The Provisional Government of France does not itself seem to me quite without reproach: I reject the calumnies of Maubreuil[178]; nevertheless, amid the terror with which Napoleon still inspired his former servants, a fortuitous catastrophe might have presented itself in their eyes in the light only of a misfortune.
One would gladly doubt the truth of the facts reported by Count Waldburg-Truchsess, but General Koller, in a Sequel to Waldburgs Itinerary, has confirmed a part of his colleague's narrative; General Schouvaloff, on his part, has certified, in conversation with myself, the exactness of the facts: his measured words said more than Waldburg's expansive recital. Lastly, Fabry's[179] Itinéraire is composed of authentic French documents furnished by eye-witnesses.
His humiliation.
Now that I have done justice on the commissaries and the Allies, is it really the conqueror of the world whom one sees in Waldburg's Itinerary? The hero reduced to disguises and tears, weeping under a post-boy's jacket in the corner of a back-room at an inn! Was it thus that Marius bore himself on the ruins of Carthage, that Hannibal died in Bithynia, Cæsar in the Senate? How did Pompey disguise himself? By covering his head with his toga! He who had donned the purple taking shelter beneath the white cockade, uttering the cry of safety: "God save the King!"—that King, one of whose heirs he had had shot! The master of the nations encouraging the commissaries in the humiliations which they heaped upon him in order the better to hide him, delighted to have General Koller whistling before him and a coachman smoking in his face, compelling General Schouwaloff's aide-de-camp to enact the part of the Emperor, while he, Bonaparte, wore the dress of an Austrian colonel and wrapped himself in the cloak of a Russian general. He must have loved life cruelly: those immortals cannot consent to die.
Moreau said of Bonaparte:
"His chief characteristics are falsehood and the love of life: let me beat him, and I should see him at my feet begging me for mercy."
Moreau thought thus, being unable to grasp Bonaparte's nature; he fell into the same error as Lord Byron. At least, at St. Helena, Napoleon, dignified by the Muses, although petty in his quarrels with the English Governor, had to support only the weight of his own immensity. In France, the evil which he had done appeared to him personified by the widows and orphans, and constrained him to tremble before the hands of a few women.
This is too true; but Bonaparte should not be judged by the rules applied to great geniuses, because he was lacking in magnanimity. There are men who have the faculty of rising, and who have not the faculty of descending. Napoleon possessed both faculties: like the rebellious angel, he was able to contract his incommensurable stature, so as to enclose it within a measured space; his ductility furnished him with means of safety and regeneration: with him, all was not finished when he seemed to have finished. Changing his manners and costume at will, as perfect in comedy as in tragedy, this actor knew how to appear natural in the slave's tunic as in the king's mantle, in the part of Attalus or in the part of Cæsar. Another moment and you shall see, from the depth of his degradation, the dwarf raising his Briarean head; Asmodeus will come forth in a huge column of smoke from the flask into which he had compressed himself. Napoleon valued life for what it brought him; he had the instinct of that which yet remained to him to paint; he did not wish his canvas to fail him before he had completed his pictures.
Scott's Life of Napoleon.