You know how changeable was my life during my condition as a traveller and a soldier; you know of my literary existence from 1800 to 1813, the year in which you left me at the Vallée-aux-Loups, which still belonged to me when my political career opened. We are about to enter into that career: before penetrating into it, I must needs revert to the general facts which I have overlooked while occupying myself solely with my works and my personal adventures. Those facts are of Napoleon's making. Let us therefore pass to him; let us speak of the huge edifice which was being built outside my dreams. I now turn historian without ceasing to be an autobiographer; a public interest is about to support my private confidences; my own smaller recitals will group themselves around my narrative.
When the war of the Revolution broke out, the kings did not understand it; they saw a revolt where they ought to have seen the changing of the nations, the end and the commencement of a world: they flattered themselves that for them there was a question only of enlarging their States with a few provinces taken from France; they believed in bygone military tactics, in bygone diplomatic treaties, in cabinet negociations: and conscripts were about to set Frederic's grenadiers to flight; monarchs were about to come to sue for peace in the ante-rooms of a few obscure demagogues; and awful revolutionary opinion was about to unravel the intrigues of old Europe upon the scaffolds. That old Europe thought it was fighting only France; it did not perceive that a new age was marching upon it.
Bonaparte, in the course of his ever-increasing successes, seemed called upon to change the royal dynasties, to make his own the oldest of them all. He had made Kings of the Electors of Bavaria, Wurtemberg and Saxony; he had given the crown of Naples to Murat, that of Spain to Joseph, that of Holland to Louis, that of Westphalia to Jerome; his sister, Élisa Bacciochi, was Princess of Lucca; he, on his own account, was Emperor of the French, King of Italy, in which kingdom were included Venice, Tuscany, Parma and Piacenza; Piedmont was united to France; he had consented to allow one of his captains, Bernadotte[90], to reign in Sweden; by the Treaty of the Confederation of the Rhine he exercised the rights of the House of Austria over Germany; he had declared himself the mediator of the Helvetian Confederation; he had laid Prussia low; without possessing a bark, he had declared the British Isles in a state of blockade. England, in spite of her fleets, was on the point of not having a port in Europe in which to discharge a bale of merchandise or post a letter.
Napoleon's position in 1813.
The Papal States formed part of the French Empire; the Tiber was a French department. In the streets of Paris, one saw cardinals, half-prisoners, who, putting their heads through the window of their cab, asked:
"Is this where the King of —— lives?"
"No," replied the porter to whom the question was put, "it's higher up."
Austria had redeemed herself only by handing over her daughter: the "raider" of the South[91] demanded Honoria[92] from Valentinian[93], with half of the provinces of the Empire.
How had those miracles been worked? What qualities were possessed by the man who gave birth to them? What qualities did he lack for their achievement? I will trace the immense fortune of Bonaparte, who, notwithstanding, passed so quickly that his days fill but a short period of the time covered by these Memoirs. Fastidious productions of genealogies, cold disquisitions upon facts, insipid verifications of dates are the burdens and servitudes of the writer.[94]
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