[Cover Illustration]
NAPOLEON AND HIS COURT
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
A PAWN AMONG KINGS
[Illustration: EQUESTRIAN GROUP OF NAPOLEON AND HIS STAFF AT AUSTERLITZ
(_From a print in Canon Brook-Jackson’s collection, believed to be
the only one in existence._)]
NAPOLEON AND
HIS COURT
BY
C. S. FORESTER
WITH SIXTEEN ILLUSTRATIONS
METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 E S S E X S T R E E T, W.C.
L O N D O N
_First Published in 1924_
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. IN GENERAL....................................... 9
II. THE MAN HIMSELF.................................. 17
III. SOME PALADINS.................................... 25
IV. ONE WIFE......................................... 35
V. THE DIVORCE...................................... 42
VI. ANOTHER WIFE..................................... 47
VII. SOME COURT DETAILS............................... 55
VIII. THE GREATEST PALADIN............................. 67
IX. MORE PALADINS.................................... 80
X. BROTHERS......................................... 95
XI. SISTERS.......................................... 114
XII. STARS OF LESSER MAGNITUDE........................ 133
XIII. WOMEN............................................ 151
XIV. LIKES AND DISLIKES............................... 174
XV. WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN............................. 184
XVI. SPOTS IN THE SUN................................. 202
XVII. ST. HELENA....................................... 223
APPENDIX—INCIDENTS AND AUTHORITIES............... 237
INDEX............................................ 245
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
_Page_
EQUESTRIAN GROUP OF NAPOLEON AND HIS STAFF AT
AUSTERLITZ.......................................... front
GENERAL BONAPARTE..................................... 16
PRINCE JOACHIM (MURAT, KING OF THE TWO SICILIES)...... 34
MARIE LOUISE, EMPRESS OF THE FRENCH................... 54
GRAF VON NEIPPERG..................................... 66
EUGÈNE DE BEAUHARNAIS (VICEROY OF ITALY, PRINCE DE
VENISE)............................................. 79
AUGEREAU, DUC DE CASTIGLIONE.......................... 94
JOSEPH NAPOLEON, KING OF NAPLES....................... 113
CAROLINE MURAT........................................ 132
LETIZIA BONAPARTE (MADAME MÈRE)....................... 151
ELISE BACIOCCHI....................................... 151
THE KING OF ROME...................................... 173
PAULINE BORGHESE...................................... 183
DAVOUT (PRINCE D’ECKMÜHL AND DUC D’AUERSTÄDT)......... 201
MASSENA (PRINCE D’ESSLING AND DUC DE RIVOLI).......... 222
LOUIS NAPOLEON, KING OF HOLLAND....................... 236
NOTE.—_The illustrations are reproduced from prints in the
collection of Canon Brook-Jackson, by kind permission._
Napoleon and His Court
CHAPTER I
IN GENERAL
THERE was a time when France extended to the Baltic, the Ebro and the
Tiber; when the term “Frenchmen” included Frenchmen, Spaniards,
Italians, Belgians, Dutch, Germans and even a few stray Danes, Poles and
Letts; when Rome was the second city of France, and Amsterdam the third;
when the Emperor of the French was also King of Italy and Mediator of
Switzerland; when one of his brothers was King of Spain, another, King
of Westphalia, and one of his generals King of Naples; when all Germany
was ruled by his vassals; when Poland was a French province in all but
name; when Austria was the French Emperor’s subservient ally; and when
one of his less successful generals had just been appointed ruler of
Sweden.
Never, since the days of the Roman Empire, had one man held so much
power, and never in all history has so much power been as rapidly
acquired or as rapidly lost. In ten years Napoleon rose from the
obscurity of a disgraced artillery officer to the dignity of the most
powerful ruler in the world; in ten more he was a despised fugitive
flying for his life from his enemies.
It is difficult for us nowadays to visualize such a state of affairs. To
the people of that time life must have appeared like a wild nightmare,
as impossibly logical as a lunatic’s dream. There seems to have been no
doubt anywhere that the frantic hypertrophy could not last, and yet when
the end was clearly at hand hardly a soul perceived its approach.
There was only one nation of Europe which escaped the mesmerism of the
man in the grey coat, and that was the British. It was only in Britain
that they did not speak of him with bated breath as “the Emperor,” and
remained undaunted by his monstrous power and ruthless energy. To the
English he was not His Imperial and Royal Majesty, Napoleon, Emperor of
the French, King of Italy, Protector of the Confederation of the Rhine,
and Mediator of the Helvetian Republic. No, the English thought of him
merely as Boney, a fantastic figment of the imagination of the other
peoples of the world, who were of course a queer lot with unaccountable
fears and superstitions.
But this Boney, this Corsican Ogre, incredible though he was, loomed
appallingly large upon the horizon. There were beacons all round the
coast in case he landed; his privateers were the scourge of shipping;
prices were at famine point and business was parlous on account of his
activities; the militia was embodied and there was a ceaseless drain of
recruits into the army; every village mourned the loss of a son who had
enlisted and whose life had been thrown away in some harebrained
expedition into ill-defined foreign parts. And yet on the other hand
there were considerations which gave an aspect of unreality to the whole
menace. England was constantly victorious at sea, and though Nelson
might be mourned the glory of Trafalgar and the Nile cast the
possibility of invasion into insignificance. The English people were
confident that on land as well they would beat the French at every
encounter. Not for nothing were Agincourt and Minden blazoned on English
history, and Alexandria and Maida supplied whatever confirmation might
be desired. Such disasters as that at Buenos Ayres were forgotten;
confidence ran high. When Wellington gained a victory by which all
Portugal was cleared of the French at one blow the public annoyance that
even greater results had not been achieved, that the whole French army
had not been captured, was extreme. There were few English people who
did not think that, should Napoleon by some freak of fortune land in
England, the veterans of Austerlitz and the almost legendary Imperial
Guard would be routed by the militia and the hasty levies of the
countryside. There was nothing which could drive the realities of war
hard home into the public mind. If prices were high, then as
compensation colonies fell into our hands, employment was fairly good,
and the business of manufacturing arms and equipment was simply booming.
Besides, intercourse with the Continent was not entirely cut off for the
smugglers worked busily and successfully, and French lace and French
fashions and French brandy circulated freely. It was hard for the
average Englishman to realize that the Corsican Ogre was not merely an
ogre, especially as the fantastic cartoons of the period and the wild
legends which were current were more fitted to grace a child’s
fairy-tale than to depict the most formidable enemy England had yet
encountered.
On the mainland of Europe the picture was utterly reversed. The reality
of war was only too obvious. The Emperor was no mere cartoonist’s figure
drawn with disgusting detail. They had seen him; he had ridden into
their capitals on his white horse in the midst of the army which had
shattered their proud battalions over and over again. His power was
terrible and his vengeance was swift. In half the countries of Europe a
chance word might result in the careless speaker being flung next day
into an unknown dungeon. His armies swarmed everywhere, and wherever
they went they left a trail of desolation behind them. The peasants were
starved and the landowners were ruined, to pay the enormous taxes which
the indemnities he imposed demanded. The mass of the people, who had
once hailed the great conqueror because his arrival meant their delivery
from feudalism, now found themselves crushed under a despotism ten times
more exacting. The Emperor was very real to them. Many of them now
served new rulers who had been imposed upon them by him, and him alone.
Wherever he appeared he was attended by a train of subject kings to whom
his wish was law. At his word an Italian might find himself a Frenchman,
or an Austrian a Bavarian. And this was no mere distinction without a
difference. Once upon a time the peasant classes cared little about the
politics of their rulers, or even about which ruler they served. The
fate of a professional army was a royal, not a national concern. But now
every able-bodied man found himself in the ranks. Badeners fought
Portuguese on the question as to whether a Frenchman should rule Spain,
and a hundred thousand Germans perished in the northern snows because
the Emperor of the French wished to exclude English goods from Russian
ports. The imposition was monstrous, and in consequence the question of
nationality became of supreme importance. If a country made war upon
Napoleon every citizen of that country now realized that defeat meant
the continuance of a slavery as exasperating as it was degrading. The
fact that their eventual victory left them very little freer does not
enter into this argument. It is sufficient to say that Napoleon was
regarded on the Continent with an interest agonizing in its intensity,
and that this interest was nourished in a much more substantial fashion
than prevailed in England.
It has been maintained and has infected all nationalities alike. The
ability of the French nation to write telling memoirs is nowhere better
displayed than in the period of the Empire. A large amount of very
fascinating material was produced, by which the history of the period,
which had previously been grossly distorted, was corrected and balanced.
Details were worked out with an elaboration all too rare. The events in
themselves were so exceedingly interesting, and the books about them
were so well written, that it can hardly be considered surprising that
more and more attention was turned towards the Empire. In addition, the
fascinating personality of the Emperor concentrated and specialized the
attention. More important than all, since events of huge importance
turned merely upon his own whims and predilections, it was necessary to
analyse and to examine the nature of the man who had this vast
responsibility. It has become fashionable to inquire into every detail
of his life, and there has grown up an enormous literature about him.
Most of these books contain a fair amount of truth, but they nearly all
contain a high proportion of lies. Napoleon himself was a good liar, but
by now he is much more lied about than lying.
That coffee legend, for instance. Nine books on Napoleon out of ten say
(with no more regard for physiology than for fact) that he was
accustomed to drinking ten, twenty, even thirty cups of coffee a day.
Napoleon drinking coffee is as familiar a figure to us as Sherlock
Holmes injecting morphine, but both figures are equally apocryphal. The
best authorities, people who really knew, are unanimous in saying that
he never drank more than three cups a day. De Bausset, who was a Prefect
of the Palace, and in charge of such arrangements, distinctly says he
took only two, and goes out of his way to deny the rumours to the
contrary which were already circulating. This is but one example out of
many; perhaps we shall meet with others later on.
It is necessary first to sketch Napoleon’s career in brief, for the sake
of later reference. The merest outline will suffice.
Napoleon began his military life under the old régime as an officer in
the artillery; despite an inauspicious start, he attracted attention by
his conduct at the siege of Toulon. Later he was nearly involved in the
fall of Robespierre, but, extricating himself, he served with credit in
the Riviera campaign of 1794. Next, he earned all the gratitude of which
Barras was capable by crushing the revolt of the Sections against the
Directory in 1795. By some means (it is certain that Josephine his wife
had something to do with it) he obtained the command of the army of
Italy; in 1796 and 1797 he crushed the Austrians and Piedmontese,
conquered Piedmont and Lombardy, and made himself a name as the greatest
living general. There followed the expedition to Egypt, where his
successes (extolled as only he knew how) stood out in sharp contrast to
the failures of the other French armies in Italy and Germany. Returning
at the psychological moment, he seized the supreme power, and made
himself First Consul. Masséna had already almost saved France by his
victory at Zürich and his defence of Genoa, and Napoleon continued the
work by a spectacular passage of the Alps and a perilously narrow
victory at Marengo. Moreau settled the business by the battle of
Hohenlinden. During the interval of peace which followed, Napoleon
strengthened himself in every possible way. He codified the legal
system, built up the Grand Army which later astonished the world,
disposed of Moreau and various other possible rivals, assured the French
people of his political wholeheartedness by shooting the Duc d’Enghien
and by sending republicans wholesale to Cayenne; and finally grasped as
much as possible of the shadow as well as the substance of royalty by
proclaiming himself Emperor and receiving the Papal blessing at his
coronation. But already he was at war again with England, and the
following year (1805) Russia and Austria declared against him. He hurled
the Grand Army across Europe with a sure aim. Mack surrendered at Ulm;
out of seventy thousand men only a few escaped. At Austerlitz the
Russian army was smitten into fragments. Austria submitted, and Napoleon
triumphantly tore Tyrol and Venetia from her, gave crowns to his vassal
rulers of Bavaria and Würtemberg, and proclaimed himself overlord of
Germany as Protector of the Confederation of the Rhine. His brother
Louis he made King of Holland; his brother Joseph King of Naples; his
brother-in-law Murat Grand Duke of Berg. Prussia demurred, and was
crushed almost out of existence at Jena. Russia, tardily moving to her
support, was, after a hard fight at Eylau, beaten at Friedland (1807).
At Tilsit the Emperors of the French and of Russia settled the fate of
Continental Europe, and Jerome, the youngest brother of Napoleon, was
given a new kingdom, Westphalia.
So far, nothing but glory and progress; but from now on, nothing but
false steps and failure. First, the overrunning of Spain and the
proclamation of Joseph as King of Spain. This brought Napoleon into
contact with the enmity of a people instead of that merely of a king. It
gave England a chance of effective military intervention, and it shook
the world’s belief in the invulnerability of the Colossus by the defeats
of Vimiero and Baylen. Austria made another effort for freedom in 1809,
to submit tamely, after one victory and two defeats, when the game was
by no means entirely lost. Hence followed further annexations and
maltreatment. Then came blunder after blunder, while the Empire sagged
through its sheer dead weight. The divorce of Josephine lost him the
sympathy of the fervent Catholics and of the sentimentalists. The
marriage with Marie Louise lost him the support of the republicans and
of Russia. He quarrelled with his brother Louis, drove him from the
country and annexed Holland. He tried to direct the Spanish war from
Paris, with bad results. Annexation followed annexation in his attempt
to shut the coasts to English trade. The Empire was gorged and
surfeited, but Napoleon was inevitably forced to further action. Having
irritated each other past bearing, he and Alexander of Russia drifted
into war, and the snows of Russia swallowed up what few fragments of the
old Grand Army had been spared from the Spanish and Danube campaigns. It
was like a blow delivered by a dazed boxer—powerful, but ill-directed
and easily avoided, so that the striker overbalances by his own
momentum. Napoleon struggled once more to his feet. In 1813 he summoned
to the eagles every Frenchman capable of bearing arms. But one by one
his friends turned against him. Prussia, Austria, Saxony, Bavaria, each
in turn joined the ranks of his enemies. His victories of Lützen,
Bautzen and Dresden were of no avail. At Leipzig his army was shattered;
he fought on desperately for a few more months, but at last he had to
submit and abdicate.
A further effort after his escape from Elba ended with the disaster of
Waterloo, and merely led to the last tragedy of St. Helena.
So much for the general. From this we can turn with relief to the
particular; and from the particular, with perhaps even more relief, to
the merely trivial.
[Illustration: GENERAL BONAPARTE]