Memoirs of the Empress Josephine, Vol. 2 of 2

by Madame de Rémusat

“There was no amelioration in this state of things when Napoleon, who had gone to Germany in April, 1809, came back to Fontainebleau on the 6th of October, the conqueror of Wagram, and proud of the peace just signed at Vienna. Victories, however dearly bought, did not make him more generous or kindly. He was still performing work important enough to be vain of his power, and, if it had been put to severe tests, that was a stronger reason why he desired it to be respected. However, he found, in reverting to the recent souvenir of the descent of the English upon Walcheren, a state of things in Spain quite unsatisfactory, a quarrel with the Holy See pushed to its last extremities, and public opinion more restless about his inclination for war than reassured by his victories—defiant, sad, even critical, and besetting with its suspicions the man whom it had so long environed with its fallacies.

“This time Fouché was the object of his thoughts. Fouché had acted in his own way at the moment of the descent of the English. He had assumed authority, he had made an appeal to public sentiment, he had reorganized the national guard, and employed Bernadotte on our side. Everything in these proceedings, both the conception and the details, had greatly displeased the Emperor. All his ill-temper was concentrated upon Fouché; and, besides, as he had come back resolved upon the divorce, it was difficult to hold M. de Talleyrand aloof from a deliberation in which the knowledge of the condition of Europe should have a decisive weight. In this must be still seen one of those proofs, at that time less frequent each day, of the almost impartial justice of his mind. He was sometimes heard to say: ‘It is Talleyrand alone who understands me; it is only Talleyrand with whom I can talk.’ He consulted him, and at other moments spoke of placing him at Vincennes. Thus he did not fail to call him when he deliberated upon his marriage. M. de Talleyrand strongly insisted that he should unite himself to an Archduchess. He even thought that the Emperor had sought an interview with him because his intervention in this matter would contribute to decide Austria. What is certain is the fact that he has always alluded to his conduct in this instance as one of the guarantees he had given of his fundamental opinion in regard to the alliances of France and the conditions of the independence of Europe.

“It is seen how, in all these matters—the state of opinion during the campaign of the Danube, the deliberations relative to the divorce, those which preceded the marriage with Marie Louise—the Memoirs of my mother would have been instructive and interesting. It is unhappily impossible to supply this last link. I am only able to recall that she said that the Empress was wrong in doubting her fidelity on one occasion, probably relative to the divorce. She has announced that this matter was explained. I can not explain it in its place, and I have no recollection that she ever spoke to me of it. At the moment of the divorce her devotion was appreciated, and Queen Hortense went so far as to consult with her in regard to it twice before enlisting her irrevocably in favor of her mother. I have no wish to over-estimate the value of what she did in that matter; the most refined delicacy dictated her conduct; and, besides, with her deplorable health, her forced inactivity, her former relations to Josephine, and our new situation near the Emperor, she would have had in a renovated Court, near a new Empress, a most awkward and painful position. It may be conceived, indeed, that nothing in all that I am going to recall restored our credit at the Court, and my family remained there irreparably lessened in its influence. The Emperor, however, approved of my mother’s remaining with the Empress Josephine. He even praised her for it; this suited her. He regarded her as a person on the retreat, with whom he no longer needed to concern himself. Having less to expect from him, less to demand from him, he reproached us less in his thought for omitting to do anything on our part to please him. He left my father in the circle of his official duties, to which his character and a certain mingling of discontent and fear kept him closely enough confined. It was almost established in the mind of Napoleon that he had nothing more to do for us, and he no longer thought of us.

“This new situation makes it evident that the Memoirs of my mother would have lost their interest. She no longer visited the Court, going once only to be presented to the Empress Marie Louise; then she had later an audience of the Emperor, who wrote to her asking it. She would, therefore, have had nothing to relate of which she had been a witness in the imperial palace. She was no longer placed under obligations by any relations with the great personages of the state—at least she considered herself relieved of them; and yielding, perhaps too readily, to her tastes, and her sufferings, she gradually isolated herself from everything that would remind her of the Court and of the Government.

“However, as my father did not cease to frequent the palace to the end, as the confidence in M. de Talleyrand seemed not to diminish, and, finally, as the rapid and declining steps in the affairs of the Emperor more and more affected public opinion, and soon stirred up the restless attention of the nation, my mother had still much with which to become acquainted, and much to observe, and she would have been able to give to the painting of the last five years of the Empire a positive historic value.

“Some reflections on many events of those five years will be taken, if it is desired, as a remembrance of what I have heard, during this same time, from the lips of my parents.

“Among the events of that year, 1809, one of the most important, and which made the least noise, was the action of the Emperor in regard to the Pope. The facts were not well understood when they took place, and, it is necessary to say, that among the nation that Louis XIII. put under the protection of the Holy Virgin no one thought of them. The Emperor had begun by causing the Roman States to be occupied, then went on by dismembering them, then by demanding from the Pope that he should make war upon England, then by driving him from the city of Rome, then by depriving him of all temporal power, then, finally, by causing him to be arrested and guarded as a prisoner. How strange all this, assuredly! And yet it seemed that no government of Catholic Europe seriously offered assistance to the common father of the faithful. The Pope certainly, deliberating in 1804 whether he should crown Napoleon, had not objected on the ground that it was he who, in that year, had caused the Duc d’Enghien to be shot. The Emperor of Austria, deliberating in 1809 whether he should give his daughter to Napoleon, did not object on the ground that it was he who, in that same year, had placed the Pope in prison. It is true that at that time all the sovereigns of Europe had, in that which relates to pontifical authority, entirely different ideas from those ascribed to them, and from those attributed to them to-day. The house of Austria, in particular, had for a traditional rule that political testament in which the Duke of Lorraine, Charles V., recommends that the Pope should be reduced to the single domain of the court of Rome, and makes sport ‘of the delusion of excommunications, when the real point is that Jesus Christ never established the temporal power of the Church, and that the latter can possess nothing without contradicting his example and without compromising his Gospel.’

“In a letter of my mother she advised my father, in the autumn of 1809, not to allow ‘Athalie’ to be represented at Court, at a moment when it might be said that there were some allusions to papal affairs in that struggle of a queen and a priest, and in presence of a prince so pious as the King of Saxony, who was preparing to visit the Emperor. In this incident was the maximum of evidence of the direction of her thoughts excited by a tyrannic act of which so much would now be heard, and in regard to which public opinion would certainly be no more divided. I have not heard it said that a single officer in this immense empire would have separated himself from a government of which the head was excommunicated, if not by name, at least impliedly, by the bull launched against all the authors or abettors of the attempts against pontifical authority. I can not refrain from alluding to the Duc de Cadore. He was a man not without intelligence nor without honesty; but, accepting as indisputable laws the intentions of the Emperor, after having employed his ministry in the spoliation of the Spanish dynasty, he concurred with the same docility in that of the sovereign Pontiff, and, himself excommunicated as a mandatory, abettor, and counselor, he maintained with great composure that Napoleon could resume that which Charlemagne had given, and that now France was in the presence of Rome by the rights of the Gallic Church.

“The situation of the Empire at the end of 1809 is summarized in these words by the great historian of the Empire: ‘The Emperor had made himself, at Vincennes, the rival of the regicides; at Bayonne, the peer of those who would declare war on Europe to establish a universal republic; at the Quirinal, the peer certainly of those who had dethroned Pius VI. to create the Roman Republic.’

“I am not one of those who assist by declamation in intensifying the odium of these acts. I do not regard them as unheard-of monstrosities reserved to our century; I know that history is full of examples with which it is not difficult to compare them, and that analogous outrages can be found in the life of sovereigns for whom posterity has preserved some respect. It would not be difficult to find in the history of the severities of the reign of Louis XIV. executions which are not incomparable with the death of the Duc d’Enghien. The affair of the Man in the Iron Mask, especially if, as it is difficult not to believe, this man was a brother of the King, is nothing that the murder of Vincennes need be envious of; and power and deception are not less worthily arrayed in the act by which Louis XIV. seized Lorraine in 1661 than in the fraudulent dismemberment of Spain in 1808. I see in the abduction of the Pope hardly more than its equivalent if we revert to the middle ages. I will add that, even after these acts, for ever to be condemned, it was still possible, by the use of a little wisdom, to have assured the repose, the prosperity, and the grandeur of France to the extent that no name in history would have been more honored than that of Napoleon. But if any one imagines that this is what he has not done; that all the wars thereafter undertaken were no more than the mad preparatory steps to the ruin of the country; and that thenceforward the character of the man already loaded with such misdeeds was afflicted with a superciliousness and a harshness which were discouraging to his best servants, it is essential to clearly understand that, even at Court, all those whom the servile complaisance of false judgment had not led astray, sadly disabused, could rightly serve without confidence, admire without affection, fear more than hope, desire lessons of opposition to a terrible power, in his successes to dread his intoxication, and in his misfortunes to weep for France rather than him.