“my grand master of the horse,” or announces at table: “I have been
anointed by the pope; thereby I have become a bishop, and have the power
to consecrate you as priests.” When he teases his friends about their
all being in the “Dictionary of Weathercocks,” whose pages he is at the
moment fluttering, Gourgaud ventures to say that the Emperor himself
deserves a place in it. “Oh; and pray why?”
“Because you first of all recognised the republic, Sire, and yet, later,
you were the crown.”
“You are right. Oh, well, the Empire was certainly the best of the
republics!”
At the feast of Epiphany, he has a cake made for the children. Then
he crowns little Napoléon Bertrand as king. When he is informed that
there has been a complaint from the governor about the expenses of his
household, and that, now that the price of meat has risen to forty sous,
they must be more moderate in their consumption, he turns the matter off
with a laugh, saying: “Parbleu! You might have answered that it costs us
more than a crown.”
Never before has so much self-control been forced on him. Impassively he
reads Lowe’s answer to a statement of grievances from Bertrand, who had
said something about “the Emperor.” The governor writes that he is not
aware of the presence of any emperor on the island.—The prisoner asks
Gourgaud to order his horse to be saddled. Gourgaud replies that he has
not seen the animal for three days, since the blacksmith insists on being
paid three napoleons before he will send it back. The Emperor masters his
anger, and says nothing more at the time; but next day he bursts out at
Gourgaud: “Why did you insult me by talking to me about the blacksmith’s
bill?” The day before, by a superhuman effort, he had managed to restrain
his wrath, but by the torturing thoughts of the intervening hours his
pride had been broken. The adjutant’s sullen reply had disturbed the
Emperor’s equanimity quite as much as Austria’s desertion had done in
earlier years.
A soldier and a southron, he is choked sometimes by the passion for
vengeance. On one occasion, when uneatable meat is served at dinner,
he contents himself with the remark: “I should trouble little about
myself, if I could only feel sure that some day our humiliations would be
proclaimed to the world, so that those who are responsible for them would
be covered with shame!”
With a sublimity of spirit which grows in him now, he tries to moderate
the natural rebelliousness of his disposition: “I am living here under a
weight, so to speak; a weight which compresses the spring, but does not
break it. Resignation—that is the dominion of reason, the real triumph of
the soul.” This masterful man does his utmost to regulate his own conduct
in accordance with the foregoing axiom. Subsequently he says: “Misfortune
has its good side; it teaches us truths.... For the first time, I am able
to contemplate history as a philosopher.”
For the first time, too, he is able to contemplate the present with a
tranquil mind. During the early weeks of his stay on the island, when
he was out walking with a pretty young Englishwoman, he conversed with
her agreeably about various topics: how the climate was bad for the
complexion; Ossian; the plantations. At this moment some negro slaves
carrying heavy boxes crossed the path, and the lady called to them
imperiously: “Get out of the way!”
The Emperor interposed: “But, Madame, please remember that the men are
carrying burdens!”
Collapse of lady! Yet Napoleon Bonaparte himself would not have been so
considerate in the days before he came to St. Helena.
In all matters now, except when he is playing the shadow emperor in
pursuance of his feud with Lowe, Napoleon adopts a simplicity of life
which outdoes that even of his poorest days as a lieutenant. When for
some time there has been very little to eat, and the cook has had to eke
things out with French beans, he eats them enthusiastically, praises the
dish and the cooking.
“In Paris, I could get along with twelve francs a day. Dinner frs. 1.50;
reading room; theatre in the evening, pit; I should hire a room for
frs. 20 a month. I should only want one servant; and I should associate
exclusively with people of like fortune. One can be happy in any station
in life. When my mother sang lullabies over my cradle, there was not a
word about what I was destined to become. I believe ‘Monsieur Bonaparte’
would have been quite as happy as ‘Emperor Napoleon.’ Everything in life
is relative.”
His doctor has a fainting fit. Coming to himself, he finds that he is
being attended to, not by a servant, but by the Emperor in person.
Napoleon has lifted him on to the bed, has unfastened the collar of his
shirt, and is kneeling beside him, administering vinegar.—When Cipriani,
the Corsican servant, is dying, the Emperor asks the doctor whether a
visit from the master would stimulate the man’s flagging forces.
“The excitement would kill him.”
“Oh, well, I suppose I had better not go.”
When playing reversi, he establishes a bank. For whose benefit? The money
is to be used to buy the freedom of the most beautiful female slave on
the island. One evening, his companions find him at work beside the lamp,
slowly and carefully stitching the pages of a manuscript.
Sometimes, however, his dreams reawaken, and flutter against the bars
of the cage. “I wish they would transfer me to a desert island, where
I could have two thousand people of my own choice, with muskets and
cannon. I should found a glorious colony, and should end my days happily
in that model land. There I should not find it necessary to be at grips
all the time with antiquated ideas.” Having said this apropos of nothing
in particular, he passes on to the details of the scheme, dictating
specifications—how much money and stores would be needed for the founding
of his colony.
A chained sculptor, his plastic impulses must be content with such
outlets in the world of imagination; but, side by side with these
capriccios, he displays a heroic simplicity. One day, during the early
weeks at St. Helena, he is out riding with Las Cases. “We came to a field
that was being ploughed. The Emperor dismounted, and took the handles of
the plough. With incredible speed, he drove a long and perfectly straight
furrow. All this without saying a word until he had finished, when he
told me to give the ploughman a napoleon. We remounted, and rode on our
way.”
XV
“No one but myself can be blamed for my fall. I have been my own greatest
enemy, the cause of my own disastrous fate.”
This admission, the profoundest of all those made by the exile shows
that Napoleon has completely outgrown the cloudy Cæsarist fancies of
his middle period. Had he been a believing Christian, the confession
would have rounded off his atonement upon the rock. His sense of
responsibility, however, is not directed towards God but only towards
himself, and therefore the utterance represents a great man’s final
settlement of accounts with destiny. But, at the same time, it is a last
outburst of defiance, for his self-overweening esteem made it impossible
for him to admit that there were any greater forces in the world than his
own. Napoleon alone could overthrow Napoleon.
The remark was not the outcome of transient depression. During the
closing years of his power, he had again and again spoken to his
intimates about his faults and errors; now, upon the island, such
admissions are frequent. Some of them are ardent, and some of them are
cold; for even in these self-examinations there is an alternation between
fantasy and realism. From time to time, we have the heartfelt cry of a
penitent: “When I close my eyes, all my mistakes parade themselves before
me, like figures in a nightmare.” Or, again: “I wanted too much.... I
strung the bow too tightly, and trusted too much in my good fortune.”
But he will coldly reckon up the cases in which he has failed to
understand men, coming at this late hour to views which the ablest
observers had held while he was still on the throne. The reader who knows
his story will require no comment on the remarks that follow.
“I considered Emperor Francis a good man; but he was only a blockhead,
and in Metternich’s hands he became an instrument for my destruction.”—“I
ought to have left Talleyrand at his post. What concern was it of mine
that he was plundering the foreign chancelleries. I should have been
content with having him closely watched. He served me well, as long as
he could hope to make anything out of me. If I had kept him in office,
I should still have been on the throne.”—“If only that man Fulton, with
his steamboat, had been right, I should have been master of the world.
But those idiots of savants made fun of his invention, just as they make
fun of electricity. All the same, gigantic powers are hidden in steam and
electricity!”
He regrets that at Tilsit he had decided to maintain the Hohenzollern
dynasty. He regrets having crossed the Memel too early; having crossed
it in 1812, before he had settled matters in Spain. He regrets that, in
defiance of Carnot’s advice, he began the last campaign too early, and he
regrets that at Waterloo he did not send the guard forward soon enough.
Most of all, he regrets having, when his power was finally broken,
entrusted himself to England, instead of to the tsar, or, better still,
to the United States. Always, when he hears of crises in France, he
regrets that he did not go to America.
“From that vantage ground I should have been able to guard France against
humiliation from abroad, reaction from within; the dread of my return
would have sufficed. In America I should have established the centre of
a new French fatherland. Within a year, I should have had sixty thousand
men grouped round me.... It would have been the most natural place of
refuge—a land of vast expanses where a man can live in freedom. If I had
had a fit of the blues, I should have mounted a horse, ridden hundreds of
miles, enjoyed travel with the ease of a private individual, lost amid
the crowd. In Europe I was too popular; bound up, in one way or another,
with every nation.... As a fugitive, and disguised, I could certainly
have escaped to the United States; but both expedients would have been
undignified. I put my trust in the approach of danger, thinking that the
nation would be forced to turn to me as its saviour; that is why I stayed
as long as possible at Malmaison and in Rochefort. The destiny that
brought me to St. Helena was the outcome of those feelings.”
This is the most productive of his meditations. The other mistakes of his
career had entailed such complicated consequences that it was impossible
for him to trace what might have been had he acted otherwise. But the
final resolve at Rochefort had, as its inevitable upshot, brought him
to this rock. In that respect, therefore, his mind was continually
busied with alternative possibilities. Although, when in fancy he roams
across the American prairies, he sometimes pictures himself as founding
new States there, and sometimes as galloping through the wilds, we may
ascribe it to the infinite variety of human passions that he should at
the same time justify his final blunder on patriotic grounds.
His critical faculty is most keenly at work when he is pondering his
dynastic aspirations. In the last days of the Empire, he had confided
his doubts to a few choice spirits; now, when it is too late, he freely
acknowledges his error. “I was a softy where my family was concerned; by
sticking to their point they could get anything out of me. What terrible
mistakes I made there! If my brothers had communicated a common impulse
to the masses I placed under their rule, we should have been able to
make our way to the ends of the earth!... I was not so lucky as Genghis
Khan, whose four sons vied with one another in their father’s service.
If I made any one king, he instantly regarded himself as king by divine
right; the mere word was as infective as the plague. The new king was no
longer my representative, but became a fresh enemy; instead of serving
me, he wanted to make himself independent. I was the only stumbling block
in his path. In the twinkling of an eye, they all became kings warranted
genuine; under my protection, they all tasted the sweets of dominion. I
alone bore the burden. Poor devils! Once I had been defeated, the enemy
did not even bother to declare their formal deposition.”
That was as far as his penitence reached. However self-critical he might
be, Napoleon never uttered a word of regret for having assumed a crown,
or for having wished to found a dynasty. On the contrary, again and again
he returned to his basic social idea: “I was the natural mediator in
this struggle between the revolution and the past; my empire was in the
interests of the rulers as well as in that of the peoples. My aim was
the social rebirth of Europe; fate interfered before I had completed my
task.” In line with his general conception of kingship, he deplores that
the kings should have made an end of Murat. They would have done better
to show the peoples that kings are above the law. Though the guillotining
of King Louis had opened the road along which he himself had advanced
to a throne, he condemned the act of regicide; not because he regarded
the Bourbons as competent rulers, but because continuity seemed to him
essential.
[Illustration: Death mask of Napoleon. By Dr. Antommarchi.]
For he will never misunderstand Europe’s historical conditions; he
will never try to establish offhand in Europe that which he dreams of
establishing in the promised land of America or in the utopian island
of his fancy. He always sees what is, as an outgrowth of what has been;
always transforms the extant, instead of destroying it; he never wants
to build entirely anew. Consequently, he does not discard the old forms,
but uses them as a foundation for his new buildings. With a passion for
ordering and arranging, and with a hatred for destruction, he feels how
much can be done when the basis is secure. “When I rose to power, people
thought I was going to be a Washington. Words cost nothing! In America,
the role would have suited me well enough; there would have been no merit
in adopting it on the western side of the Atlantic. In France, I could
only become a Washington as a king among kings.”
That is the truth as he sees it. Since, at bottom, he despises the purple
he has hung round his own shoulders, he would have been careful to avoid
taking it to America, just as Washington had resisted the solicitations
of his officers. By birth, he had been neither proletarian nor prince,
but a member of a petty noble family which had fallen on evil days. Thus
his position was an intermediate one, sandwiched between the classes. In
his conversations with Englishmen about England, he displayed the naïveté
of his class feeling, and his faith in the right of succession, for he
closed an attack upon the British nobility in the following remarkable
way:
“It is not a handful of nobles or rich men that makes a nation, but the
mass of the people. True, as soon as the mob gains the upper hand it
adopts an alias, and speaks of itself as the People; whereas, if it is
conquered, a few poor wretches are hanged, and spoken of as robbers and
rebels. ’Tis the way of the world: mob, robbers, rebels—or heroes. As the
fortune of war may decide!”
After a reading of Voltaire’s _La mort de César_, he remarks that in
youth he had himself wanted to write a “Cæsar.” One of his auditors,
with a courtly double meaning, says that the Emperor has done so.
Napoleon laughs the flatterer to scorn. “I? You poor babe! Yes, if I had
been completely successful! But, in fact, Cæsar had no better luck than I
have had—for he was assassinated!”
Closely associated with his self-criticism is his own estimate of
his deeds. His historical sense, which is an integral part of his
composition, leads him to an objective clarity in his contemplation of
himself; perhaps an attitude of mind we may vainly seek for elsewhere in
history before his day. Las Cases tells us that Napoleon talks of his
career as if three hundred years lay behind him; and Countess Montholon
movingly observes: “It seemed to me as if we found ourselves in another
world, and I was listening to a Dialogue of the Dead.”
He stubbornly defends his alleged crimes, the poisoning of the
plague-stricken in Jaffa, the execution of the duke of Enghien. One
day he is seized with the impulse to confide to an English physician
the whole story of the Enghien episode; since, as Consul, he ran the
risk of being murdered, a counterstroke was necessary. Another time he
deliberately sets himself to the task of finding out what O’Meara really
thinks of him. The Emperor knows the doctor to be whole-heartedly devoted
to his person, but of independent character. They are sitting over a jug
of porter, drinking together. Napoleon suddenly puts his question:
“What sort of a man did you think I was before you came to know me? Speak
your mind frankly!”
O’Meara gives the description of an amoral chimera, a man capable of any
crime to achieve his end.
“I expected as much!” exclaims the Emperor. “Probably many Frenchmen
think the same. They’ll be saying: Yes, he climbed to the top of the
ladder of fame, by his own efforts; but in his climb he had to commit
many atrocities.’” Thereupon he launches forth into vehement self-defence.
One night he summons Montholon in order to dictate the thoughts which
throng his sleepless brain. He sets down how he was ever inclined
to peace, how before a battle and after a victory he always entered
negotiations. Or he compares the two revolutions, adding: “Cromwell
achieved his aim when he was in the full maturity of his age, and
attained to the highest rung of the ladder through cunning and hypocrisy.
But Napoleon came to the fore as a stripling, and his first steps are
illuminated with deeds of glory.... Whose blood have I shed? Who can
boast that in my place he would have acted differently? What epoch
confronted with similar difficulties has ever come through with such
blameless results?... I believe it to be without parallel in history
that a plain man should have attained to such amazing power without
committing a single crime. In face of death itself, I could make no other
declaration.”
Something now occurs which takes us wholly by surprise. Instead of, in
the midst of this harangue, laying the blame for ill success on others,
instead of allowing his inborn misanthropy to storm the heavens in
resentment, he shows us that his days of exile have fostered his sense
of justice. He who, for a lifetime, had declared that cupidity lay at
the root of all men’s endeavours, and had dealt with his fellows on that
presupposition, now becomes a cautious analyst; the man of power becomes
a philosopher; Napoleon becomes tolerant.
Now, he declares that mankind is prone to gratitude rather than to
ingratitude; the only trouble is, people always expect more thanks
than the deed is worth. Las Cases informs us that his greatest censure
nowadays is expressed by silence. He defends even those who were
faithless: Augereau, Berthier, were not equal to the magnitude of their
positions; he excuses his brothers. From the altitude of these judgments,
he surveys the wide perspective with a tolerant eye. We seem to be
listening to the imprisoned Socrates when we read:
“It is difficult to give people their due.... Do they even know
themselves? Those who forsook me would never have believed, in the days
of their good fortune, that a time would come when they would deny me....
Our last trials were more than human nature could endure. As a matter
of fact, I was left in the lurch rather than actually betrayed, just
as Peter denied his master.... Perhaps they have already shed tears of
repentance. Who ever had more friends and more adherents than I? Who has
ever been more beloved?... My fate might have been far worse!”
XVI
The Emperor’s companions keep diaries. He is well aware of this; he even
has a look into one of them, but he reserves his thoughts. As a realist
he calculates the monetary worth of these records, and he foretells what
the writers will earn when they publish their books after his death; his
only mistake is that he underestimates the amount. He bequeaths to each
of his secretaries those portions of his writings which he has dictated
to them severally. But he is correct in his estimate of the incalculable
value the diaries will have for posterity in the study of himself.
Accustomed as he is to dictate, he shapes his sentences carefully
even when conversing, so that his hearers may record his sayings with
advantage. The value to future generations is thus enhanced, and
these summaries of his thoughts raise him above his present wearisome
existence. His passionate feeling for historical events drives him to
this self-expression, no less than regard for those who shall come after.
Five days pass, sometimes, without his seeing anybody; he reads and
he writes nothing. The future gives him no more food for thought. But
during these periods of seclusion he surveys his life as a whole. Then
his soul is shaken, and his lightning glance searches through and
through his personality for a hundred hours at a stretch. Never has any
man before him had to submit to such a scrutiny. The tension of his
being is at these moments greater than at Austerlitz, more elemental
than in the Council of State: he is a bound Prometheus, one who wishes
to promote human happiness; and, shackled to the rock, he groans. Yet
he is but a little man in an old green coat! The visions, the dreams,
which for twenty years he was able and willing to conjure into reality,
he now dissects into ideas. Thus, in the end, he becomes the severest
commentator upon his own life story.
A book arrives. It is a collection of his manifestoes and decrees. He
reads. Then he throws the volume aside, strides to and fro, and says to
Las Cases:
“Every future historian will have to allow me my share.... Facts speak
for themselves. I closed up the chasm of anarchy, and put an end to
chaos. I cleansed the revolution from the filth it had accumulated, I
ennobled the peoples, I stabilised the thrones. I encouraged all those
who had talents, rewarded every merit, and widened the boundaries
of fame and glory.... Could not historians protect me against many
grave charges?... If I am accused of despotism, they can claim that
dictatorship was necessary in the circumstances. Is it freedom I
attacked? They can answer that anarchy was still threatening on our very
threshold. Love of war? I was never the aggressor. Striving for world
dominion? This arose accidentally, because of the conditions of the time.
Too ambitious? Yes, true indeed. But my ambition was of the sublimest:
to found the kingdom of reason, with full development and unrestricted
enjoyment of all the human faculties. The historian may deplore that such
ambition could not wholly attain its goal.” After a momentary silence,
he concludes: “There, my dear fellow, in a few words, you have my entire
story.”
Here he is on the defensive. But neither in such moods nor in any other
do we ever hear him rave enthusiastically over his battles. In all the
six years of his captivity, he does not seem, even once, to have sung the
praises of General Bonaparte. If he is summing up what he achieved, he
says:
“My fame does not rest upon my forty victorious battles, nor does it lie
in the fact that I bent the monarchs to my will. Waterloo will wipe out
the memory of so many victories; the last act makes one forget the first.
What will never pass away, is my book of laws, the minutes of my Council
of State, my correspondence with my ministers.... Through its simplicity
my code of laws has had more effect than any civil codes before it; the
schools I have set up, my methods of instruction, are creating a new
generation; crime has decreased during my rule, whereas in England crime
has become more prevalent.... _I wanted to found a European system, a
European code of laws, a European court of appeal; there would have been
but one people throughout Europe._”
He reads in an English newspaper that Napoleon has hidden away vast
treasures. He leaps to his feet, and dictates, to the man who happens to
be his companion at the moment, these splendid sentences: