After his defeat at La Rothière, the Emperor authorized Bassano to make peace, giving to Caulaincourt unlimited powers. But before the necessary papers could be signed, Blücher had made his false movement, and Napoleon’s hopes had risen. Bassano, entering his room on the morning of February 9, found the Emperor lying on his map and planting his wax-headed pins.
“Ah, it is you, is it?” cried he to Bassano, who held the papers in his hands ready for signing. “There is no more question of that. See here, I want to thrash Blücher. He has taken the Montmirail road. I shall fight him to-morrow and next day. The face of affairs is about to change. We will wait.”
In the movements which followed the Bonaparte of the Italian campaign was seen again, and for the last time. He was everywhere, he was tireless, he was inspiring, he was faultless, he was a terror to his foes. We see him heading charges with reckless dash, see him aiming cannon in the batteries, see him showing his recruits how to build bridges, see him check a panic by spurring his own horse up to a live shell and holding him there till the bomb exploded, see him rallying fugitives, on foot and sword in hand. We hear him appeal to his tardy marshals to “Pull on the boots and the resolution of 1793”; we hear him address the people and the troops with the military eloquence of his best days; we see him writing all night after marching or fighting all day—his care and his efforts embracing everything, and achieving all that was possible to man.
That was a pretty picture at the crossing of the river Aube, where Napoleon was making a hasty bridge out of ladders spliced together, floored with blinds taken from the houses near by. Balls were tearing up the ground where the Emperor stood; but yet when he was about to quench his extreme thirst by dipping up in his hands the water of the river, a little girl of the village, seeing his need, ran to him with a glass of wine. Empire was slipping away from him, and his mind must have been weighed down by a thousand cares; but he was so touched by the gallantry of the little maid that he smiled down upon her, as he gratefully drank, and he said:—
“Mademoiselle, you would make a brave soldier!”
Then he added playfully, “Will you take the epaulets? Will you be my aide-de-camp?” He gave her his hand, which she kissed, and as she turned to go he added, “Come to Paris when the war is over, and remind me of what you did to-day; you will feel my gratitude.”
He was no gentleman; he had not a spark of generosity in his nature; he was mean and cruel; he was a superlatively bad man. So his enemies say, beginning at Lewis Goldsmith and ending at Viscount Wolseley. It may be so; but it is a little hard on the average citizen who would like to love the good men and hate the bad ones that a “superlatively evil man” like Napoleon Bonaparte should be endowed by Providence with qualities which make such men as Wellington, Metternich, Talleyrand, Czar Alexander, Emperor Francis, or Bourbon Louis seem small, seem paltry, seem prosaic and sordid beside him.
Another glimpse of the Emperor fixes attention in these last struggles. He was at the village of Méry where he rapidly reconnoitred over the marshy ground bordering the Aube. Getting out of the saddle, he sat down upon a bundle of reeds, resting his back against the hut of a night-watchman, and unrolled his map. Studying this a few moments, he sprang upon his horse, set off at a gallop, crying to his staff, “This time we have got them!”
It did indeed seem that Blücher was entrapped and would be annihilated; but after very heavy losses he managed to get across the marsh and the river. It is said that a sudden frost, hardening the mud, was all that saved him.
Having been reënforced by the corps of Bülow and Woronzoff, which England had compelled Bernadotte to send, Blücher advanced against Marmont on the Marne. The French fell back upon the position of Marshal Mortier; and the two French generals, with about twelve thousand, checked one hundred thousand Prussians.