CHAPTER IX
The Beginning of the End[11]
Napoleon's Problem — The Military Situation — A Council of War and State — The Return to Paris — Prostrating News — The Empress-Regent and her Advisers — Traitors Within — Talleyrand — The Defenders of the Capital — The Flight of the Court — The Allies before the City.
The pallid, silent Emperor at St. Dizier was closeted with considerations like these. He knew of the defeat which forced Marmont and Mortier back on Paris; the loss of the capital was imminent; parties were in a dangerous state; his marshals were growing more and more slack; he had failed in transferring the seat of war to Lorraine; the information he had so far received was almost certainly colored by the medium of scheming followers through which it came. What single mind could grapple with such affairs? It was not because the thwarted man had lost his nerve, but because he was calm and clear-minded, that he felt the need of frank, dispassionate advice on all these matters. On the other hand, there stood forth in the clearest light a single fact about which there could be no doubt, and it alone might counterbalance all the rest: the peoples of northern and eastern France were at last aroused in behalf of his cause. For years all Europe had rung with outcries against the outrages of Napoleon's soldiery; the allied armies no sooner became invaders in their turn than they began to outstrip their foe in every deed of shame; in particular, the savage bands from Russian Asia indulged their inhuman passions to the full, while the French peasantry, rigid with horror, looked on for the moment in paralysis. Now they had begun to rise in mass, and from the twenty-fifth to the twenty-eighth their volunteer companies brought in a thousand prisoners. The depots, trains, and impedimenta of every sort which the allies abandoned on turning westward fell into the hands of a peasant soldiery, many of whom were armed with shot-guns. The rising for Napoleon was comparable only to that which earlier years had seen in the Vendée on behalf of the Bourbons.
Besides, all the chief cities of the district were now in the hands of more or less regular troops; Dunette was marching from Metz with four thousand men; Broussier, from Strasburg with five thousand; Verdun could furnish two thousand, and several other fortresses a like number. Souham was at Nogent with his division, Allix at Auxerre with his; the army at the Emperor's disposal could easily be reckoned at seventy thousand. Assisted by the partizan bands which now hung in a passion of hatred on the skirts of the invaders, and by the national uprising now fairly under way, could not the Emperor-general hope for another successful stand? He well knew that the fear of what had happened was the specter of his enemy's council-board; they would, he reckoned, be rendered over-cautious, and give him at least a fortnight in which to manœuver before the fall of Paris could be expected. Counting the men about Vitry and the garrison reinforcements at only sixty thousand, the combined armies of Suchet, Soult, and Augereau at the same number, that of Marmont at fourteen thousand, and the men in the various depots at sixteen thousand, he would have a total of a hundred and fifty thousand, from which he could easily spare fifty thousand to cut off every line of retreat from his foe, and still have left a hundred thousand wherewith to meet their concentrated force on a basis of something like equality. From the purely strategic point of view, the march of the allies to Paris was sheer madness unless they could count on the exhaustion of the population right, left, and behind. If the national uprising could be organized, they would be cut off from all reinforcement and entrapped. Already their numbers had been reduced to a hundred and ten thousand men. Napoleon with a hundred thousand, and the nation to support him, had a fair chance of annihilating them.
It was, therefore, not a mere hallucination which led him to hope that once again the tangled web of affairs might be severed by a sweep of the soldier's saber. But of course in the crisis of his great decision he could not stand alone; he must be sure of his lieutenants. Accordingly, after a few hours of secret communing, he summoned a council, and laid before it his considerations substantially as enumerated. Those present were Berthier, Ney, Lefebvre, Caulaincourt, and Maret; Oudinot and Macdonald, at Bar on the Ornain and Perthes respectively, were too distant to arrive in time, but he believed that he knew their opinion, which was that the war should be continued either in Lorraine or from a center of operations to be established at Sens. From this conclusion Macdonald did not once waver; Oudinot had begun to hedge; their absence, therefore, was unimportant. Berthier was verging on desperation, and so was Caulaincourt, who, since leaving Châtillon, had been vainly struggling to reopen negotiations for peace on any terms; Ney, though physically brave, was not the stuff from which martyrs are made, and Lefebvre, naturally weak, was laboring under a momentary attack of senility. The council was imperative for peace at any price; the Emperor, having foreseen its temper, had little difficulty in taking the military steps for carrying out its behests.
Early in the morning of March twenty-eighth the army was set in motion toward Paris. The line of march was to be through Bar on the Aube, Troyes, and Fontainebleau, a somewhat circuitous route, chosen apparently for three reasons: because the region to be traversed would still afford sustenance to the men, because the Seine would protect its right flank, and because the dangerous point of Meaux was thus avoided. Such a conclusion is significant of the clearest judgment and the nicest calculation. Pages have been written about Napoleon's hallucinations at the close of his career; neither here nor in any of the courses he adopted is there aught to sustain the charge. At breakfast-time a squad of jubilant peasants brought in a prisoner whom they believed to be no less a person than the Comte d'Artois. In reality it was Weissenberg, an Austrian ambassador on his way to London. He was promptly liberated on parole and despatched with letters to Francis and Metternich. By a curious adventure, Vitrolles was in the minister's suite disguised as a serving-man, but he was not detected.
Map of the field of operations in 1814.