Then the writer describes a conversation in which Napoleon spoke without apparent reserve of his past life. Referring to the doings of the Bourbons in France, he remarked that they had better mind what they were about, as there were still five hundred thousand excellent soldiers there. “But what is all that to me?” he exclaimed with a rapid turn; “I am to all intents and purposes dead.”
“His manner,” says the Scotchman, “was that of a blunt, honest, good-hearted soldier’s, his smile, when he chose it, very insinuating. He never has anybody to dinner. Bertrand says that they are in the greatest distress for money, as the French court does not pay the stipulated salary to Bonaparte.
“The following day the Emperor set off for his country house. He was in an old coach with four half-starved horses; on the wheel-horse sat a coachman of the ordinary size, and the bridles had the imperial eagle on them; on the leaders there was a mere child, and the bridles had the coronet of a British viscount on them. He had General Bertrand in the carriage, and two or three officers behind on small ponies, which could not, by all the exertions of their riders, keep up with the carriage, emaciated as those poor horses were.”
The Scotchman contrasts the wretched little establishment at Elba with the splendor of the Tuileries where he went to see Louis XVIII. dine in public,—separate table for king, separate tables for princes of the blood-royal; attendant courtiers standing in full dress, duchesses only being permitted to sit; everything served on gold plate; the dining hall, a hundred feet long, brilliantly lighted and hung with gobelin tapestries, “and a very fine concert going on all the time.”
The contrast between these two pictures, striking as it was to the Scotchman, was no less so to Napoleon, who felt the squalor of Elba and longed for the lost grandeur of France. If there had been a secret bargain between the fallen Emperor and the Bourbons that they should prepare the country for his speedy return, they could hardly have gone to work in a more effective manner to accomplish that result. They had not been in possession of the throne six months before the nation was fairly seething with discontent.
Note.—While the Congress of Vienna was in session, Dr. Richard Bright, an Englishman, was visiting the city and saw the pageant. He describes many of the august sovereigns who were in attendance, and gives an account of the festivities, amusements, and polite dissipations which were in progress. But perhaps the most interesting page the Doctor wrote was that in which he relates his visit to Napoleon’s son, who was then with his mother at the palace of Schönbrunn. “We found that all the servants about the palace were Frenchmen, who still wore the liveries of Napoleon.... We ... were ushered into a room where the infant [King of Rome] was sitting on the floor amusing himself amidst a profuse collection of playthings.... He was at that moment occupied with a toy which imitated a well-furnished kitchen. He was the sweetest child I ever beheld; his complexion light, with fine, white, silky hair, falling in curls upon his neck. He was dressed in the embroidered uniform of an hussar, and seemed to pay little attention to us as we entered, continuing to arrange the dishes in his little kitchen. I believe he was the least embarrassed of the party. He was rather too old to admit of loud praise of his beauty, and rather too young to enter into conversation. His appearance was so engaging that I longed to take him in my arms, but his situation forbade such familiarity. Under these circumstances, we contrived a few trifling questions, to which he gave such arch and bashful answers as we have all often received from children of his age.”
Madame Montesquieu was still with the child, but, after a while, she and all the other French attendants were dismissed. The effort was made to wean the poor boy of all things French, and to transform him into an Austrian.
It may be proper here to add that he died of consumption at the early age of twenty-one. It is darkly hinted that the same malevolent influences which destroyed the respectability of Napoleon’s wife led the son into excesses which undermined his constitution. To the last he was passionately fond of his father, and when Marmont visited Vienna in 1831 the Duke de Reichstadt (as the boy was called in Austria) eagerly drew from him all that he would tell of the great Emperor.
The cage in which Napoleon’s only legitimate son was kept was gilded with pension and title and outward show of deference, but it was a cage, nevertheless, and he died in it (1832).
CHAPTER XLV
The ink was hardly dry upon the Charter before Louis XVIII. began to break its conditions. It had served its purpose, he had ridden into office upon it: what further use had he for it? Why should he trammel his actions by treaty when the other kings of Europe were freeing themselves from such fetters? To the south of him was Spain, where the liberals had framed a constitution which Ferdinand, released by Napoleon early in 1814, had sworn to respect, and which he had set aside the moment he had taken again into his hands the reins of power. Instead of reform and limited monarchy on the peninsula, there was now a full restoration of the Old Order, feudalism, tithes, local tyrannies, clerical and royal absolutism, the jails full of democrats, and the Inquisition hungry for heretics. Nobles and priests struck their ancient bargain, mastered a willing king, and with the resistless strength of self-interest, class-prejudice, and corporate unity of purpose, acting upon the ignorance, the superstition, and the cultivated hatreds of the people, carried Spain back with a rush to the good old times of Bourbon and Roman absolutism.
Not only in the south was counter-revolution triumphant; in the north it was equally so. In Jerome Bonaparte’s kingdom of Westphalia, where the people had driven out the system of Napoleon, and called in their former rulers, old laws and customs rattled back to their rusty grooves; the Code Napoléon vanished; equality of civil right was seen no more, feudalism fell like a chain upon the astounded peasant, purchasers of state lands were ousted without compensation, special privilege and tax exemptions again gladdened the elect, aristocracy and clericalism swept away every vestige of Jerome’s brief rule, the torture chamber again rang with the shrieks of victims, and the punishment of death by breaking upon the wheel emphasized the desperate efforts nobles and priests were making to stem the torrent of modern liberalism.