THE THRESHOLD OF MONARCHY[24]
[Footnote 24: Personal details are abundant in Antommarchi,
Montholon, Las Cases and Gourgaud; likewise in the memoirs of
the brothers Joseph and Lucien, of the ladies Junot, de
Remusat, de Genlis, and Avrillon, of Barante, Barras,
Bourrienne, Chaptal, Chateaubriand, Constant, de Gerardin,
Mallet du Pan, Meneval, Thiebault, and Rapp; in Lord
Holland's recollections and in the following books: Aubenas:
Vie de Josephine; Ducrest: Memoires sur Josephine; Bouilly:
Mes recapitulations; Lamartine: Histoire de la Restauration;
Lacretelle: Histoire du Consulat; Begin: Histoire de
Napoleon, and Stenger: La Societe Francaise pendant le
Consulat.]
Bonaparte at Maturity -- Ability and Opportunity -- Personal
Appearance -- Mind and Manners -- Personal Habits -- The Man of
France -- The Consular Court -- The First Consul's Cynicism --
The Feud between Bonapartes and Beauharnais -- Disuse of the
Republican Calendar -- The "Genius of Christianity."
Bonaparte was now thirty-four. Thus far he had been not alone the tool
of fate nor yet entirely the architect of his own fortunes; he had
been both. In Corsica his immature powers had been thwarted by
conditions beyond his control. During the Revolution he had caught at
every straw which would spare his life and give him a living. Until
his marriage he was a soldier of fortune, and fortune made it
difficult, either by professional excellence or political scheming, to
grasp any of her favors. Accordingly he went without them, suffering,
erring, dreaming, philosophizing, observing, and gathering the
experience which made him mature at the age when most men are still
boys. The observer can descry no revolution in his character when
opportunities began to open. There are the same unscrupulous
enterprise, the same determination to seize the chances of the hour,
the same ability to make the most of circumstances; but the grist is
now wheat and the resultant output is flour.
Every success is made introductory to another effort, and his scheming
shows the same overweening self-confidence as that of his boyhood.
Only now his plans unfold, not in the chill blasts of habitual
failure, but in the mild breezes of prospering influences. Many
historians proclaim the existence of a great life-scheme, declaring
that with satanic powers the boy had prearranged every detail of his
manhood. Of this there is not the slightest proof. All that is clear
is the continued use, by a great mind tempered in the fires of
experience, of ever greater opportunities as they arose. Like all men
of commanding ability, Bonaparte belonged, not to one age, but to all
ages. His elemental nature made the time and place and conditions in
which he actually lived a means to his end, exactly as another century
and another environment would have been. Whatever he might have been
elsewhere or in another age, he was the personification of France as
she was in his time, when he arrived by her desire and connivance at
the height of his power.
[Sidenote: 1803]
"Calm on a fiery steed"; thus he desired that the great painter of the
time, David, should portray him for posterity. Thus he firmly decided
both to appear and to be. But the trustworthy portraits of the time,
varying strangely, according to the artist and the mood of the sitter,
leave in the composite a quite different impression, expressed by
Lamartine as that of a "restless flame." His massive brow jutting over
piercing blue eyes, his fine-cut nose, his thin curved lips, his
strong short chin, all crowned by scant lank chestnut hair and firmly
set on a sturdy neck, gave an impression of manly strength; so, too,
did his long bust. But his rather muddy complexion, his short stature,
his fine and exquisitely modeled hands and feet, the former dazzling
in their clear white skin, the easy comfort of supple hat, loose
garments, and wrinkled footwear, were evidence of a nervous
temperament, impatient of physical discipline. His voice was
ordinarily soft and caressing, but his address was cold and haughty,
especially to strangers; when roused, however, his speech was brief,
sharp, incisive. His gestures were inelegant and his carriage uneasy;
his French was incorrect, and the expression of his face had little or
no connection with his language. His smiles were forced, but his
laughter was hearty. "Smite brass with a glove," he said, "and it is
mute, but strike it with a hammer and you get its ring." So he was
almost rude in addressing persons of importance, but he was neither
affected nor arrogant. It is the universal testimony of those who saw
him that his presence was grave and noble, even majestic. De Stael
declared that "more and less than human, comparison was impossible."
His imagination was considered by his poet contemporaries to be
prodigious: his word memory was poor, but he recalled figures with
accuracy, in numbers and details that were bewildering; and he
mastered the reports of finance and statistics in such perfection as
to stun his agents and ministers. He had an intimate acquaintance with
the persons, lives, and family archives of his officers, and as he
paced with his hands behind his back, his head on one side, his lips
mechanically working from side to side, he could open any pigeonhole
of his memory and dictate facts, figures, orders, suggestions for
hours. Enemies like Remusat and Talleyrand thought him ill-bred, but
they admitted that his judgment was infallible, and his capacity for
work beyond compare; that, at least, of four men in one. He was an
indefatigable reader, especially in the fields of law, philosophy,
administration, and war; and in conversation with great specialists he
could draw from their stores by apt question the exact explication of
difficult points in such a skilful way as to infatuate and fascinate
the great men whose society he sought.
Time was his most precious commodity, and for every stage and state of
life he had a routine from which he deviated most unwillingly. In
these years his days were spent in the careful husbanding of every
hour. He rose at seven, summoned his secretaries, and saw both letters
and papers opened before his eyes. He read all the former, and heard
full reports of the latter, the periodicals, and journals, English and
German, as well as French. Meantime he was thoroughly rubbed from head
to foot with a silk brush, sprayed with perfumed alcohol, and dried
with a sponge. This was varied by frequent baths, for cleanliness, not
for invigoration. He then shaved himself before a glass held in
position by his body-servant, the Mameluke Rustan. He then slipped
quickly into his clothes, all made of the finest, softest materials
procurable; his ordinary uniform being the green coat of his chasseurs
with a colonel's epaulettes, white nankin breeches, and varnished
boots with spurs. Having taken his handkerchief and snuff-box from an
attendant, he passed through the door into his office and worked until
ten, when a plain breakfast, some simple dish with a single glass of
wine, was set before him on a little mahogany table. Having eaten, he
took an easy posture on the sofa, spending a short time in reflection,
often in light sleep; then rousing himself swiftly, he resumed his
dictation, pacing the floor with knitted brow. The late afternoon was
devoted to outdoors and the reception of visitors, his dinner hour was
seven, the evening was given to relaxation, and at ten he was asleep.
When affairs were urgent, as they very often were, he rose again at
midnight, took some light refreshment, chocolate or ices, and wrapped
in a gown resumed his work with secretaries at hand for the purpose.
His labors terminated, he retired once more and fell at once into a
sound sleep. When overwhelmed with anxiety he withdrew from the
Tuileries to the quiet of Malmaison.
Visionaries might say in vain and beautiful phrase, as they did then
and do now, that, having harvested his laurels and exhausted the
glories of conquest, he should turn to ameliorate the race, to guide a
great nation with the easy reins of popular law in the brilliant paths
illuminated by the light of the century. The ideal nation referred to
did not exist. It was because the despotism of monarchy and the
madness of revolution had shown the utter absence of self-control in
the nation--because the French as a whole were avid not of virtue but
of pleasure, not of self-denial but of luxury, not of stern morality
but of glory--because Bonaparte was a man after their own heart, that
he had some justification in his reply to a demand for liberty of the
press: "In a moment," said he, "I should have thirty royalist journals
and as many Jacobin ones, and I should have to govern with a
minority." Many an earnest, liberty-loving French statesman of to-day
has had cause in the bitterness of his heart to recall the language.
As the ministries in France topple, and a dozen legislative factions,
having each its journal, combine for no other purpose than the sport
of overturning the government, it is, alas! too often a minority which
neither governs nor rules, but guides the public career by a (p.~255)
kind of sufferance. This occurs because control of the government,
even for a short time, means the autocratic control of power,
patronage, and honor, as it was arranged by Bonaparte for his own
purposes.
There is no doubt that the First Consul realized what he had done and
whither he was going. The conspiracies had seriously affected his
nerves; more and more he withdrew from the society of all but a few
confidants, and surrounded himself with a more rigid etiquette. Mme.
Bonaparte gathered to the Tuileries ever larger numbers of the
fortune-hunting nobility, who hoped that Bonaparte's elevation would
yet prove a stepping-stone to restore the Bourbons. These elegant
persons laughed in their sleeves at what they heard and saw. The dress
and state of the monarchy were restored, but neither the chief
magistrate himself, nor the late republicans who had made good their
position at court, had the manners or the morals of those for whom the
social institutions of royalty had been developed. The returning
nobles thought it very funny that the great man liked seclusion, and
found what amusement he took in ghost-stories, in the sighing of the
wind, in brusque sallies of coarse wit, or in the rude familiarities
of bluff intimacy with plain people; they considered it very absurd
that his vices were commonplace and perhaps even worse; they thought
it laughable that the newcomers slipped on the polished floors, and it
seemed most entertaining that the gentlewomen of the old regime who,
like Mme. de Remusat, had accepted permanent positions as ladies of
the palace, were often subjected to treatment and put into positions
not foreseen in the training they had received from courtly tutors.
But, for all this, it was not merry at the Tuileries. The chief grew
timid and dark before his own achievements, as he sought to master
difficulties which ambition does not foresee, but with which it must
reckon. No one liked less than Bonaparte to ride abroad surrounded by
guards, or to muse in green alleys where, as at Malmaison, every tree
was at times the post of a patrol. Yet even he could not alter the
necessity, and the system of espionage was extended about him like a
cage for his protection. As to friends, they grew fewer and fewer; for
one of the First Consul's maxims was the cynical aphorism of
Machiavelli, that friends must always be treated as if one day they
might be enemies. Even the notion of duty, not to speak of its
practice, was foreign to him; generosity, honesty, and sincerity were
utopian conceptions of which his world and his experience had never
known. The attractive visions and ideals of virtue which mingled with
the speculations of Rousseau or Voltaire had become, like the mirage
of the desert, empty illusions that heighten the barrenness of
self-interest and ambition beneath them. Human greed, passion,
vanity--such, Bonaparte declared, are the motive forces by which kings
rule; the justice of governors was for him the safeguarding of
comfort, of material prosperity, and of the superstitions which under
the name of religion create a moral power necessary to the public
order.
In the circle immediately surrounding Bonaparte there was much
quarreling and jealousy. Josephine having been barren since her second
marriage, would the succession go to her children or to her husband's
relatives? This was becoming a serious question. Joseph Bonaparte had
kept the new order in touch with the republican idea by his skilful
diplomacy both in society and in foreign negotiation. He was disposed
to yield to his arbitrary brother in any extremity, and his beautiful
wife was a tower of strength to the family interest. The vigorous and
able Lucien had risen to the height of his chances, and, having
acquired a handsome fortune while occupying the post of French
minister to Madrid, began to assert his old democratic independence.
He was now a widower, and refusing to marry the queen regent of
Etruria, espoused a wife from among the people, and this step
eventually cost him the penalty of exile. Josephine was successful in
making a match between her daughter Hortense and her husband's third
brother, Louis; but although at a later time the Emperor contemplated
bequeathing his power to their son, for the present their quarrels,
instead of appeasing, intensified the Bonaparte-Beauharnais feud. It
was sometimes said in loud whispers that the only solution of the
impending difficulties was the divorce of the First Consul from his
wife; but the question was not yet seriously discussed. The consular
pair had never been married by ecclesiastical form, and many have
since suggested that it was a discontented husband who had spoken in
the manifest partiality for easy divorce which Bonaparte displayed in
discussing the civil code. Jerome had been among the officers
blockaded in the West Indies by the English fleet. Having escaped to
the United States, he became desperately enamored of Elizabeth
Patterson, a beautiful woman of Baltimore, and in December, 1803,
married her. The pre-nuptial contract is couched in language which
proves that her father understood the risks he was taking. As might
have been and was expected, the First Consul was furious, refusing to
recognize the marriage or the child born of it, and forbidding his
sister-in-law to live in France. In a short time the unworthy object
of his wrath deserted his family, and returned, with few qualms
apparently, to his elder brother's fold and a share in the splendors
of the Empire.
The Bonaparte women were clever intriguers. Madame Mere lived quietly
in her own home, where, to her son's exasperation, she continued to
speak the Corsican dialect and to save money; it is said that she
always distrusted the permanency of her son's elevation. Elisa, now
Mme. Bacciocchi, was a shrewd woman of the world, and with Lucien's
aid formed a literary coterie of which Chateaubriand was the
illumination. Pauline returned from San Domingo to marry Prince
Borghese, and became notorious for her conjugal infidelities.
Caroline, the wife of Murat, chafed under her husband's intellectual
inferiority, but used her position with skill in behalf of her family.
Of all his connections none was more useful to the head of the State
than Fesch, who was easily persuaded to reenter the Church, and not
long after the Concordat became Archbishop of Lyons and cardinal. The
republican calendar still nominally survived, but after the
reconciliation of State and Church the celebration of the ten-day
festival of Decadi, instituted under the republic, fell into disuse,
the Church resumed the observance of Sunday, and among the diligent
attendants at mass on that day was the First Consul. His near
relationship with an ecclesiastical dignitary did not tend to weaken
the bonds which tied his government to the religious sentiment of the
common people.
In the great world outside the Tuileries there was for a moment peace.
Nothing was left of Jacobinism or revolutionary ferment. Old names
were restored to streets and places, just as every one now wore the
garments of the ancient regime, except the impoverished aristocrats,
who in mild protest continued to wear the trousers of the
sansculottes. Even they, however, had got back a small portion of
their properties, and the newly rich saw in the confirmation of
personal government by a consul through a so-called republic the
guarantee that restitution of the rest to its former owners would
never be required of them. Both alike were therefore satisfied with
what was sure. Thus in the same way monarchists and republicans were
equally gratified, the latter with a semblance of democratic
government, the former with a reality which might end in royalty, the
full fruition of their yearnings. In short, public confidence was
restored, and showed itself in a respectable, temperate decency of
living which had been foreign to Paris under the Directory. Everything
appeared as if society were performing its normal functions in
commerce, trade, industry, and religion. Even art and literature
revived as if upon a solid substructure of permanent organic life.
Mme. de Stael had fought gallantly for notoriety and for the attention
of the great, so dear to her woman's heart in spite of all its
philosophy; but Bonaparte never forgave her persistent self-seeking,
nor the insight into his character which she and her friends
displayed, and he discovered that the air of Paris disagreed with her.
Chateaubriand, a noble of high imaginative power and brilliant
literary gifts, after several unsuccessful ventures as a romantic
youth, had finally published in 1797 an "Essay on Revolutions," which
was intended to be a peacemaker in the struggle of ideas, to mediate
between the monarchy and the republic. It was imbued with atheism and
the philosophy of Rousseau. Very soon after its appearance the author
was the subject of a remarkable conversion, and at once began the
composition of his treatise on the "Genius of Christianity," that
exquisitely literary and pious work which established his fame.
Although he had been hitherto unknown to Bonaparte, his book was so
opportune in its far-reaching influence that men could not rid
themselves of the feeling that the writer was sponsor for the
Concordat. Eloquent and poetic in style, the dissertation is
nevertheless arid in opinion and scanty in argument. Its life was
therefore ephemeral, but its influence while it lasted was supreme; as
a reward for its composition, Chateaubriand was made the French
representative first in Rome, afterward in the republic of Valais.