BIRTH OF THE KING OF ROME[38]
[Footnote 38: References as before, and Helfert: Marie
Louise. Welschinger: La censure sous le premier empire.
Wertheimer: Die Heirat der Erzherzogin Marie Louise mit
Napoleon I. Montbel: Le duc de Reichstadt. Welschinger: Le
roi de Rome.]
England Under the Continental System -- End of Constitutional
Government in France -- Napoleon's Personal Rule -- Wealth of his
High Officials -- Literature and the Empire -- Mme. de Stael's
Aspirations -- Her Attempts to Win Napoleon -- Her Genius Saved
by Defeat -- The Decennial Prizes -- Pregnancy of Maria Louisa --
The Heir of the Napoleon Dynasty.
[Sidenote: 1810-11]
It would be idle to suppose that during the winter of 1810-11 the
Spanish situation was not thoroughly appreciated by the imperial
bridegroom at Paris, or that he underrated the ultimate effects of
what was taking place in the Iberian peninsula if the process were to
go on. Still less is it probable that with the direction of all his
energy toward that quarter he could not have quenched the uncertain
and spasmodic efforts of Spanish patriotism, either by arts of which
he was a master, or by making a desert to call it a peace. No; every
indication is that his eye was still fixed on England at her vital
point, and that he took his measures in the North to deal her such a
thrust that the life-blood which sustained the Peninsular war would
either flow inefficacious, or be turned away altogether from Spain,
and change the ever-doubtful success of Wellington into assured
disaster. Wealthy as England was, it was certain that her credit could
not long hold out in view of the lavish subsidies she was constantly
granting to continental powers, while the expeditions to Spain,
Holland, and Sicily were even more costly, inconclusive as they had so
far been. In 1810 English bank-notes were twenty per cent. below par,
and the sovereign could be exchanged on the Continent for only
seventeen francs instead of the twenty-five it usually brought.
Business failures were becoming ominously frequent in London, and
panic was stalking abroad. What must be the necessary result if the
continental embargo were more thoroughly enforced? The enormous
contraband trade of the North was now virtually at an end. Where
English merchants had so far been able to secure at least half of the
prices obtained from the consumers by smugglers, they could now no
longer secure even that doubtful market at any price; the
incorporation of Holland and the North Sea shores into France left
virtually no opening into Europe for them except through Russia. The
fate of England and of the world seemed to hang on how far the Czar
could or would keep the engagements which he had made at Tilsit.
This might not have been so completely true if the French finances had
been desperate; but they were not--that is, the Emperor's personal
finances were not. After the legislative assembly met in December,
1809, it was soon clear to France that the farce of constitutional
government under the Empire was nearly played out. Not only were the
members of the senate, who should have retired according to the
constitution, kept in their seats by a decree of the body to which
they belonged, but an imperial edict appointed the deputies for the
new departments without even the form of an election. Fontanes retired
from the presidency of the senate to become grand master of the
university; the grand chamberlain of the palace was appointed in his
stead. The Emperor had already sold to private corporations the
canals which belonged to the state; the legislature ratified the
illegal act. The penal code was now ready. It contained the iniquitous
and dangerous penalty of confiscation for certain crimes, thus
punishing the children for the faults of their sires, and opening a
most tempting avenue to the courts for indulgence in venality under
legal forms. There was little debate, and the code was adopted in its
entirety as presented.
The reason for this paralysis of constitutional government is clear.
Even the immense war indemnities taken from conquered states did not
suffice for the maintenance of the enormous armies which covered
Europe like swarms of locusts. The marshals and generals were
insatiate, and the greed of the civil administrators was scarcely
less. From the top to the bottom of the public service every official
stood with open hand and hungry eyes. This state of things was
directly due to Napoleon's policy of attaching everybody to himself by
personal ties, and in giving he had the lavish hand of a parvenu. The
recipients were never content, hoarding their fees, and becoming
opulent, pursuing all the time each his personal ambitions, and
ofttimes returning insolence for favors. To meet these enormous
expenditures there had been inaugurated throughout Europe a system of
what may be termed private confiscations, the vast dimensions of which
can never be justly estimated. German princes and Spanish grandees,
English merchants and the Italian clergy, had all been wrung dry;
timorous statesmen, crafty churchmen and sly contractors, unprincipled
financiers and ambitious politicians, not one was forgotten or
overlooked in the accumulation of hoards which, having long been
called the army chest, were now erected into the dignity of an
"extraordinary domain."
Kept so far in a decent obscurity, these ill-gotten possessions, which
belonged, if not to their original owners, then to the state, were, in
the low condition of public morality, not merely recognized--they were
actually increased from new sources of supply. The confiscated
palaces, forests, lands, and fisheries, the proceeds from the sale of
American ships, values of every kind, were all made the private
property of the Emperor. If any of these rills of revenue should run
dry, the criminal code with its legislation of confiscation might be
relied on to supply a menace strong enough to express inexhaustible
treasure from storehouses yet untouched. One orator declared this
barbaric fund to have been in the Emperor's hands a "French
Providence, which made the laurel a fertile tree, the fruits of which
had nourished the brave whom its branches covered." Napoleon had found
the crown moneys sufficient for himself. Berthier now had a revenue of
one million three hundred and fifty thousand eight hundred francs, and
Davout was scarcely less regal with one of nine hundred and ten
thousand; Ney had only seven hundred and twenty-eight thousand, and
Massena five hundred thousand; Soult was ambitious to increase his
income of three hundred and five thousand by securing the Portuguese
crown. What with the great public charities endowed from this
extraordinary fund, what with the great public works in Paris and
elsewhere which had been carried on by its means, the total
expenditures had been more than four hundred and thirty million
francs. The total receipts had risen to about seven hundred and sixty
millions, and there were therefore still in the Emperor's purse upward
of three hundred millions. He could not be called destitute or even
poor.
[Illustration: NAPOLEON BONAPARTE in 1809.
From a painting by Rene-Theodore Berthon, in the possession of the
painter's descendants in Canada.]
The same years which saw the extinction of the remnants of
legislative independence saw likewise the establishment of six state
prisons, in which were to be confined those disaffected persons who
were too powerful to be left at liberty, but whose trials in open
court would have revealed troublesome facts. The censorship of the
press was likewise reestablished with iron rigidity, and the
publishers purchased the meager immunities they were permitted to
enjoy by the payment of whatever pensions the Emperor chose to grant
to needy men of letters. Chenier the poet, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre,
the author of "Paul and Virginia," and others enjoyed, in addition to
decorations of the Legion of Honor, substantial incomes that were
virtually paid by their fellow-craftsmen; while a chosen
few--including Gros, Gerard, Guerin, Lagrange, Monge, and
Laplace--were elevated to the new baronage. Even Carnot did not
hesitate to accept employment and place from Napoleon. At first he
solicited a loan for the relief of his urgent necessities. This the
Emperor made unnecessary by ordering the War Office to pay all arrears
in his rations and other perquisites, by giving him a commission to
prepare a volume on fortification, and by according him a pension of
ten thousand francs. The ponderous sledge-hammer of the censorship was
apparently forged to kill a gnat. Nothing is known to the history of
literature so subservient and humble as the conduct of the great
majority of French writers and artists under the Empire.
There was one exception--Mme. de Stael. That overestimated woman had
gained the halo of martyrdom by the so-called persecution of the
Emperor. But the persecution was, in the opinion of keen observers,
more on her part than his. The Committee of Public Safety had found
her an intriguer, and had called upon her husband to remove her from
Paris; the Directory kept her under watch at Coppet, and ordered her
arrest should she return to France. Her aspirations were boundless,
and Mallet du Pan, royalist agent, said that she shamelessly flaunted
her charms on public occasions. In 1796, aspiring to rule the country
through her friends, she wrote to Bonaparte, who was in Italy, that
the widow Beauharnais was far from possessing the necessary qualities
to supplement those of a genius such as he was, and on his return to
Paris she at once made suspicious advances to win his favor.
Bourrienne declares that he saw one of her letters to Bonaparte, in
which she flatly stated that they two, she herself and her
correspondent, had been created for each other. Mention has elsewhere
been made of the coldness with which Bonaparte treated her when by her
own request she was presented to him in Talleyrand's drawing-room. Not
long afterward, at the reception given by the minister of foreign
affairs to the conqueror of Italy, the indefatigable seeker for
notoriety addressed the latter once again.
The scene is given in the memoirs of Arnault. At first she plied her
suit with fulsome compliment. Bonaparte listened coldly, and the
conversation flagged. In despair she blurted out, "General, what woman
could you love the most?" "My own," was the stinging reply. ("Quelle
femme?" "La mienne.") Woman and wife being the same word in French,
Napoleon's retort was a disdainful pun. "Very well; but which would
esteem you the highest?" she persisted. "The best housekeeper." "Yes,
I understand; but which one would be for you the foremost among
women?" "She who should bear the most children, madame," was the icy
rejoinder, as the harried and disgusted soldier turned on his heel.
Somewhat later she said to Lucien in a melting voice, "I am but a fool
in my desire to please your brother. I am at a loss when I wish to
converse with him. I choose my language and modify my expressions; I
want to make him think of me and occupy himself with me. It ends in my
being and feeling as silly as a goose." When the complacent Lucien
reported the language his brother replied: "I know her thoroughly....
She declared to one who informed me that since I would neither love
her nor permit her to love me, there was nothing left but for her to
hate me, as she could not remain indifferent. What a virago!" In a
letter to Joseph, dated March nineteenth, 1800, the future Emperor
wrote: "M. de Stael is in the depths of misery, and his wife is giving
dinners and balls. If you should continue to see her, would it not be
well to have the woman allow her husband one thousand or one thousand
two hundred francs a month? Have we already reached a time when,
without any protest from decent people, not merely morality but the
most sacred ties which bind children to their parents can be trampled
under foot? Suppose we judge Mme. de Stael as we should a man,--only,
of course, as a man inheriting the fortune of M. de Necker,--one who
had long enjoyed the prerogatives of a distinguished name, and who
should leave his wife in misery while he lived in abundance: could we
associate with a man like that?"
Soon afterward the battle of Marengo was fought. All her passion being
now turned into hate, the scheming woman openly desired Bonaparte's
defeat. Thenceforward she was an avowed and bitter enemy; he would
have called her a conspirator. The ten years of her banishment, as she
herself declared, were occupied in wandering from court to court in
England, Russia, Prussia, and Sweden, engaged in the task of
undermining the Emperor's name and fame, and in fomenting the
coalitions which eventually ruined him. As Bonaparte became an
ultra-imperialist she became an ultra-liberal. Her book on Germany,
published in 1810, was a laudation, in the main just and fair, of a
regenerated land; but it held up to France as a model the achievements
of the country which was now her bitterest foe. The censors gave it a
fictitious renown by ordering its complete suppression.
When, in November, 1810, the decennial prizes, instituted as a spur to
literature and science, were distributed, the judges could find
nothing in science later than 1803 worthy of their favor; but the
prize-winners, old as they were, were all men of real distinction. The
names of the literary men who were crowned are now known only to the
student of history. Napoleon demanded why the name of Chateaubriand
had been omitted from the list, as it was. He may have remembered, as
one of his detractors suggests, that in that writer's great book the
Roman doctrine of obedience to constituted authority was attractively
presented; or else, and more probably, he may have wished his list of
authors to be more brilliant. The Emperor may have instituted those
prizes, as his apologists declared he himself said that he did, to
keep active minds from occupying themselves with politics; but the
exhibition of how the Empire had crushed out originality and fecundity
in the French brain must have appalled him, whatever were his
thoughts.
During the winter of 1810-11 Napoleon's private life was virtually
devoted to beneficence. In addition to the favors granted to Carnot,
he lavished money on other objects, some not so worthy. Canova, who
had been called from Rome to make a portrait-statue of the Empress,
obtained a substantial grant for the learned societies of that city.
Chenier, like Carnot, had been a pronounced adversary of the Empire.
He now sought employment under it, and was made inspector-general of
the university, an office which he did not live long to enjoy. All the
old favorites were remembered in a general distribution of good
things. Talleyrand having just lost an immense sum by the failure of a
trusted bank, the Emperor came to his relief by purchasing one of his
minister's most splendid palaces for more than two million francs. The
court resided sometimes at St. Cloud, sometimes at Rambouillet,
sometimes at the Trianon, but for the most part at Fontainebleau,
where the ceremonious life, to which all concerned were now well
accustomed, was marked by none of the old awkwardness and friction,
but ran as brilliantly as lavish expenditure could make it.
The pregnancy of the Empress was celebrated with great festivities,
during which Napoleon performed one of his most applauded acts--the
endowment of a vast maternity hospital. The Empress was brought into
great prominence as the president of a society consisting of a
thousand noble ladies under whose patronage the charity was placed.
The unconcealed and ecstatic delight of the prospective father found
vent in delicate and tender attention to the mother of his child, and
until her deliverance he was a gentle, devoted, and considerate
husband. His whole nature seemed transformed. When in the early
morning of March twentieth, 1811, word was brought that the Empress
was in labor, and that a false presentation made it of instant
necessity to choose between the life of the mother and that of the
child, the feelings of the Emperor can better be imagined than
described.
If the expected heir should die his dynasty would be jeopardized, his
enemies would once more be making appointments over his grave, the
hopes of a lifetime might be shattered. But there was not a moment's
wavering. "Think only of the mother," he cried. The fears of the
attending physician were vain, after all, and the man-child, coming
without a cry into the world and lying breathless for seven minutes as
if hesitating to accept or decline his destiny, finally gave a wail as
at last he caught the breath of life. Napoleon turned, caught up his
treasure, and pressed it to his bosom. A hundred guns announced the
birth, and the city burst into jubilations, which were reechoed
throughout Europe from Dantzic to Cadiz. Festival succeeded festival,
and for an interval men believed that the temple of Janus would be
again closed. No boy ever came on the earthly stage amid such
splendors, or seemed destined to honors such as appeared to await this
one. The devotion of the father was passionate and unwavering. It
lasted even after he had been deserted and betrayed by the mother,
after the child had been estranged and turned into an Austrian prince.