“Mon Cher Fonblanque,—J’espère que vous avez vu que notre conseil à été écouté; les réductions dans l’armée et la marine sont très fortes, et Napoleon à éprouvé, je vous assure, une grande opposition pour en arriver là. L’armée, qui était en 1845 de 502,196 hommes et de 100, 432 horses, sera réduite en 1849 à 380,824 hommes et 92,410 chevaux. Le Budget de la Marine est diminué de vingt deux millions et plus; la flotte en activité est réduite à dix vaisseaux de ligne, huit frégates, etc.—et il y a aussi une grande réduction dans les travaux des arsenaux. Tout cela devrait plaire à John Bull et à Cobden. Je vous promets que ces réductions n’en resteront pas là; mais il faut considérer la difficulté qu’il y a de toucher aux joujoux des enfants français, car chez nous l’armée est l’objet principal; chez vous ce n’est qu’un accessoire. Votre affectionné,
“D’Orsay.”
Madden, in his description of this “man-mystery,” for once in a way is graphic. “I watched his pale, corpse-like, imperturbable features, not many months since, for a period of three hours. I saw eighty thousand men in arms pass before him, and I never observed a change in his countenance or an expression in his look which would enable the bystander to say whether he was pleased or otherwise at the stirring scene.… He did not speak to those around him, except at very long intervals, and then with an air of nonchalance, of ennui and eternal occupation with self; he rarely spoke a syllable to his uncle, Jérôme Bonaparte, who was on horseback somewhat behind him.… He gave me the idea of a man who had a perfect reliance on himself, and a feeling of complete control over those around him. But there was a weary look about him, an aspect of excessive watchfulness, an appearance of want of sleep, of over-work, of over-indulgence, too, that gives an air of exhaustion to face and form, and leaves an impression on the mind of a close observer that the machine of the body will break down soon, and suddenly—or the mind will give way—under the pressure of pent-up thoughts and energies eternally in action, and never suffered to be observed or noticed by friends or followers.”
Napoleon III
(By D’Orsay)
[TO FACE PAGE 206
Louis Napoleon is, as everybody knows, the Colonel Albert who plays so large a part in Lord Beaconsfield’s unjustly neglected Endymion, quite one of the most delightful of his novels, although it contains that strange caricature of Thackeray in the grotesque personage of St Barbe.
Says “Colonel Albert”:—“… I am the child of destiny. That destiny will again place me on the throne of my fathers. That is as certain as I am now speaking to you. But destiny for its fulfilment ordains action. Its decrees are inexorable, but they are obscure, and the being whose career it directs is as a man travelling in a dark night; he reaches his goal even without the aid of stars and moon.”
Louis Napoleon emerged from the dark night of his exile and sat in the limelight that beats upon a throne, and he achieved his destiny without accepting the aid or advice of his friend, D’Orsay. He did not trust the latter with his counsels and could scarcely have been expected to ask him to accompany him to France. D’Orsay would have been the central figure; the Prince of the Dandies would have basked in the popularity which the future Emperor of the French knew he must focus upon himself.