fishing smacks which the English will never dream of searching for
Napoleon; but in the end he rejects the plan. There are two American
ships available. Negotiations are entered into with a Danish sloop.
Enthusiastic youths from the naval training school propose to carry
him off in an advice-boat. Sixteen midshipmen will spirit him out of
the harbour at dead of night. They sit packed together in the little
room, feverishly discussing the plan with Las Cases, the Emperor’s new
confidant. The man to whom this madcap venture is proposed, talks over
the situation coolly with his companions, asking each in turn for an
opinion as to the best course. Most of them advise a return to the army,
for there are still good prospects that the soldiers in the south will
support him. He emphatically refuses:
“Nothing will induce me to light up a civil war. I will have no more to
do with politics; I need repose; I shall go to America!”
But his self-respect makes him shrink from the thought of escaping in
disguise.
News comes that the Bourbon has re-entered the land of his fathers, once
more under the protection of allied troops. The path of escape seaward
is now blocked by an English cruiser which bears the ominous name of
“Bellerophon.” The Emperor has missed his chance. Here are his thoughts:
“A return to Paris is impossible. The port is blockaded. Shall I allow
myself to be seized like a pirate, and taken in chains to London? England
has been my foe for twenty years. Next to the French, the English nation
is the greatest and the most distinguished in the world. Have I not been
an Emperor? Has not, from of old, chivalry toward a fallen enemy aroused
universal admiration? In Corsica, they knife any one who violates the
rights of hospitality.”
Making up his mind, he dictates the following letter to the prince regent:
“Your Royal Highness, Exposed to the factions which distract my country
and to the enmity of the greatest powers of Europe, I have closed my
political career, and I come, like Themistocles, to throw myself upon
the hospitality of the British people. I put myself under the protection
of their laws, and beg Your Royal Highness, as the most powerful, the
most persistent, and the most generous of my enemies, to grant me this
protection. Napoleon.”
Eight lines, three words of respect, neither arrogance nor humility,
almost courtly. There is, however, one word which embodies the pathos
of the step he is taking, and assumes that his adversary will give
moral guarantees; that in this century, after such a life, Napoleon
will be as welcome a guest in the enemy land, as of old in Persia had
been—Themistocles. It is overwhelming self-confidence, based upon
historical parallels, which determines the last great step of his
career, as, in youth, it had determined his first advances to Paoli. Now,
this self-confidence will be his ruin.
Next day, Las Cases hands the letter to the captain of the “Bellerophon,”
and negotiates with Maitland for Napoleon’s reception on board.
Admiral Hotham, Maitland’s immediate superior, was not a party to the
negotiations, but had long since received orders to seize the fugitive if
possible. In accordance with international law, this was quite in order,
for England, with the other powers in Vienna, had decreed Napoleon’s
outlawry. But it is an undisputed fact that Captain Maitland, supreme
on his own ship, guaranteed his guest’s liberty, saying: “Napoleon will
receive all proper attention in England. Our people are generous and
democratic.”
No record was taken at the time of the terms of the understanding in
accordance with which the man who had been the master of Europe went on
board one of his enemy’s ships. Nevertheless, it was not an affair of
hours, but, rather, of days; not the outcome of haste and desperation,
but the logical conclusion of a long chain of reasoning. Napoleon’s own
experience of the last twenty years had shown him that verbal agreements
are untrustworthy, whereas written agreements are comparatively reliable.
Yet he takes this last step, one of profound historical significance,
without any written document having been signed, sealed, and delivered.
In truth, he cannot await an answer from London. He trusts, however,
not in the mere word of a captain in the navy, but in the moral effect
of what he is doing. That is why, just before going on board the
“Bellerophon,” he writes the above-quoted heroic lines, addressed to
the ruler of the land in which he seeks hospitality, and the supreme
commander of all its navies.
Then, in uniform, Napoleon boards the British vessel.
XX
Maitland stands on the quarter-deck. Napoleon raises his hat, a thing
he has not always done to greet princes, and addresses the captain as
follows: “I come to place myself under the protection of your king and
your laws.” The British naval officers are introduced to him, and he
asks about the sea-fights in which they have been engaged. Then, with
the detachment of a man discussing ancient history, he talks about the
English navy and the French, says that the English sailors are cleaner
and more efficient, and argues with his host about certain punishments
customary in the navy after a fight. Then he passes to generalities:
“I really cannot understand why your ships have defeated our French
vessels so easily. The best of them were ours to begin with. A French
ship is stronger in every respect than an English vessel of the same
type. It has more and heavier guns, a larger complement.”
“I have already explained that to you, Sir. Our seamen have had more
experience than yours.”
Napoleon does not move an eyelash. The conversation remains strictly
academic; they talk of the nautical science of their respective countries.
“If you had tried to escape in a French frigate,” says Maitland, “you
would have seen for yourself how well we can shoot.”
No repining! Here stands a gamester who has lost the game. All that the
Emperor troubles to dispute is Maitland’s contention that two frigates
with a few twenty-four pounders could not possibly have got the better
of the “Bellerophon,” which carried seventy-four heavy guns. The captain
proves that it would have been impossible. Napoleon examines the ship’s
guns, praises what he sees, but has some criticisms to make here and
there. Maitland declares afterwards, when alone with his own people, that
he has been amazed by the extent of the Emperor’s technical knowledge.
The ship puts out to sea.
Meanwhile, the legitimate ministers and kings are discussing their
course. Not a single member of this circle proves great enough to advise
a great gesture, before Europe and before history. Ten days after leaving
the roads of Rochefort, the “Bellerophon” anchors in Plymouth harbour.
It is a fine morning in the end of July, and the water is thronged with
rowing boats full of people anxious to catch a glimpse of the caged lion.
Since no decision has yet arrived from London, civilian visitors are
not allowed on board. But it is a great time for the crew. They can see
Napoleon every day, and he converses with any of them that are able to
speak French. The gaping crowds in the boats are the thousands who for
twenty years past have heard nothing but abuse and mockery of “Boney”;
have seen numberless caricatures of him, depicted as a hideous monster.
Now, they are all animated with the same curiosity; they all want to
feast their eyes upon this dread spectre.
For the most part, Napoleon stays in his cabin. He does not want to
become a raree-show. A few days’ patience, and he will be able to go
ashore, and live where he pleases. At length, however, feeling the need
for fresh air, he comes up the gangway and mounts the poop. There he
stands, the great defeated foe, in his old world-famous green coat;
defenceless. Thousands of eyes instantly converge on him, so that it
seems as if he must be consumed in their fire.
But the man with the simple, impenetrable countenance, who is thus
pilloried, must radiate an aura of dignity and suffering, for an
extraordinary thing happens. Thousands of heads are bared. As far as
Napoleon’s gaze can reach, on the boats, the ships, throughout the
harbour, not a man remains covered. The greeting is universal, but
for one exception. Only one man among all those onlookers keeps his
three-cornered hat on his head. It seems as if the whole nation were
willing to pay the Emperor the homage which a pettifogging captain
withheld.
Such was the judgment of the British nation, which in this tense moment
cleared itself from all the contumely so soon to be heaped upon its
name. The waiting lasted three days. On the fourth, British officers
entered the Emperor’s cabin, and laid before him a paper containing the
government’s decision. No direct answer had come from the prince regent.
The document was to the effect that it would not be consistent with the
government’s duties towards England and her allies to allow General
Bonaparte any further opportunity of disturbing the peace of Europe, and
it would therefore be necessary to restrain his liberty to “whatever
extent may be necessary for securing that first and paramount object.”
St. Helena would be his place of residence, as it was healthy, and would
admit of a smaller degree of restraint than might be necessary elsewhere.
He could take with him three officers, a physician, and twelve servants.
Such was the reply of the modern Xerxes.
Napoleon, we are told, “laid the paper on the table, and, after a pause,
began to protest in vigorous terms.” He said:
“I am not a prisoner of war!... I came on board the ‘Bellerophon’ of my
own free will, after previous negotiation with the commander. I threw
myself on your protection, and claimed the rights of hospitality. The
tricolour was still waving over Rochefort and Bordeaux. I might have
gone back to the army; or might for years have lived secretly among the
people, who were devoted to me.
“Instead, I came to this country as a private person. I asked the
commander of one of your warships whether he was disposed to take me
and my train to England. He told me he had orders to this effect from
his government. If I have fallen into a trap, your government has acted
dishonourably and has dishonoured your flag.... St. Helena will kill me
in three months. I am used to riding twenty leagues a day. What can I do
on a little rock at the world’s end? I will not go!... If your government
wishes to kill me, that can be done here.... I gave the prince regent an
opportunity of performing the finest action of his life. I have been the
greatest of his country’s foes, and I paid you the highest compliment in
the world by voluntarily entrusting myself to your protection.... What
you are proposing will be an everlasting disgrace to the whole British
nation!”
The most characteristic point in this protest, which he renews in
writing, is the moral indignation with which it thrills. International
law is but lightly touched upon, for what he claims is a hero’s right.
Such were the words spoken in the heat of the moment, in that small
cabin, to the officers who had brought him notice of his doom, and
who subsequently recorded them for posterity. Though spoken in haste,
they have a historical ring and some of the sentences are modelled for
imperishability. A soul has been wounded, a soul that is mourning, not so
much on account of its own loss of freedom, as because the world fails to
recognise greatness.
Thus, in the first moment of his doom, he recognises that which,
a century later, cannot be more profoundly expressed by the great
grandchildren of the men of those days, who have been brought up on
contemplation of the legend of Napoleon’s career. Themistocles feels that
he has been betrayed. Once again, one of these legitimate princes has
failed to seize the opportunity of performing the finest action of his
life. A man void of imagination, a weakling in possession of brute force,
he crushed the great and splendid thing which has fallen into his hands.
But from under the brutal pressure of this fist, the spirit of what he
is crushing rises in a tenuous column. He upon whom the doom is enforced
has acquired a power over himself, a power which sustains him in his
powerlessness—stoicism. After the first outbreak, he bears the injustice
with indomitable firmness, enduring for ten days the indignity of his
position at Plymouth, and unruffled while England seizes his baggage and
his money.
In due course, the Emperor and his companions were transferred to the
“Northumberland,” which set sail for St. Helena. It was on an August
morning that, for the last time, Napoleon set eyes on the coast of
France, looming through the mist. But what did he care about the coast?
The centre of his interest lay many miles to the eastward—Paris, which
he had wooed more hotly than all the rest of the world, Paris, which had
rejected his suit.
By evening, he loses sight of Europe, which he has ruled. Darkling is the
sea, which he has never been able to rule. He stands in the bows, not
looking backwards, nor forwards either. As on the voyage to Egypt, he
looks upwards towards the stars. He is seeking his own star.
A great saga is drawing to its close.
BOOK FIVE
THE ROCK
On Judgment Day, before God’s throne,
There stood at last, Napoleon.
The Devil had his list begun
Of crimes the Bonapartes had done,
When God the Father, or God the Son,
Cut Satan short before God’s throne:
“Don’t bore us all to death with reading
A German professorial pleading!
If you’re bold enough to face him,
In your kingdom you may place him.”—GOETHE.
I
The sea spreads out into the vast distance. It is like a mirror of steel.
The man on the rock, hands clasped behind, stares across the watery
plain. He is lonely, so lonely.
One looking at him from a distance would see a fat man with short legs, a
man of uncertain age. He is wearing a green coat, decorated with the star
of the Legion of Honour; silk stockings; three-cornered hat in his hands.
The head is large; the brownish hair makes a bush at the back; there is
no sign of whitening. The short neck springs from powerful shoulders.
The features are as if hewn out of stone, with a yellowish tint, like
the marble of an ancient statue that has been darkened in the course of
the ages; no wrinkles, but the classical profile is somewhat marred by
the heaviness of the chin. The only beautiful features are the nose and
the teeth. These last are perfect, and he has never lost a tooth. His
hands, too, are beautiful. All through his campaigns he was scrupulous
in his care for them; and, when correcting the letters and despatches
he dictated, he generally used a pencil in order that he might avoid
staining his fingers with ink.
The doctors have told us a good deal about his physical condition.
“Pulse never more frequent than 62; bosom well padded, almost like a
woman’s, and with very little hair; partes viriles exiguitates insignis
sicut pueri.” He himself knows much about his body, he has studied his
battle-field of his life in order that here, likewise, he may utilise his
forces to the best advantage.
“I have never yet heard my own heart beating; it is almost as if I had
none,” he says, half seriously. Moderation, he assures us, is the secret
of his amazing faculty for work. “Nature has bestowed on me two valuable
gifts: the capacity for sleeping whenever I want to; and the incapacity
for committing excesses in drinking and eating.... However little a man
may eat, he always eats too much. One can get ill from over-eating,
but never from under-eating.” The alternation between campaigning and
sedentary life enables him again and again to escape from the air of the
study, and to fortify his constitution by long rides and drives. “Water,
air, and cleanliness are my favourite medicines.”
With a body thus steeled, he can drive without stopping from Tilsit to
Dresden, nearly five hundred miles, and be quite fresh at the journey’s
end: can ride fifty miles from Vienna to Semmering, breakfast there,
and be back at work in Schönbrunn the same evening; can gallop in five
hours from Valladolid to Burgos, a distance of about eighty miles. After
long rides and marches through Poland, he reaches Warsaw at midnight
and receives the new authorities at seven next morning. These are the
excesses he practises to restore the balance of his natural forces. After
a long spell of sedentary life, he will start off on a ride of seven
days, or will go out shooting for the whole day; after great exertions,
he will keep his room for twenty-four hours. He believes that his energy
has saved his life. He says to Metternich: “Sometimes death only comes
from lack of energy. Yesterday, when I was thrown out of my carriage, I
thought I was done for. But I had just time to say to myself that I would
not die. Any one else in my place would have been killed.”
His muscles are powerful, but his nerves are sensitive. Accustomed to
command, he cannot endure anything in the nature of compulsion. If his
coat is at all tight, he tears it off; the same with shoes that pinch
him in the slightest. On these occasions, he will box his servants’
ears. If he has to wear court dress, they watch out while they help him
on with his coat. When his mind is busy (when is it not?) he will push
away his breakfast, jump up from his chair, and stride about, talking,
issuing orders. His handwriting is nothing more than a series of violent
contractions of the hand which cannot keep up with the furious pace
of his thoughts; a sort of involuntary shorthand, which in places has
not been deciphered after a hundred years of study. He cannot endure
the smell of paint or size; he always masks unpleasant odours by using
eau-de-Cologne. If his nerves are utterly exhausted, he soothes them in
a hot bath. When the war with England broke out, he worked continuously,
with four secretaries, for three days and three nights, and then spent
six hours in his bath dictating dispatches. This nervous irritability is
the antithesis of his slow circulation. He thinks that, the constitution
of his nerves being what it is, he would be in danger of going mad, “if
it were not that my blood works so slowly.”
[Illustration: Napoleon as Emperor in 1815. Engraving by Robert Lefèvre,
after a painting by Muneret.]
But there is no evidence at all that his nervousness ever rose to the
pitch of convulsions, that he suffered from epilepsy. This illness
usually begins in childhood, and none of his schoolmates have reported
that he had fits. Never was any one’s life more closely watched than
Napoleon’s; and the documents upon which the assertion that he was an
epileptic is based are scanty, confused, and untrustworthy.
As long as his body remained healthy, he was able to endure all the
tensions and shocks to which he was exposed. It was when he was
approaching forty that he began to show the first symptoms of a stomach
trouble which was in those days summarily diagnosed as cancerous. Beyond
questions, the tendency to it was inherited. During the last three years
of warfare, he was put out of action in decisive hours by paroxysms of
gastric spasm. His courage and resolution were practically unimpaired;
had it not been for these attacks, the history of his decline would have
been different.
II
The soul which governed this body was driven forward by three fundamental
powers:
Self-confidence, energy, imagination.
“I am not as other men; the laws of morality and convention cannot be
applied to me.” In these cold words, he emphasises the “I” with which
he began his first political writing in the days of his youth. They are
a plain acknowledgment of a fact, by a man of thirty to whom nothing
is more alien than vanity. “I alone, because of my position, know what
government is,” he said when he was Consul. “I am persuaded that no one
save myself could govern France at this moment. Were I to die, it would
be a great misfortune for the nation.” He utters such words seldom,
and only when he is with an intimate; but these sayings show with what
scientific aloofness he could contemplate the phenomenon, Napoleon. When,
during the Russian disaster, he was asked who in spite of all would
defend him in France, he replied: “My name.”
His contemporaries and posterity have held this fundamental feeling to
be ambition. That view is mistaken. Common ambition distinguishes itself
from Napoleon’s self-confidence as a restless, climbing animal does from
a bird of prey whose free flight, by a law of nature, assumes wider and
wider circles as it swings heavenwards. Napoleon’s aspiration is neither
restless nor envious: it is nothing but his natural disposition which, as
Consul, he once charmingly explained to his friend Roederer:
“I have no ambition whatever; or if I have, then it is so inborn, so
intimately knit up with my very life, that it is as the blood in my
veins. It does not incite me to outstrip my associates.... I have never
had to fight for or against it; it does not urge me to greater speed
than is natural to me, it comes out only when circumstances and my ideas
demand.”
Already in the days when he was a general, ideas and circumstances forced
upon him the conviction that he was the man predestined to rebuild
France. It is nothing other than the conviction of his mission which
makes him say to Roederer: “Circumstances have changed. I am now one of
those who found States, not one of those who ruin States.” Another time,
he speaks of Corneille, but he means himself when he says: “Whence did
this man acquire his antique greatness? From himself, from his soul?
Very well. Do you know what that is called, My Lord Cardinal? It is
called genius. Genius is a flame, which comes from heaven, but seldom
finds a head ready to receive it. Corneille is a man whom the world has
recognised.” When his interlocutor observed that the poet had not seen
the flame, so how could he recognise it, the Emperor answered scornfully:
“Precisely for that reason I consider he is a great man!”
He thus, indirectly by anticipation, announces his own genius to the
world, just as Goethe had announced his own.
The will-to-power, not as an endeavour or even as a question, but,
rather, as simplicity, dwells within him close at hand. He calls interest
the key to ordinary deeds; the will to govern the intellect, he describes
as the strongest of all the passions: and the artistic urge of genius,
he depicts in the following words: “I love power, yes, I love it, but
after the manner of an artist: as a fiddler loves his fiddle in order to
conjure from it tone, chords, harmonies.”
That is why it is his nature to command. “Wherever I may be, I command,
or else I keep silence.” He might have added: “I negotiate,” for he had
spent a quarter of his time in negotiating. Even as a young general of
twenty-seven, he aroused the respect of all who came in contact with
him. He never learned to obey; but to command came to him naturally at
the very outset, just as a calf stands and walks in the first hour of
its life. Because this power of commanding comes so naturally, he never
acquires the art of asking; because he can command as no other, he is
denied the gift of being able to ask favours.
His self-confidence confers on him a natural dignity that amazes and
angers the legitimist world, which believes dignity to be consonant only
with heredity and culture. The friends of his youth stand embarrassed
when they recognise him as their commander in the field and yet
realise the solitude which his position as leader entails. All his
companions-in-arms speak of him with spontaneous homage. One of his
intimates writes: “When he speaks, every one listens, for he speaks as
an expert; if he is silent, his silence is respected; and no one would
venture to say that he was silent because of ill humour. We all felt that
between him and us there lived a great thought which was wholly occupying
his mind and forbade familiar accost.” This statement is all the more
surprising since it was made during a campaign, when tent life usually
breaks down barriers. With absolute ingenuousness he once said, while
playing and chatting with friends at Malmaison: “I have no sense of the
ridiculous. Power is never ridiculous.”
An adept at analysis, the greatest psychologist of his epoch, he knows
all about his own qualities, and is therefore able, by degrees, to
elaborate these instincts into principles. “The goodness of a king,” he
informs his brother Louis, King of Holland, “must always bear a regal
stamp and must never be monkish.... The love which a king inspires should
invariably be a manly love, wedded to reverence, fear, and esteem. If
people speak of him as ‘a good man,’ his rule is a failure.” This love
and fear which he himself inspires has the greatest practical results.