Napoleon: A Sketch of His Life, Character, Struggles, and Achievements

by Thomas E. Watson

While his nerves were very irritable, his pulse was slow and regular. He declared that he had never felt his heart beat. Medicine he detested and would not take. When ill, he left off food, drank barley water, and took violent exercise. He could not bear the least tightness in his clothing. His garments were of the softest, finest material, and cut loose. His hats were padded, his boots lined with silk, and both hats and boots were “broken” for him before he wore them. His favorite trousers were white cassimere, and a habit he had of wiping his pen on his breeches made a new pair necessary every morning. His taking of snuff consisted merely in smelling it. He used tobacco in no other form.

Extremely careful in business matters, he was disorderly in some personal details. In undressing he flung his clothes all about the room, and sometimes broke his watch in this way. Newspapers and books which he had been reading were scattered around in confusion. In shaving, he would never allow both sides of his face to be lathered at the same time: one cheek was finished before the other was touched. He had a habit of poking the fire with his foot, and burnt out many a pair of boots in so doing. Excessively fond of the hot water bath, he opened letters, read newspapers, and received callers while splashing around in the tub. On leaving the bath, his valet rubbed him down, using the flesh brush and coarse cloths, and then dressed him. The most self-helpful of men in matters of importance, he was one of the least so in this. He depended upon servants for almost everything connected with the care of his person. “Rub me hard! Scrub me as though I were an ass!” he would call to his valet, while he stood almost naked, and with a red bandanna handkerchief knotted about his head. He loved cologne-water and drenched himself with quantities of it. One of the privations he keenly felt at St. Helena was the lack of cologne. Other perfumes he detested, and Constant relates a curious incident of Napoleon calling to him one night to take out of his room a certain young lady who had been brought there, and who was “killing me with her perfume.”

With his elevation to empire, Napoleon became more stately, reserved, dignified, and imposing; but perfect ease and repose of manner he never acquired. The indolent, calm, and studied air of languor and fatigue which, according to a well-known standard, constitutes good-breeding, he did not have. Perhaps he did not realize its tremendous value. Nervous, intense, electrical, pulsing with vital power, tossed by colossal ideas, ambitions, purposes, it was never possible for him to become a self-complacent formality, posing with studiously indolent grace, and uttering with laborious ease the dialect of polite platitude.

But the man never lived who knew better how to talk, how to write, how to say what he meant. He could address mobs, committees, state councils, senates, armies, peoples, and kings. Who that ever lived excelled him in speaking to soldiers? Verily the lines are yet hot in his proclamations, and he who reads them even now will feel the magnetic thrill. How they must have inspired the soldiers then!

His speeches to the councils and the Senate were models in their way; his state papers have not been excelled; his diplomatic correspondence measures up the loftiest standards. In truth, his language varied with the subject and the occasion. He could be as elegantly gracious as any Bourbon, if the occasion required it. If it became needful to call a spade a spade, he could do it, and with a vim which left the ears tingling. In all of his talk, however, there was character, individuality, and greatness. Wrong he might often be, weak never. Whatever view he expressed, in youth or age, was stated clearly, and with strength. Even when sifted through the recollections of others, his sayings stand out as incomparably finer than those of any talker of that age. Compare the few little jests and epigrams of Talleyrand, for instance, with the numberless comments of Napoleon on men and things, on matters social, political, industrial, financial, military, and religious. It is like a comparison between a few lamps in a hallway and the myriad stars of the firmament. On every topic he discussed he said the best things that can be said on that side; and there is no subject connected with human affairs in a state that he has not touched. Upon every subject he had a word which shot to the core of the matter. His talent for throwing into one dazzling sentence the pith of a long discussion was unexcelled. Some of the best sayings attributed to Talleyrand were really the sayings of Napoleon. It often happened that these terse expressions were coarse, the language of men on the street. At such sayings the “Lady Clara” tribe of men arched their eyebrows in delicate protest, and said to one another, “This Bonaparte is no gentleman; he was not so well brought up as we were,—we, the Talleyrands, Metternichs, and Whitworths!”

In one humor, Napoleon was brusque, coarse, overbearing, and pitiless; in another he was caressing, elegantly dignified, imperially generous and gracious. Between these extremes ran the current of his life: hence the varied impressions he made upon others. Charles Fox and Lord Holland knew him personally, and they risked political and social influence in England by defending him from the abuse which had become the fashion there. Almost without exception the men who came into personal relations with him loved him. The rare exceptions are such people as Bourrienne and Rémusat, whom Napoleon had to rebuke for ways that were crooked. Even to his valets he was a hero.

As Charles Fox said, “The First Consul at Malmaison, at St. Cloud, and at the Tuileries are three different men, forming together the beau ideal of human greatness.”

To these three Napoleons should be added at least one other,—Napoleon at the head of his army.

In public, Napoleon trained himself to that majestic dignity, grace, and thoughtfulness which his imposing position required. The Pope did not act his part better at the coronation, nor Alexander at Tilsit. He rarely, if ever, overacted or underacted a public part, but in private there was a difference. In familiar converse he would pace up and down the room, or twitch in his chair, or throw his feet up on the desk, and open his penknife and whittle the chair arm, or sprawl on the floor studying his big maps, or sit down in the lap of his secretary.

With the rough good humor of a soldier, he would call his intimates “simpleton,” “ninny,” or even “fool”; he would pinch their ears, and lightly flick them on the cheek with his open hand. Whereupon the oversensitive biographers have unanimously shuddered, and exclaimed, “See what a vulgar creature this Napoleon was!”