Not less high than this was the estimate which Louis Bonaparte placed on his “rights” as King of Holland. No sooner had that morose, jealous, ill-conditioned dolt been placed on a throne by his elder brother than he arrogated to himself all the prerogatives of a dynastic king. The “divine right” virus got into his sluggish veins, and he began to shift on to God the responsibility for such a creature as himself being a king at all. He wished to rule Holland, not as a fief of the Empire, not as part of the Napoleonic system, but as a piece of independent property which had come to him, Louis, through a long line of ancestors. When Napoleon gave him the crown, the conditions were made plain. Holland was a part of France; must be governed with reference to France; the friends and enemies of the one must be those of the other. In other words, Holland was a planet in the French system, and Louis a subordinate king. If Louis was too proud to rule as a lesser light in the system of his great brother, he should have been as frank as Lucien: he should have refused the crown. But he accepted the splendid gift, and then violated the conditions. English goods poured into his markets. To all intents and purposes he became the ally of Great Britain, for it was her policy which he favored. It was her dearest object to break down the Continental system, and Louis was aiding her to the best of his slight ability. Could Napoleon be otherwise than furious? Had Holland been won merely that England should be enriched? Had he set his brother on a throne merely to weaken his own empire, and to set an example of disloyalty to other allies? At a time when Prussia, Austria, and even Russia were under contract to enforce the Continental system, was it tolerable that his own brother, in all-important Holland, should be throwing his ports open to the common foe?
This cause of trouble, also, was worrying Napoleon and making it hard to maintain good humor. And even this was far from being all. Murat, his brother-in-law, was acting almost as badly as his brother. Murat, who was grand duke, wanted to be king, had coveted the crown of Poland, had claimed the Spanish throne, and in his disappointment, in both instances, had fallen into a rebellious mood.
Napoleon had given him Joseph’s vacant throne in Naples; but it was rumored that he was still discontented, and had been holding communications with conspirators in Paris. And who were these conspirators? Talleyrand and Fouché, of course. These restless, overrated, and chronic traitors had been sagely conferring in Paris, as they had done previous to Marengo, for the purpose of agreeing upon a successor to Napoleon, in case he should be killed in battle or hopelessly defeated.
Nor was even this all: the funds had fallen, the treasury was drained, murmurs had begun to be heard in France against the expansion of the Empire; conscriptions, which had been called for in advance of the legal time, began to be unpopular, desertions were frequent, and “the refractory” grew ever more numerous. The Spanish war was not relished. Generals ordered to Spain went, but went reluctantly. They carried no zeal, none of that buoyant confidence which is half the battle. Troops ordered there marched, but without enthusiasm. Compared with Italy and Germany Spain was a barren land. Against armed peasant bands no glory was to be won; little booty could be expected. Even the Guard grumbled at such service. As Napoleon was holding a review at Valladolid just before quitting Spain, the murmurs in the ranks grew so loud that he lost control of himself, snatched the musket from one of the growlers, jerked the man out of the line, threatened to have him shot, and then pushed him back to his place while he sharply lectured the whole troop.
Once more at Paris, Napoleon’s courtiers grouped themselves around him with the same blandishments as before. A few, a very few, might venture to speak frankly to him and to tell him the truth, but the many had fallen into the ways natural to all courts: they spoke, not to inform, but to please. And foremost among those who came to fawn and to flatter was “that cripple” whom Josephine said she dreaded, Talleyrand.
Only dangerous to the weak, gifted with no constructive talent whatever, incapable of sustained labor of any sort, strong only in sudden emergencies, in the crises of political changes, Talleyrand was known to Napoleon like an open book. Scorning him, rather than fearing him, Napoleon’s anger against him now was inflamed to the highest pitch, not so much because of anything he had done, as because of what his treachery implied. That so keen-eyed a time-server as Talleyrand should begin to plot, meant that confidence was shaken in the Napoleonic power. That the funds should fall, conscripts dodge the law, allies shirk their obligations, and domestic enemies conspire, were but various symptoms of the same malady.
When Talleyrand appeared at the levee, Napoleon boiled over. He began to rebuke the false courtier, began in a moderate tone, but the more he talked the less he could control himself. All the past perfidies of this most perfidious of men came to mind, and in bitter words were hurled at Talleyrand’s head. His venalities, his bribe-takings, his betrayal of state secrets—they all swelled the torrent of Napoleon’s excoriation. “You base wretch, you false-hearted minister. You pretend that you advised against the trial of the Duke d’Enghien when you urged it in writing; you pretend that you advised against the Spanish war when you urged me into it!”
And at each sentence Napoleon advanced, face distorted with passion, hand raised in menace, while the guilty courtier slunk back step by step as the Emperor advanced, until he reached the wall. There he stood, with Napoleon’s clenched hand in his face and Napoleon’s blazing eyes threatening death, warning him, as he loved life, to say nothing, and let the storm pass.
When Talleyrand reached home, “he fell into a kind of fit,” and the doctors had to be called in. Only a few days elapsed, however, before he was again at the levee, bending humbly before his master, and ready again with his fawnings and flatteries. Napoleon’s anger had passed: he listened to the courtier’s suave phrases with a smile of contemptuous indifference.
France had given Austria no cause for war. It was not even claimed that she had. Austria had causelessly provoked two wars already, had got whipped in both, had lost much territory, much money, much prestige. She now believed she was strong enough to win back all she had lost—hence she had mustered her forces and commenced the march into Bavaria. Her readiness to “begin again” had been accelerated by a bribe of $20,000,000 paid her by England.