Méneval states that in private he found the Emperor “careworn, though he did his best to hide his anxiety.”
“But in public his face was calm and reassured. In our conversations he used to complain of feeling tired of war and of no longer being able to endure horse exercise. He reproached me in jest with having fine times, whilst he painfully dragged his plough.”
Is there anything which is more pathetic and which shows how grandly Napoleon towered above the small men who were tugging to pull him down than his rebuke to the intriguers of the legislative body?
At the head of a disloyal faction there, M. Lainé—an old Girondin, now a royalist, who was soon to set up the Bourbon standard at Bordeaux—started a movement which was meant to give aid to the Allies by showing that divisions existed in France, and by forming a nucleus of Bourbon opposition. A committee, which Lainé controlled, made a report in which Napoleon’s government was impliedly censured, and reforms demanded. Following this lead, others in the legislative body clamored for the acceptance of the Frankfort Proposals.
This movement of opposition in the legislative body, at a time when half a million men were on the march to invade France, was nothing short of treason. At such a crisis, the dullest of Frenchmen must have understood that obstruction to Napoleon was comfort to the enemy.
Even the cold Pasquier admits that the Emperor’s words to these men were “somewhat touching.”
Having reproved the committee for allowing Lainé, the royalist, to lead them astray, Napoleon said: “I stood in need of something to console me, and you have sought to dishonor me. I was expecting that you would unite in mind and deed to drive out the foreigner. You have bidden him come! Indeed, had I lost two battles, it would not have done France greater harm.”
Somewhat touching, Chancellor Pasquier? Ah, if ever the great man was heard to sob in public, it was here! A nobler grief, and a nobler expression of it, history has seldom recorded.
In the course of the same talk, the indignant Emperor reminded the legislators that whatever differences existed between him and them should have been discussed in private. “Dirty linen should not be washed in public.” Then hurried away by angry impatience at those who were forever prating about the sacrifices he exacted of France, he exclaimed, “France has more need of me than I of France.” This was true, but the statement was imprudent; and his enemies at once misconstrued his meaning, and used the remark to his damage. He dismissed the legislative body fearing, doubtless, that while he was at the head of the army the royalists of the chamber might become a danger in his rear.
Blow after blow fell upon the defeated Emperor during the closing weeks of 1813. St. Cyr gave up Dresden, and Rapp surrendered Dantzic, upon condition that their troops should be allowed to return to France. The Allies set aside the conditions, and held the garrisons as prisoners of war.