Constant relates two incidents which reveal Napoleon’s melancholy more fully than his words to Méneval or to the legislative body.
The Emperor went about Paris more informally than he had ever done. Sometimes on horseback, sometimes on foot, he went to inspect his public works, schools, and hospitals. Apparently he was curious to feel the public pulse. Constant says that the people cheered him, and that sometimes great multitudes followed him back to the Tuileries. The time had been when the Emperor had not paid any special heed to the shouts of a street mob. Now the cry of enthusiasm was music to his ears. After one of these episodes the Emperor would return to the palace in high spirits, would have much to say to his valet that night, and would be “very gay.”
In his visits to Saint-Denis (Girl’s School of the Legion of Honor) the Emperor was usually accompanied by two pages. “Now it happened in the evening,” writes Constant, “that the Emperor, after returning from Saint-Denis, said to me with a laugh on entering his chamber, where I was waiting to undress him, ‘Well, well, here are my pages trying to resemble the ancient pages. The little rogues! Do you know what they do? When I go to Saint-Denis they wrangle with each other as to who shall go with me.’ As he spoke, the Emperor was laughing and rubbing his hands, and repeated in the same tone a number of times, ‘The little rogues.’”
Would Chancellor Pasquier admit that this was also “somewhat touching”?
The greatest man of all history had said with proud mournfulness, “I stood in need of something to console me,” and we do not realize how infinitely sad he was till we read in Constant’s artless narrative that the shouts of the mob made him “very gay,” and that the dispute of the boys in the palace as to which two should go out into the town with him made him rub his hands with pleasure, and repeat time and again, “Ah, the little rogues.”
* * * * *
At the beginning of 1814 positive information came that Murat had made a treaty with Austria, and had promised an army of thirty thousand men to coöperate with the Allies against France. Much as this defection must have wounded the Emperor, the worst part of it was that he knew his sister Caroline to be more to blame than Murat. She did not believe that the Allies meant to dethrone Napoleon; she believed he could make peace on the basis of the Frankfort Proposals; and to save her own crown she believed that a treaty with the Allies was necessary. To this extent her treachery can be palliated—excuse for it there is none.
LETTER TO COUNTESS WALEWSKI, APRIL 16, 1814.*
This defection was the cruelest blow of all; for Murat had been promising his support, and the Emperor had based his plan of campaign upon it. He had intended that Eugène should unite his forces to those of Murat, and that the two should fall upon the Austrian line of communications, threatening Vienna. From this plan he had expected the happiest results.