Napoleon (O'Connor 1896)/Chapter 7
CHAPTER VII.
JOSEPHINE.[1]
The memoirs of Barras leave so bad a taste in the mouth that it is necessary to seek some violent relief; and my next essays will be taken from the writings of those whose admiration for him was unstinted.
With the first of the volumes which supply the material for this portion of the volume, I shall have to deal briefly. The Count de Ségur is very interesting, especially to military readers, but he goes over ground which I have already traversed.
The volume is mainly interesting as an antidote to the "Memoirs of Madame de Rémusat," whose pictures of Napoleon's personality and Court supplied Taine with the chief material for his indictment.
The reader will not have forgotten the truly odious picture of Napoleon's Court which I quoted from Taine. I put in contrast with this the picture which is drawn by M. de Ségur. Writing of 1802, M. de Ségur exclaims: "No epoch was more glorious for Paris. What a happy and glorious time! The whole year has left on my memory the impression of a realisation of the most brilliant Utopias, a spectacle of the finest galas, and that of a grand society restored to all good things by the presiding genius."
And then he goes on to give this interesting and agreeable picture of Napoleon at home:
"The First Consul in his more personal surroundings had initiated many ingenious amusements, and given the signal for an almost universal joy.
"True, his household was divided into two parties, but kept in check by the firmness of their chief, they remained in the shade. These were, on one hand, the Beauharnais; on the other, Napoleon's own family. The marriage of Louis Bonaparte with Hortense de Beauharnais on July 17th, 1802, appeared to have put an end to these differences, so that peace seemed to pervade everything, a domestic peace which was not one whit more durable than the other peaces of this epoch. But at first this alliance, and several other marriages amongst the younger members of Napoleon's family, increased the general cheerful disposition of mind by the addition of their honeymoon happiness. The well-known attractions and wit of the sisters of the First Consul, the many graces of Madame Bonaparte and her daughter, and the remarkable beauty of the young brides who had just been admitted into this fascinating circle, above all the presence of a real hero, gave an indefinable charm and lustre to this new. Court, as yet unfettered by etiquette, or any other tie than the former traditions of good society.
"Our morning amusements at Malmaison consisted of country-house diversions in which Napoleon used to take part, and in the evening of various games, and of conversations, sometimes light and sparkling, sometimes profound and serious, of which I still find records in my notebook. The Revolution, philosophy, above all, the East, were the favourite topics of the First Consul. How often, as night drew on, even the most youthful amongst these young women, losing all count of time, would fancy they could see what he was describing, under the charm of his admirable narratives, so vividly coloured by a flow of bold and novel illustration, and his piquant and unexpected imagery."
The reader will also remember the passage in which Taine describes the infectious weariness of Napoleon at the play. Ségur has a different story to tell:
"The other amusements of his household consisted in private theatricals, in which his adopted children and ourselves took part. He sometimes would encourage us by looking on at our rehearsals, which were superintended by the celebrated actors, Michaud, Mole, and Fleury. The performances took place at Malmaison before a select party. They would be followed by concerts, of Italian songs principally, and often by little dances where there was no crowding or confusion, consisting, as they did, of three or four quadrille sets with plenty of space between each. He would himself dance gaily with us, and would ask for old-fashioned tunes, recalling his own youth. These delightful evenings used to end about midnight."
There is an anecdote which presents Napoleon in a pleasant light:
"One evening, at St. Cloud, when he was describing the desert, Egypt, and the defeat of the Mamelukes, seeing me hanging on his words, he stopped short, and taking up from the cardtable, which he had just left, a silver marker a medal representing the combat of the Pyramids he said to me, 'You were not there in those days, young man.' 'Alas, no,' I answered. 'Well,' said he, 'take this and keep it as a remembrance.' I need hardly say that I religiously did so, the proof of which will be found by my children after me."
And, finally, here is Segur's summary of Napoleon's demeanour to his dependents, illustrated by quite a pretty story:
"Such was his usual amenity, concerning which I remember that one day when our outbursts of laughter in the drawing-room were interrupting his work in the adjoining study, he just opened the door to complain that we were hindering him, with a gentle request that we should be a little less noisy."
There are many passages in Ségur which show the Marshals of Napoleon in a far from favourable light Their ambition, their selfishness, their murderous jealousy of each other, shock and appal―especially when one sees thousands of the lives of brave men sacrificed to passions so ignoble. These pictures also enable one to take a different view of Napoleon's treatment of these men than that to which Taine has given such fierce expression. It will be remembered that Taine bitterly complains that Napoleon appealed only to the basest elements in these men; that he exploited their selfishness, their ambition, their vices, and their weaknesses. After one has read Ségur and some other authorities, one is tempted to come to the conclusion that if Napoleon acted on these motives in his subordinates, it was because these motives were the only ones to which he could appeal.
I pass from this point and from Ségur to another and an even more fervid eulogist of the great Emperor.
M. Albert Lévy devotes two bulky volumes to the record of the smallest incidents of Napoleon's life, with extracts from not scores but hundreds of memoirs in which he forms the central figure; and this work—evidently the result of years of patient labour—is devoted to proving that of all men who have lived Napoleon was the most generous, the most unselfish, and the most patriotic.
I cannot accept this estimate; but in the pages of M. Lévy's intensely interesting volumes there is the satisfaction of feeling that Napoleon is restored to something of human shape. He is there neither god, nor demon, nor angel—though M. Lévy would have him angelic—but a human being, with plenty of human weaknesses, affections, and even considerateness, athwart all his iron strength, callousness, and voracious ambition.
I.
EARLY YEARS.
Napoleon's early years were, as we already know, full of all the straits and miseries of genteel poverty. His father, as everybody knows, was an easy-going, thriftless, helpless creature, who died at an early age of cancer in the stomach—the only heritage, as Taine sardonically remarks, which he left to his great son. It was from his mother that Napoleon inherited most of his qualities. She came of a commercial family, partly Swiss in origin, and at an age "when most girls are thinking of marriage she was studying order, economy, and careful management." It was from her that Napoleon inherited what M. Lévy calls "those instincts of honesty, of excessive carefulness in all matters in which money plays a part, which is one of the most characteristic features of Napoleon."
The education of the children was the first point to be determined. In those days anybody with influence with the clergy or at the Court could get a free education, and young Napoleon, having the first, was enabled in this way to get into the Royal College at Brienne, where boys were trained for the Navy. He had first, however, to spend some time at Autun to learn French—so thoroughly Italian was the man who became afterwards the most absolute ruler of Frenchmen the world has seen. In three months at Autun Napoleon had "learned sufficient French to enable him to converse easily and to write small essays and translations." At Brienne there were many things to make him unhappy: his foreign birth, his foreign accent, doubtless his foreign mistakes; but, above all things, his poverty. Even at school the inequalities of life make themselves bitterly felt; and Napoleon, with all his pride, love of command, and sensitiveness to slights, must have suffered more than most boys.
"At Brienne," he writes afterwards himself, "I was the poorest of all my schoolfellows. They always had money in their pockets, I never. I was proud, and was most careful that nobody should perceive this . . . . I could neither laugh nor amuse myself like the others." Bonaparte the schoolboy was out of touch with his comrades, and he was not popular.
It will be seen from this passage that Napoleon was made early acquainted with those traits of human nature which gave him his permanently and instinctively low opinion of it, and which helped to make him regard life as simply a personal struggle, where you destroy or are destroyed. Napoleon was five years and a half in this school; and, curiously enough, though he must really have been unhappy, he saw it afterwards through the gauze of retrospect as being very different. One day, when he was First Consul, and was walking with Bourrienne―the one schoolfellow whom he loved in Brienne―in the gardens of Malmaison, the residence of his office, he heard the chiming of bells, which always had a remarkable effect upon him; he stopped, listened delightedly, and said in a broken voice: "That reminds me of my first years at Brienne; I was happy then." M. Levy is able to prove that the tenderness of these recollections showed itself in another way also. Napoleon befriended nearly everybody who was ever connected with the school unless they had treated him badly. Napoleon was one of the worst writers of his time. His script was undecipherable, even to himself; sometimes he found it hard to write his own name; but old Dupré, who was his writing-master, came to him once at St. Cloud and reminded the Emperor―as Napoleon then was―that "for fifteen months he had had the pleasure of giving him lessons in writing at Brienne." Napoleon could not help exclaiming to the poor man, who was quite aghast: "And a fine sort of pupil you had! I congratulate you."
After a few kindly words he dismissed Dupré, who received a few days later a notification of a pension of one thousand two hundred francs (forty-eight pounds).
II.
IN THE ARTILLERY.
Napoleon was unable to get a place in the Navy, for his influence was not sufficiently great; so he besought his family to try and get him into the artillery or engineers. He was sent to the Military School in Paris, and arrived there in 1784―that starting-point of the great events that led the King to the scaffold and himself to an Imperial throne. The descriptions of the period show that he is like most other new-comers to a great city.
He gaped at everything he saw, and stared about him. His appearance was that of a man whom any scoundrel would try to rob after seeing him.
But even at that age―he was then fifteen―he had the instincts of order and activity. There is extant a letter written at that period, in which he very cleverly criticises the luxury and the laxity of the discipline which existed in the Military School. He found that the pupils had a large staff of servants, kept an expensive stud of horses and a number of grooms; and to his realistic and practical mind all this was abomination.
"Would it not be better," he exclaimed, "of course without interrupting their studies, to compel them to buy enough for their own wants, that is to say, without compelling them to do their own cooking, to let them eat soldiers' bread, or something similar, to accustom them to beat and brush their own clothes, and to clean their own boots and shoes?"
In thus writing young Napoleon was describing the things he had to do himself, then and afterwards, for a long time. It was these hardships of his childhood that helped to make him and to, at the same time, mar his nature.
"All these cares spoiled my early years," he himself said in 1811. "They influenced my temper and made me grave before my time."
Unlike some of the boys around him, Napoleon refused to run into debt. A friend of his family, seeing him in low spirits, offered to lend him money so as to be able to make a better show.
Napoleon grew very red and refused, saying: "My mother has already too many expenses, and I have no business to increase them by extravagances which are simply imposed upon me by the stupid folly of my comrades."
At sixteen he passed his examination without any particular distinction. He was forty-second out of fifty-eight pupils who passed. His German master's comment upon him at the time was that "the pupil Bonaparte was nothing but a fool."
On September 1, 1785, he was named Second Lieutenant in the Bombardiers garrisoned at Valence. His new uniform was in proportion to the slenderness of his purpose.
His boots were so inordinately large that his legs, which were very slender, disappeared in them completely. Proud of his new outfit, he went off to seek his friends, the Permons. On seeing him the two children, Cecilia and Laura (the latter was afterwards Duchesse d'Abrantès), could not restrain their laughter, and to his face nicknamed him "Puss in Boots." He did not mind, it appears, for, according to one of these little wits, the lieutenant took them a few days later a toy carriage containing a puss in boots, and Perrault's fairy story.
III.
EARLY POVERTY.
At Valence―part of the journey to which Napoleon had to perform on foot from having spent his money―he had to live a very modest life. It is said that he was "a great talker, embarking, on the smallest provocation, into interminable arguments; "that he developed "those powers of pleasing which he possessed in a remarkable degree; "and applied himself, above all," to pleasing the fair sex, who received him with acclamation." I doubt the correctness of this latter statement. Throughout his entire life we have seen Napoleon was gauche and constrained and dumb before women; his flirtation was of the barrack-room grossness, directness, and simplicity―horseplay rather than play of wit.
He obtained leave of absence after the easy fashion of those times, and visited his home in Corsica. This visit must have left sad impressions, for we can trace from that period the disappearance of even the slight gaiety which was to be found in his life at Valence. When he went into garrison at Auxonne ― his new station ― he began that ferocious system of work which he continued for so many years afterwards. He never went out except to a frugal dinner, and then he had to be summoned, so absorbed was he in his studies. Immediately dinner was over he went back to his room. He lived most humbly. Milk was his chief food. He himself, writing to his mother, said:
"I have no resources here but work; I only dress myself once a week; I sleep but very little since my illness; it is incredible. I go to bed at ten o'clock, and get up at four in the morning. I only eat one meal a day―at three o'clock." But he broke down under the work, and had once again to seek refuge in his Corsican home. He returned to Auxonne after a longer vacation than would have been possible with any but the ill-disciplined troops of France. And now comes a period of Napoleon's life which must always stand out in his history, and cannot permit any impartial person to regard him as a wholly selfish man. He brought back with him his brother Louis, and for some time supported this brother and himself on his wretched pay. That pay amounted to three pounds fifteen shillings a month:
"The two brothers, therefore, had to lodge, clothe, and feed themselves upon three francs five centimes (two shillings and sixpence) a day; and, moreover, Louis's education, which Napoleon had undertaken, had to be provided for."
Even on these restricted means Napoleon was able to live without getting into debt, but he had to do it at the sacrifice of every comfort. It is recorded that he cooked their broth with his own hands, and broth formed the chief meal of the day. Napoleon never forgot the privations of this time, nor the lessons it taught. Louis was afterwards―as we know―King of Holland, but, like every other relative of Napoleon, made but a poor requital to his illustrious relative. In rage at one of these acts of Louis, Napoleon cried out:
"That Louis whom I educated out of my pay as a sub-lieutenant, God knows at the price of what privations! Do you know how I managed it? It was by never setting foot in society or in a cafe; by eating dry bread, and by brushing my clothes myself, so that they should last longer."
An Imperial official once complained to him that he could not live on a salary of forty pounds a month. Said Napoleon:
"I know all about it, sir . . . . When I had the honour to be a sub-lieutenant I breakfasted off dry bread, but I bolted my door on my poverty. In public I did not disgrace my comrades."
One proof of the scrupulousness of his examination of his expenses is to be seen in a tailor's bill, still extant, on which he had obtained a reduction of twopence.
IV.
A YOUTHFUL CYNIC.
The period between Napoleon's earliest military days and his appearance at Toulon belongs to Corsica rather than to France. He spent nearly an entire year on furlough there. He was reprimanded, and at one time seemed likely permanently to lose his position in the regular army. A biographer who does not love him declares that he was guilty during this period of crimes of insubordination and want of discipline enough to have shot him a hundred times over in ordinary times. It is certain that he had to go to Paris to justify himself. Here, again, he had to face the privations and humiliations of extreme poverty. He owed fifteen francs to his wine erchant, and he had to pawn his watch. Bourrienne, his old college chum—afterwards his secretary—thus describes Napoleon at this period.
"Our friendship of childhood and college days," says Bourrienne," was as fresh as ever. I was not very happy; adversity weighed heavily upon him, and he often wanted money. We passed our time like two young men with nothing to do, and with but little money—he had even less than I. Every day gave birth to some new plans; we were always on the look-out for some useful speculation. At one time he wanted to hire with me several houses then being built in the Rue Montholon, intending to make money by sub-letting them."
The two comrades often dined together, Bour-rienne usually paying for the dinner—at least so Bourrienne says, though, as he became infamous for avarice and peculation, the statement must be taken with reserve. It is certain that sometimes poor Napoleon had to dine at a restaurant where a dish cost but a modest threepence.
While the future ruler of France was thus in the depths, France herself was marching through the terrific events that ended in the overthrow of the monarchy. Napoleon was never a democrat, but what little traces of democracy there might have been in him were destroyed by what he then saw. It is known that he saw the march on the Tuileries on June 2Oth. When he saw the ragged and fierce crowd going in the direction of the Palace, "Let us follow these scoundrels," was his comment. And when the poor King put on the red cap he was equally disgusted. "Why did they allow these brutes to come in? They ought to have shot down fifty or sixty of them with cannon, and the rest would have run."
This youthful cynic has already weighed and found wanting the men who are at the head of affairs. "You know those who are at the head," he writes to his brother Joseph, "are the poorest of men. The people are equally contemptible when one comes in contact with them. They are hardly worth all the trouble men take to earn their favour." "You know the history of Ajaccio," he continues; "that of Paris is exactly the same, only that there, perhaps, men are more petted, more spiteful, more censorious." And finally here is his judgment of the French people as a whole―a judgment given, it will be observed, with the detachment and with the calm contempt of a foreigner: "The French people is an old people, without prejudices, without bonds. Every one seeks his own interest, and wishes to rise by means of lying and calumny; men intrigue more contemptibly than ever." And finally, from this period, here is an extract worth giving it is Napoleon's comment on a proclamation to the Corsicans which had been written by his brother Lucien:
"I have read your proclamation; it is worth nothing. It contains too many words and too few ideas. You run after pathos; that is not the way to speak to nations."
Here already we see the final philosophy of Napoleon. His view of human nature is low; self-interest is the one guiding motive―unchecked, uncrossed, unmixed by other and higher impulses; the people, when they attack constituted authorities, are rabble to be shot down, and the one art of government is to rule men through their base passions. After all, the sternest critic of Napoleon is himself; the portrait he draws with his own hand, is very like that of M. Taine. M. Levy―if he wanted to make his hero a saint―should have omitted his hero's own letters.
V.
FLIGHT FROM CORSICA.
Napoleon was restored to his rank, and then he rushed back home again―still filled by that strong sense of family obligation which may be distinctively Corsican―as it is distinctively Irish―and making sacrifices at this period, as throughout his life, for his relatives, which, as I have said before, do not permit us to regard him as wholly selfish. In Corsica he came into collision with Paoli―for Napoleon wished Corsica to remain French―and Paoli retorted by giving orders for the arrest and expulsion of the Bonaparte family; and with their property pillaged and burned behind them, the large and poverty-stricken family fled from their native island to Marseilles. In Marseilles Napoleon's pay was the chief support of the family; this was supplemented by the public relief given to distressed patriots who had suffered for the cause.
I pass rapidly over the episode at Toulon―which first gave Napoleon prominence with the observation that his action was not so highly regarded at the time as at a subsequent date. Bonaparte's name is scarcely mentioned in the bulletins, but he succeeded, in those days of improvised soldiers and quick promotions, in being made a General of Brigade.
Then there is another interval, during a portion of which he is imprisoned, and in some danger, as everybody was in the days of the Terror; and finally he is called to Paris in order to take part in the Vendean war. He is asked, however, to descend from the artillery to the infantry; he declines, and for some months he is in Paris―without employment, without money, without much hope. All kinds of projects hovered before his mind. There was an idea of his being sent to Turkey to put the troops of the Grand Sultan in order; he tried to make money as an exporter of books; he got his dinner either at the expense of his friends in arms, or at the house of some Corsicans; he was wretched bodily and mentally; and his wretchedness appeared in his exterior and in his manners.
"He was to be met wandering about the streets of Paris in an awkward and ungainly manner, with a shabby round hat thrust down over his eyes and with his curls (known at that time as oreilles de chien) badly powdered, badly combed, and falling over the collar of the iron-gray coat which has since become so celebrated; his hands, long, thin, and black, without gloves, because, he said, they were an unnecessary expense; wearing ill-made and ill-cleaned boots." "But his glance and his smile were always admirable, and helped to enliven an appearance always sickly, resulting partly from the yellowness of his complexion, which deepened the shadows projected by his gaunt, angular, and pointed features."
And mentally he was in the same condition as externally. Bourrienne and his wife meet him in the Palais Royal; together they go to the theatre. "The audience was convulsed with laughter; Bonaparte and I was much struck by it preserved an icy silence."
"Another time he disappeared from us without saying a word, and when we thought he must have left the theatre, we espied him seated in a box on the second or third tier, all alone, looking as though he wished to sulk."
The fact, of course, is that Napoleon was consumed by all that volcanic activity which was to burst forth very soon in such lava tide; and neither then nor at any other time has he the power of idling gracefully. Either he is in fierce activity or he mopes and despairs.
VI.
A FIRST CHANCE.
And then all these periods of gloomy and despondent expectation are put an end to, after the anarchic and unaccountable manner of human affairs, by a slight chance acquaintance. M. de Pontecoulant, when he was appointed a member of the War Committee of the Committee of Public Safety, found things in dreadful disorder, and did not know where to turn, and a chance conversation with M. Boissy d'Anglas elicited this remark:
"I met yesterday a general on half-pay. He has come back from the Campaign of Italy, and seemed to know all about it. He might give you some good advice."
"Send him to me," said M. Pontecoulant; and the next day there came to the Minister on the sixth floor where he had his office―"the leanest and most miserable-looking creature he had ever seen in his life"―a young man, with a wan and livid complexion, bowed shoulders and sickly appearance. Bonaparte was a name so strange and so unknown that the War Minister could not remember it; but when the young man spoke, he recognised the acquaintance of Boissy d'Anglas. Bonaparte was told to draw up a memorandum setting forth the views he had expressed verbally; but he went out, and thinking this a polite dismissal, sent no memorandum. But he was induced to present his ideas, and got work in the War Office as a sort of secretary to the Minister. But even this position he did not long retain. He asked for the command of a brigade, a demand which at five-and-twenty struck the superior powers as audacious; and when Pontecoulant retired from office, Napoleon was again without employment.
And finally he had to seek promotion through the lady who, in even virtuous Republican days, played the part of the Pompadour or the Du Barry with the monarchs—Madame Tallien, the mistress of Barras. The reader has heard so much of this episode already that I need not recapitulate it.
There I leave M. Lévy for the moment, and pass to another eulogist of Napoleon, who is even more lifelike in his description of this period in his hero's life.
The work of M. Frédéric Masson deals entirely with one side of Napoleon's life and character—his relations, namely, to women. The book has an outspokenness that may prove a little, trying even to an age that has grown so much less squeamish than it used to be. I should say at once that M. Masson is a devoted and almost blind worshipper of the central figure of his book; and that if one were to believe the picture which he presents—I am sure in perfect good faith—one would be obliged to regard Napoleon as one of the gentlest, sweetest, and most amiable men. His faults would be an excess—instead of a defect—of sensibility. Of that other side of Napoleon—which we know from many pages—in his relations to women, M. Masson gives us not even a trace.
Let us take M. Masson's very interesting and very industriously compiled volume as we find it; if we cannot accept his conclusions or his portrait, at least let us be grateful to the superabundance of material for forming our own conclusions and our own image which his marvellous industry has placed at our disposal.
In spite of all I have already written about Josephine, I make no apology for quoting largely from M. Masson's description of her.
There is an everlasting fascination about the story of her life with that strange and marvellous creature whom she married. Even her defects of character lend an additional interest to the subject; a woman quiet, decorous, certain, stable, would have been a much worthier person, and, perchance, would have made Napoleon much more tranquil in his mind; but neither on him nor on us could she have exercised the same continual fascination as this wayward, fickle, frail Creole, that still smiles out upon us with her empty and kindly look from the grave on which the grass has been growing for little short of a century!
It is one of the many proofs of the fascination which the story exercises on the French mind that every detail of her life, of her courtship and her union with Napoleon, is known and recorded with such extraordinary care. Take this volume which lies before me. I declare that I read the account M. Frédéric Masson gives of the first interview between Napoleon and Josephine de Beauharnais, as though it were something that had occurred but yesterday; and as though I were standing and looking on at the whole scene between the two, at their half-stammered words, their exchange of half-timid, half-searching glances, at the very furniture in the rooms; and this love scene took place a hundred years ago! The passages in the book which deal with the episode are a marvellous instance of the power which a good writer, with his facts and details ample and well arranged, can exercise in realising for himself and for you a long-forgotten and long-dead scene.
VII.
HE.
There are various and conflicting accounts of the events which led to Napoleon's first acquaintance with Josephine. The story usually told is that a short time after he had put down the attack on the Convention, Napoleon was visited by a young man who begged to be excused from obeying a decree which the victorious General had just published—the decree ordering the disarmament of the civil population. The youth remarks that the sword which he desires to preserve had belonged to his father, and as he mentions the father's name Napoleon realises how different is his position from that of a few months ago, when he was pawning his sword and half starving, or picking up meals by taking "pot-luck" at the houses of old friends, not much richer than himself. For the youth was the son of Viscount Beauharnais, and Viscount Beauharnais was a nobleman of ancient descent; had even been, like Mirabeau and other fathers of the Revolution, once President of the great Constituent Assembly which had made the Revolution; had been Commander-in-Chief of one of the armies of the Republic; and, finally, after the manner of such highly-distinguished aristocrats in those days, had been guillotined. Napoleon is interested and flattered by the request of the lad, grants it quite cordially, and a few days afterwards a lady comes to offer him her thanks—it is Josephine de Beauharnais, the mother of the boy.
For the first time this rustic of twenty-six years, who knows only the revolutionary armies, to whom no woman has ever paid any particular attention, sees before him one of those beautiful, elegant, and attractive women whom hitherto he has only seen from the distance of the pit of a theatre, and he finds himself in the position which most flatters his pride—that of offering protection; and with this rôle, which he plays for the first time, he is delighted beyond all words.
VIII.
SHE.
Josephine, on the other hand, was at this moment in desperate case. She had narrowly escaped guillotining, as everybody knows, by the overthrow of Robespierre; released from prison she found herself a widow of more than thirty years, with two children, and with scarcely anything left from the ruin of her fortune. A Creole, unable at any period of her life to take any account of money, extravagant, fond of elegance, dress and pleasure, there is nothing for her but to beg for money from her relatives in far Martinique; to borrow some from those nearer home; to borrow from others who are not friends; and above all, to make debts—in confidence in the future which in those strange days offered all kinds of possibilities to pretty and elegant women. All the large fortune of her husband in land had been confiscated when he was executed; her own fortune had existed rather on paper than in solid coin of the realm; her father was dead, her mother was very poor; and the English, in any case, had blockaded the island and stood between her and remittances. Even the furniture of her house had been pledged; in short, poor Josephine at this moment was at the very end of her tether. This was her position when the following scene took place. I trust the vividness of the description will make as profound an impression on others as it does on me.
IX.
BONAPARTE KNOCKS.
"Just then, to return the visit he had received from the Viscountess de Beauharnais, General Bonaparte rings at the entrance gate of the mansion in the Rue Chantereine. He does not know that the house belongs to Citizeness Talma, who, while she was Demoiselle Julie, got it from a man whose mistress she was. He does not see that the house, with one hundred metres of grounds, situated in a remote quarter, just at the extremity of Paris, a couple of steps from the Rue Saint-Lazaire, surrounded even still by gardens, is hardly worth fifty thousand francs—the price paid in 1781, and the price which will be again paid in 1796.
"The door being opened by the concierge, for there is a concierge, the General goes through a sort of long passage; at one side he sees the stable with two black horses, going on seven years old, and a red cow; on the other, the coach-house, in which there is but one shattered vehicle, is closed. The passage leads into a garden. In the centre stands the living room; a ground floor with four very high windows, and surrounded by a low attic. The kitchen is under-ground. Bonaparte goes up the four stone steps which turn to a sort of simple balustraded terrace, and penetrates into an antechamber sparsely furnished with a copper fountain and low cupboard of oak, and a deal press."
X.
THE ROOM.
"The obliging Gonthier introduces him into a little apartment, a dining-room, where, near the round mahogany table, he could sit down on one of the four black horse-hair chairs, unless he prefers to look at some engravings on the wall, framed in black and gold. Not much luxury, but here and there tables and consoles of mahogany and rosewood with marble supports and gilt ornamentation, give tokens of former elegance, and in the two large glass presses built into the wall, a tea urn, vessels, all the accessories of the table in English electro-plate which does duty for silverplate. As for plate, in the true sense of the word, there are in the house only fourteen spoons and five forks, one soup spoon, six dessert spoons, and eleven little coffee spoons.
"But he does not know that."
XI.
ENTER JOSEPHINE.
"What! is this all the furniture of this elegant lady? Yes; and she eats off earthenware plates, except on great occasions for which she has a dozen of blue and white china ones; the table-linen comprises eight table-cloths, all so worn that in the inventory, serviettes and table-cloths are valued at four pounds. But Bonaparte does not notice all this; he does not know that this uncommon and elegant woman who is before him, whose infinite grace disturbs his brain, whose recherche toilette is a feast to his eyes, has only in her wardrobe four dozen chemises partly worn out, two dozen handkerchiefs, six petticoats, six nightdresses, eighteen fichus, twelve pairs of stockings of different colours. In addition she has for outward wearing, six muslin shawls, two taffeta robes (one brown, the other violet), three fine, coloured, embroidered muslin dresses, three plain muslins, two book-muslin dresses, three Jouy linen dresses, and one of white embroidered lawn. This underclothing so really poor, and these outward coverings so relatively numerous, though the stuffs are shabby and cheap, show the whole disposition of Josephine it is Josephine all over to have sixteen dresses and six petticoats."
XII.
THE FASCINATION BEGINS.
"But what matter? Bonaparte only sees the dress, or rather he only sees the woman, the soft chestnut hair, slightly made up, dyed, it is true—but it is then the time of white powdered wigs—a skin brown enough, already lined from care, but smoothed, whitened, pinked by cosmetics; teeth, already bad, but no one ever sees them, for the small mouth is always ready to melt into a slight, sweet smile, which agreed with the infinite mildness of her long-lashed eyes, with the tender expression of her features, with a tone of voice so touching that later on servants would stop in the passages to hear it. And with that a mobile, delicate nose, with ever-quivering nostrils, a nose a little raised at the end, engaging and roguish, which provoked desire.
"Nevertheless the head is scarcely to be mentioned in comparison with this body, so free, so stately, not yet spoiled by stoutness, and which ends in little, straight, arched feet—feet so plump and soft as to invite a kiss. On the body no restraint, no corsets, not even a neck-band to support the throat, which is, however, short and expressionless. But her general attractiveness goes beyond defining. This woman has a grace which belongs only to herself: 'She even goes to bed gracefully/ This grace results from such a just proportion of build that one forgets she is of mediocre stature, so easy and elegant are all her movements. A long and careful study of her body, a coquetry which has refined all her gestures, that loses no advantage, and is constantly on the defensive, leaves nothing to chance; this undefinable nonchalance which makes the Creole woman the essence of womanhood; this sensuality which, like a light perfume, floats around these languid attitudes of the supple and easy limbs, was it not enough to turn the brain of everybody, and most of all of him who was newer and less experienced than any other? The woman seduces him from the first moment, while at the same time the lady dazzles him by, as he says himself, 'that calm and noble dignity of the old French society.'"
XIII.
IN THE TOILS.
"She feels that he is ensnared, that he belongs to her, and when he comes back on the next day, the day after, and then every day, when he sees about Madame de Beauharnais men who belonged to the ancient Court, who are great lords in comparison with him, 'petit noble' (the word is his own), a Ségur, a Montesquieu, a Caulaincourt, who treat her as a friend, an equal, somewhat as a comrade, he does not notice the dark side; he does not realise that these men, who will always have for him a certain prestige, come there as bachelors, and do not bring their wives. After the Jacobin surroundings in which he lived, and which in Vaucluse, Toulon, Nice, and Pa s had been an advantage to him, he experienced an infinite satisfaction in finding himself in such company. All the appearances (and nothing here was more than appearance, the luxury of the lady as well as her nobility, her society, and the place she occupied in the world), all these appearances he accepted for realities, and saw them so, his senses aiding.
"Fifteen days after the first visit a liaison commenced. In writing to each other they still talk only friendship, but in the confusion of that time, says a witness, shades, transitions, were but little observed.
"'They loved one another passionately.' As to him, it is quite easy to believe it; as to her, why should we not believe that she was then sincere? This Bonaparte was new ground, a savage to tame, the lion of the day to show about in her chains. For the woman, already beginning to age, this ardour of passion, these kisses, as under the Equator, prove to her that she is still beautiful, and that she will always please. Good enough as a lover, but what of a husband? He makes an offer of his hand—he supplicates her to marry him. After all, what has she to lose? She is at the last extremity, and it is the throwing of a card that she risks. He is young, ambitious, he is Commander-in-Chief of the Interior; during the Directoire it is remembered that he furnished plans for the last Italian campaign, and Carnot is going to give him the chief command in the approaching campaign. It means, perhaps, salvation. Then what does she commit herself to? A marriage? But divorce is a remedy ready to hand, for there is no question of priest or religious ceremony. What is it in reality? A contract which will last as long as it pleases the parties to observe the conditions, but which is of no value either in the conscience of the wife or in that of her old world; which will bring something big if well played, for this young man may mount high; which will bring, in any case, a pension if he is killed."
XIV.
VENIAL MENDACITIES.
"Nevertheless, she has precautions to take; first of all, her age to dissemble, for she does not want to avow, either to this youth of twenty-six or to any one else, that she is more than thirty-two years old. So Calmelot, her confidential man, at present tutor of her children, goes, accompanied by a friend named Lesourd, to a notary's: "They certify that they know Marie-Joseph Tascher, widow of the citizen Beauharnais, intimately, know that she is a native of the Island of Martinique, and that at the present moment it is impossible for her to procure a certificate of birth on account of the island being occupied by the English." That is all; no other declaration, no date. Armed with this, Josephine can declare to the Civil officer that she was born on June 23, 1767, whilst in reality she was born on June 23, 1763. People do not examine her more closely. As to fortune, she intends there shall also be illusion. Here, one would believe, there must be some difficulty, but Bonaparte accepts all that she does, and then in private, in the presence only of Lemarrois, aide-de-camp of the General, the strangest contract of marriage that notary ever received, is prepared; no community of goods under any form nor in any manner whatsoever; absolute separation of means; all authority given in advance by the future husband to the future wife; guardianship of the children by the first marriage exclusively to be held by the mother; a jointure of fifteen hundred pounds if she becomes a widow, and in the latter case also the right to get back all that she could justly claim as belonging to her.
"Of documents relating to personal property not a single one. All that the future wife possesses is a claim to the property which was common to herself and the late M. Beauharnais. He did not make an inventory, and until the inventory was made she could not decide whether to accept or renounce. The inventory was made two years later, and she renounced, but these two years had brought something better. Bonaparte made no secret of the smallness of his fortune. 'On his side the future husband declared he possessed no real estate nor personal property other than his wardrobe and his military equipage, the whole valued by him at , and then he signed the nominal value.' Just as the notary of Madame de Beauharnais had said, his 'cape and sword' were his fortune. But the General found the declaration superfluous, and in the contract he purely and simply had the paragraph scratched out.
"The contract is dated 18 Ventôse, An IV. (March 8, 1796). The next day the marriage took place before the Civil officer, who complaisantly gave to the husband twenty-eight years instead of twenty-six, and to the wife twenty-nine instead of thirty-two. This mayor seems to have a passion for equalising. Barras, Lemarrois, who is not a major, Tallien and Calmelot, the inevitable Calmelot, are witnesses. There is no mention of the consent of the parents; they were not consulted.
"Two days after, General Bonaparte goes alone to join the army in Italy; Madame Bonaparte remains at the Rue Chantereine."
There is something weird, is there not, in this revivification of the past, even to the numbering of the articles of underclothing in poor Josephine's wardrobe. The details may seem squalid, but somehow or other they do not so impress me. There is something in their accumulation that adds so much to the reality and familiarity of the picture, and nothing that thus brings us face to face with the daily life of so portentous a figure as Napoleon, can ever cease to interest mankind. XV.
DITHYRAMBIC LOVE.
I go back to M. Lévy's volume for a description of the epoch which followed.
It is a stage in Napoleon's life which it is very hard to understand, the existence of which many people have forgotten, and which is in contrast with the strange lawlessness, heartlessness, frigidity of temper which supreme power finally begat in Napoleon's character. We have extant his correspondence with his wife during his campaign in Italy; it is the correspondence of an impassioned boy with his first love. Its warmth of language, its hysterical joy, its strange despair, all its quick alternation of the liveliest and most acute feelings, stand, as it were, outside that stern man we know, with that impassive face in the midst of the wholesale carnage of the battle-field. The daring conspirator who was ready to stake his head in the fight for a crown—the man whose settled frown, cold and steady gaze, and imperious demeanour affright the bravest general into an awed silence—this man is to be seen in these letters falling on his knees, clasping his hands, tearing his hair, sobbing in the outbursts of jealous and almost tenderly submissive love. It is certainly one of the most curious contradictions between the outer demeanour, the general character, and the inner nature which history presents. Above all, it confirms the theory of many shrewd observers of human nature, that it is women after all who alone understand men, for it is they who alone see them as they really are.
I will give some specimens of these letters. It will be seen that I in no way exaggerate their character.
At Chanceaux, on his way to Italy, he has to stop to exchange horses; he takes advantage of the pause to write a letter.
"Every instant," he writes, "takes me farther from you, adorable creature, and every instant I feel less that I can bear being separated from you. You are perpetually in my thoughts; I rack my brains to imagine what you are about. If I think you are sad, my heart feels broken; if I fancy you gay, laughing with your friends, I reproach you for having forgotten our grievous separation of three days ago.
"If I am asked whether I have slept well, I feel that, before answering, I ought to receive news from you as to whether you have had a good night. Sickness, man's fury, affect me not, except by the idea that they may come upon you. . . . Ah! be not gay, but rather somewhat melancholy, and, above all, may your soul be exempt from grief as your body from illness." XVI.
SUSPICION.
Underneath all these outbursts of passion one can detect, as M. Lévy points out, a vague sense of apprehension and coming danger. Napoleon had not failed to see the "tepidity" which his wife felt towards him, and he knew, perhaps, that her past had not been altogether without reproach. In any case, he is tormented all through his campaign; and in the midst of those mighty victories which were dazzling the world, amid all the acclaims of that triumphant army—in the midst, too, of the dangers which Napoleon madly ran—his innermost heart is constantly tortured with the idea that his love is not returned, that his confidence is betrayed. It is impossible not to tarry with some pleasure at this stage of Napoleon's career; it is somewhat like the early, innocent maidenhood of a woman that has ended disastrously.
Here is what is said of Napoleon by one of his secretaries of this period:
"General Bonaparte, however taken up he might be with his position, with the matters entrusted to him, and with his future, had yet time to give himself up to thoughts of another kind. He was thinking constantly of his wife. He longed for her, and watched for her coming with impatience. He often spoke to me of her and his love, with the expansions and the illusions of a very young man. The continual delays that she interposed before her departure were torture to him, and he occasionally gave way to fits of jealousy, and to a kind of superstition, which was strong in his nature. One day the glass of Josephine's portrait, which he always wore about him, broke, and he turned dreadfully pale. 'Marmont,' he exclaimed, 'either my wife is ill or unfaithful.'"
XVII.
FRIVOLOUS JOSEPHINE.
Josephine, meantime, is not much touched by these outbursts. Josephine may or may not have been the abandoned woman Barras declares, but her letters about her curious lover—so wan, awkward, abrupt, so devoid of drawing-room graces—give a curious picture of the conflicting emotions of her mind. Here is the first paragraph of one of them:
"You have seen General Bonaparte at my house. Well, it is he who is good enough to act as stepfather to the orphans of Alexandre de Beauharnais, as husband to his widow! Do you love him? you ask me. No. . . . I do not. Then you dislike him? No; but my state is one of tepidity towards him that is displeasing to me."
It is clearly evident from this that when Josephine married, it was not from love. The next paragraph shows, however, the method by which Napoleon was able to procure influence over her mind. It is also a curious and instructive proof of how early was that perfect self-confidence which was one of the secrets of his final triumph and glory. There is also an allusion to Barras which would seem to lend some confirmation to the unfavourable view of the alliance on which that arch-enemy of Bonaparte has insisted:
"Barras assures me that if I marry the General he will obtain for him the command in Italy. Yesterday Bonaparte was talking to me about this favour, which is already causing some of his brothers-in-arms to grumble, although it has not yet been granted. 'Do they imagine,' he said, 'that I need protection in order to rise? They will only be too glad when I accord them mine. My sword is by my side, and with that I will do anything."
And finally comes this delicious passage, which shows at once the indecision of the woman and the weapon by which she was finally overcome—the weapon of Napoleon's thorough confidence in himself:
"I do not know how it is, but sometimes this ridiculous assurance gains upon me to such an extent as to make me believe possible all that this man suggests to me; and, with his imagination, who can tell what he may not attempt?"
Similarly after her marriage, her comment on these extraordinary letters—more extraordinary because of the character of the man who wrote them and of his surroundings—her comment is one of the most fatuous utterances recorded in history: "What an odd creature Bonaparte is!" she says. "What an odd creature Bonaparte is" is really delightful in its sublime unconsciousness—in its naïveté, in its tragic forecast of her subsequent fate. M. Lévy—who is a simple man himself—describes the phrase as "vulgar and unseemly." His comment is as simple as the original phrase. It is not specially vulgar or specially unseemly; it is gigantically stupid.
Above all things, Josephine did not wish to leave her beloved Paris. And life in that delightful city was now more delightful than ever, for the victories of her husband, producing mighty street demonstrations, reflected their glory on her; she is cheered as she rides through the triumphant crowds; she is at last in a steady and brilliant social position. She tries all kinds of expedients to excuse her delay in departing for her husband's camp, until at last she takes refuge in the splendid invention that she is enceinte.
At once Napoleon is pacified, and he bursts out into a profusion of apologies, regrets, almost grovelling palinodes. As thus:
"My life is a perpetual nightmare. A horrible presentiment prevents me from breathing. I live no more. I have lost more than life, more than happiness, more than rest . . . . Write me ten pages; that alone may console me a little. You are ill, you love me; I have afflicted you; you are enceinte. I have sinned so much against you that I know not how to palliate my crimes. I accuse you of remaining in Paris, and you are ill there. Forgive me, my dearest; the love with which you have inspired me has taken away my reason. I shall never find it again."
And so it goes on, gathering force and fire as it proceeds; tumultuous, impassioned, like the improvisation of the Italian stock from which he has come. Whatever else Napoleon is, at this period of his existence he is not cold; the volcano emits lava continuously. Here, for instance, is another passage in the same letter:
"I have always been fortunate; my fate has never resisted my will; and to-day I am struck in what touches me most closely. Without appetite, without sleep, indifferent to friends, glory, and country—you, you alone—the rest of the world no more exists for me than if it were annihilated. I care for honour because you care for it, for victory because it gives you pleasure; otherwise I should have quitted all to throw myself at your feet. My darling, mind you tell me that you are convinced that I love you more than it is possible to imagine; that you are persuaded that every moment of my time is consecrated to you; that never an hour passes without my thinking of you; that in my eyes all other women are without charm, beauty, or wit; that you and you alone, such as I see you now, can please me and absorb all the faculties of my soul, that you alone have sounded all its depths; . . . that my strength, my arms, my mind all is yours; . . . that my soul is in your body; and that the day when you change, or the day on which you cease to live, would be that of my death; that nature and the earth are only beautiful in my eyes because you inhabit them."
And finally the letter, after pages of this kind of thing, winds up with this impassioned outburst:
"A child, adorable as his mother, is about to see the light in your arms! Unhappy that I am, I would be satisfied with one day! A thousand kisses on your eyes, your lips! Adorable woman, what is your power? I am ill with your illness; fever is burning me! Do not keep the courier more than six hours, and let him return straight-way to bring me the cherished letter from my sovereign."
XVIII.
THE FIRST QUARRELS.
All these outpourings did not make it a bit easier for Josephine to leave Paris; it was not until she feared that her little invention about being enceinte would be betrayed by Junot Napoleon's faithful servant—that she consented to go; and then, says a contemporary observer, "Poor woman, she burst into tears, and sobbed as though she were going to execution." At last she reaches Milan. "General Bonaparte," says Marmont, "was very happy, for then he lived only for her. This lasted for a long time. Never had a purer, truer, more exclusive love possession of the heart of man." But he has to rush from her arms to continue his fights with the enemy; and his letters, instead of cooling, grow warmer:
"I turn over and over in my mind your kisses, your tears, your charming jealousy, and the charms of the incomparable Josephine light unceasingly in my heart a warm and bright flame. When shall I be free from all worry, from all business, and at liberty to pass my time near you, and nothing to think of but the happiness of saying and proving it. . . . I thought I loved you a few days ago, but since I have left you I feel that my love has increased a thousandfold. . . . I implore you to show me your defects sometimes; be less beautiful, less gracious, less tender, less loving especially; above all, never be jealous, never cry—your tears distract me, burn my blood. . . . Come and join me, so that before we die we may be able to say: 'We were happy so many days.'"
And the next day he writes in a similar strain:
"I have been to Virgil's village, on the edge of a lake, by moonlight, and not one instant passed without my thinking of Josephine. I have lost my snuff-box, and beg you to choose me one—rather flat, and to have something rather pretty written upon it, with your hair. A thousand kisses, as burning as you are cold."
And meantime poor, lazy, tepid Josephine proves a very poor correspondent. Letter after letter from Bonaparte begins with some such phrase as this: "Two days without a letter from you. Thirty times to-day have I said that to myself." "I hope that on arriving to-night I shall receive a letter from you." "I am starting immediately for Verona. I had hoped for a letter from you, and am in a state of the utmost anxiety." "No letter from you. I am really anxious." "I write to you frequently, my dear one, and you but little to me. You are haughty and unkind, as unkind as you are heedless."
And so it goes on in reproach after reproach:
"I have received your letters and have pressed them to my heart and my lips, and the grief at my absence, divided from you as I am a hundred. miles, has vanished. But your letters are as cold as if you were fifty; they might have been written after fifteen years of married life."
Here is another:
"I love you no longer; on the contrary, I detest you. You are a wretch, very clumsy, very stupid, a Cinderella. You never write to me; you do not love your husband. You know what pleasure your letters give him, and you never write him even six miserable lines."
And still Napoleon goes on protesting the vehemence of his love:
"I hope soon to be in your arms. I love you to distraction. All is well. Wurmser has been defeated at Mantua. Nothing is wanting to your husband's happiness save the love of Josephine."
And three days after this letter, when he comes to Milan to join his wife, his love gets a shock greater than her silence and the coldness of her letters. The Palazzo where he had expected to find her is empty, Josephine has gone to Genoa; and then Napoleon, unable to control his grief, disappointment, the wound inflicted on his love and self-love, pours forth his feelings in two letters eloquent in their grief. The first is written immediately after his arrival:
"I reach Milan, I rush to your room; I have quitted all to see you, to press you in my arms. You were not there; you are travelling about in search of amusement; you put distance between us as soon as I arrive; you care nothing for your Napoleon. A caprice made you love him, inconstancy renders him indifferent to you."
And on the next day there comes another letter equally agonised in tone:
"To love you only, to render you happy, to do nothing that can annoy you, that is my destiny, and the object of my life. Be happy, do not reproach me, care nothing about the fidelity of a man who lives only through you; enjoy only your own pleasures and your own happiness. In asking for a love equal to mine, I was wrong. How can I expect lace to weigh as heavily as gold? In sacrificing to you all my desires, all my thoughts, every instant of my life, I simply yield to the ascendency that your charms, your character, and your whole heart have obtained over my unhappy heart. I am unhappy if nature did not endow me with attractions sufficient to captivate you, but what I deserve at the hands of Josephine is at least consideration and esteem, for I love you madly and solely. . . . Ah! Josephine, Josephine!"
Josephine, meantime, was surrounded by young officers, who adored and flattered and courted her, and the memoir writers have no hesitation in declaring that she was unfaithful to Napoleon; but this may not be true, for French memoir writers are not sparing of women's reputations. At all events, Napoleon banished several officers from his army who were suspected of paying too much devotion to his wife; and from the moment when, returning to Milan, he found that she had gone and not awaited him, there is a gradually increasing coldness in his letters. The romance was over; Josephine herself had killed it. XIX.
HIPPOLYTE CHARLES.
Among the officers of the army of Italy, when Napoleon was Commander-in-Chief, was a young man named Hippolyte Charles. I suppose there is nothing more curious—nor inexplicable—in some respects more saddening, in others more satisfactory, than the difficulty the greatest men of history have found in gaining real and faithful love. George Eliot in one of her early stories stands up for the man, with poor stumbling gait and commonplace mind, who wins the love of some woman far superior to himself; and asks whether the straight-limbed young gods have not enough from life without begrudging to the poor devil, who is neither fair of form nor brilliant of mind, the great good the gods have given him of a perfect woman's devotion. Catherine of Russia had wondrous charm in addition to her vast gifts of courage, resolve, clear vision—and yet Catherine, as her biographer tells us, was as much deceived by the various men on whom she bestowed so profusely the riches of her own nature and of her Empire, as the veriest grisette. And, similarly, Napoleon—the god of his own time, the god of so many successive generations of men—Napoleon never succeeded until it was too late in winning the devotion of his own wife. And to make the tragedy the more grotesque, a Hippolyte Charles was his successful rival. Hippolyte Charles, who had not great external advantages, being small and thin, very brown of skin, with hair black as jet, but very careful of his person, and very smart in his fine Hussar uniform laced with gold, showed the greatest attention to the wife of his Commander-in-Chief. He was a man of the kind most dangerous to a woman who is rather bored, and does not love her husband. Charles was what is called amusing. He made puns, and was somewhat affected. The keen interest that Josephine took in this young Hussar was known to every one in the Army of Italy, and when what M. de Ségur calls "Napoleon's jealous displeasure" burst forth, no one was surprised to see Charles, at that time aide-de-camp to General Leclerc, "banished from the Army of Italy by order of the Commander-in-Chief."
XX.
IN EGYPT.
When Napoleon went to Egypt he was accompanied a portion of the way by Josephine. The separation between them is said to have been touching. It is not known whether Josephine offered to accompany him or not. It is certain, however, that Napoleon still continued to have a warm affection for her. In the midst of all his preparations for his great campaigning—in the midst of the discussions with the scientific men whom he had brought with him—Napoleon, says Bourrienne, "passionately devoted to France, anxious for his own glory, though his heart was so full, there was still a large place kept for Josephine, of whom he almost always spoke to me in our familiar conversation."
But Josephine still was tepid, and was terribly indiscreet. In the correspondence of Napoleon with his brothers we see the anxiety gradually turning into certainty, and despair is transformed into rage and repulsion. To his brother Joseph he writes from Cairo: "Look after my wife; see her sometimes. I beg Louis to give her good advice." In the same letter he says: "I send a handsome shawl to Julia; she is a good woman, make her happy." Soon after, however, there is a very different note in the letters, and in a letter to Josephine there occurs this phrase—the epitaph on his lost confidence in his wife's fidelity: "I have many domestic sorrows, for the veil is entirely lifted." The latter part of this phrase was omitted in the earlier memoirs of Josephine; it has since been restored. In this same letter there is another passage which speaks a sorrow as profound as even these first words:
"Your affection is very dear to me. Were I to lose that, and to see you betray me, I should turn misanthrope; it alone saves me. One is in a sad plight when all one's affections are centred upon one person. Arrange that I should have active employment on my return, either near Paris or in Burgundy. I wish to pass the winter there, and to shut myself up; I am tired of human nature. I want solitude and isolation; grandeur wearies me, my affections are dried up."
Prince Eugène—Josephine's son—has in his Memoirs to confess that his mother's conduct disturbed Napoleon. He puts down the reports that reach his stepfather to malice and calumny; but, nevertheless, he has to give us a picture of Napoleon which is not without pathos:
"Although I was very young, I inspired him with so much confidence that he made me a sharer in his sorrows, It was generally at night that he thus unbosomed himself, walking with great strides up and down his tent. I was the only person to whom he could talk openly. I sought to soften his resentment, I comforted him as best I could, and as much as my age and the respect I felt for him permitted."
At last there came one of those violent explosions of wrath which were the terror of Napoleon's surrounding. He addressed Bourrienne in a voice stifled with rage; reproaches him that he has not repeated the reports which Junot had brought fresh from Paris—Junot might have been better employed—and then went on:
"Josephine . . . . and I am six hundred leagues away . . . . Josephine to have thus deceived me. She, she . . . . woe to them . . . . I will exterminate the whole tribe of fops and puppies. As for her divorce. Yes . . . . a public overwhelming divorce . . . . I know all."
Poor Bourrienne seeks in vain to stop this torrent of wrath, and recalls to Napoleon the fact that whatever might be his domestic misadventures, he had at least the comfort of the mighty glory that his Egyptian campaign had gathered around him. There is something extremely human, something really that makes Napoleon less of the scarcely human monster of the Taine portrait, in the passage which follows:
"My glory!" exclaimed Napoleon in despair. "What would I not give if only what Junot has told me were not true, so dearly do I love that woman!"
The origin of all these outbursts was the behaviour of Josephine with Hippolyte Charles. That young gentleman, after his expulsion from the Army of Italy, had entered into business in a large provision firm, was prospering, had money to spend, kept up a fine establishment, and Josephine again listened to him. He paid her visits at Malmaison, her residence as the General's wife; and, finally—it is scarcely credible that a woman could be so imprudent and expect to retain her reputation and her husband's love—"ended by living there altogether as its master."
This is what had been reported to Napoleon. He took his revenge. To this period belongs that well-known intrigue between Napoleon and Madame Pauline Faures, which suggests to Taine one of his most remarkable passages; and from this time forward Napoleon's confidence in his wife was gone. When Josephine heard that he was returning, she determined to forestall her enemies, and to win back his love by going to meet him. Possibly she recollected that most unhappy day when she left Milan, and Napoleon, rushing, as he thought, to her loving and expecting arms, found nothing but emptiness and absence. But fortune was against her this time; she went to meet him by one route, he arrived by another.
So it happened that on October 16th, 1798, at six in the morning, Napoleon found no one when he reached his house in the Rue Chantereine, and his irritation and jealousy were thereby increased.
To make this unexpected solitude in his own home the more exasperating, Napoleon had passed through France amid the mad acclamations of the people—the forerunners of that inexhaustible popularity which very soon was to enable him to mount the throne. After all these wild crowds of almost idolatrous admirers—after all this tumult—to come home and find this silence, this apparent neglect! Napoleon was so exasperated that he refused for some time to even see Josephine, and took measures for having the divorce proceedings set in motion; and what must have made the whole business the more exasperating for Napoleon was that just at that moment, when this wretched domestic complication came to disturb and preoccupy him, he was on the eve of the events which were to lead him—if he only had the nerve and the resource—to the loftiest pinnacle of human glory; which, with loss of nerve—by one slight mistake—might end in death on the scaffold.
Under these circumstances, Josephine adopted a desperate but a wise expedient. She used her two children as the intermediaries between her and her husband. The scene which followed is described by more than one contemporary, but the best accounts are those of Prince Eugène, who of course was present, and of Bourrienne, Napoleon's secretary. Prince Eugène says that Napoleon gave his mother a "cold reception." Bourrienne describes the reception as one of "calculated severity" and the "coldest indifference." But when Napoleon saw Josephine, her eyes streaming with tears, in despair, conducted to his presence by Hortense and Eugène, he broke down—"he opened his arms and forgave his wife."
It is hard to say what judgment we should pronounce on this episode. M. Lévy, of course, has no difficulty in seeing in it a sublime generosity; it may have been the cynical indifference which made Napoleon finally regard Josephine as merely a pretty woman—not to be cast off because of her prettiness—to be simply used and despised. There is much more respect to a woman in a jealousy that will not be appeased than in a reconciliation which has its roots in the senses and in contempt.
And now there comes the second epoch in the lives of Napoleon and Josephine. As married people go, they got on pretty well together. There are abundant proofs that Napoleon was in his way a fairly good family man. He certainly desired to be so considered himself.
"At home," he said to Roederer, "I am an affectionate man; I play with the children, talk to my wife, read novels to them."
And certainly there are proofs that he was very fond of children. We have seen already how intoxicated he was by the prospect of Josephine's being enceinte. Later on, his delight was keen when that poor infant was born with so tragic a destiny—so pitiful an end—the Duke of Reichstadt. Here are two very pretty pictures of Napoleon with the children of Queen Hortense, daughter of Josephine, wife of his brother Louis, the father of the Napoleon whom we knew in our days as Emperor of the French:
"Uncle Bibiche! Uncle Bibiche!" This exclamation came from a child of scarcely five years of age, running breathlessly in the park of Saint-Cloud after a man visible in the distance followed by a troop of gazelles, to whom he was distributing pinches of snuff, disputed eagerly. The child was the eldest son of Hortense, and the distributor of snuff was Napoleon, who had earned the name of "Uncle Bibiche" by the pleasure that he took in setting the boy on the back of one of the gazelles and walking him about, to the intense joy of the child, who was carefully held on by his uncle. The child, it appears, was charming, and, moreover, possessed a great admiration for his uncle. When he passed in front of the grenadiers in the Tuileries gardens, the boy would call out: "Long live grandpapa, the soldier!" "It used to be," says Mademoiselle Avrillon, "a real holiday for the Emperor when Queen Hortense came to see her mother, bringing her two children. Napoleon would take them in his arms, caress them, often tease them, and burst into laughter, as if he had been their own age, when, according to his custom, he had smeared their faces with cream or jam."
Finally, there were plenty of things to show that ordinarily he was kind and considerate to Josephine. Napoleon himself said: "If I found no pleasures in my home life, I should be too miserable." "Once the quarrels of the first years were over," says Thibaudeau, "it was on the whole a happy household."
"The Emperor," says Mademoiselle Avrillon, "was, in reality, one of the best husbands I have ever known. When the Empress was poorly, he passed near her every hour that he could spare from his work. He always went into her room before going to bed, and very often, when he woke in the night, he would send his mameluke for news of Her Majesty, or else come himself. He was tenderly attached to her." "How touching was the peace that reigned in the Imperial household!" says Constant. "The Emperor was full of attentions for his wife, and used to amuse himself by kissing her on the neck and the cheeks, tapping her face, and calling her his 'great stupid.' She often read new books to him; he liked her to read to him, as she read admirably and much enjoyed reading aloud. When the Emperor showed an inclination to go to sleep, the Empress used to descend a little staircase and rejoin the company in the drawing-room just as she had left them."
XXI.
HOPELESS JOSEPHINE.
Two or three more details will help us to form a correct view of the relations between Napoleon and Josephine. One of the husband's peculiarities was the interest he took even in the small details of his wife's toilet. He used sometimes to assist at her preparations; "and," writes one of the intimates of the household, "it was strange to us to see a man whose head was so full of great things going into all sorts of details, and pointing out the gowns or the jewels he wished her to wear on such and such occasion. He one day spilled some ink over one of the Empress's gowns because he did not like it, and to force her to put on another."
"On the morning of the consecration," says the Duchesse d'Abrantès, "the Emperor himself tried on the Empress the crown she was to wear. During the ceremony he was most attentive, arranged this little crown, which surmounted a coronet of diamonds, altered it, replaced it, and moved it again."
But, nevertheless, there were occasional quarrels between the two, mainly owing to the incurable extravagance of Josephine. Napoleon inherited from his mother, and from his days of struggle, a most careful regard for the value of money. Of that I shall give some curious stories by-and-by. Poor Josephine, on the other hand, never was capable of counting the cost of anything, and she was so fond of spending money that she frequently bought things quite useless to her for the mere sake of buying. The result was that she was always being cheated, always in debt, always in terror and tears when the time came round to meet her bills and she had to appeal to her stern taskmaster for money. Says Sismondi:—
"Josephine. . . . was always surrounded by people who robbed her; she denied herself no whim, never reckoned the cost, and allowed prodigious debts to accumulate. It happened on one occasion, when the settlement of the budget was approaching, that Napoleon saw the eyes of Josephine and of Madame de la Rochefoucauld (principal lady-in-waiting) very red. He said to Duroc: 'These women have been crying; try to find out what it is about.' Duroc discovered that there was a deficit of six hundred thousand francs (twenty-four thousand pounds). Napoleon, incredulous, immediately wrote an order for one million francs (forty thousand pounds), and exclaimed: 'All this for miserable trifles! Simply stolen by a lot of scoundrels! I must send away so-and-so, and forbid certain shopkeepers to present themselves at the Palace.'"
XXII.
NAPOLEON'S INFIDELITIES.
Poor Josephine had further and graver causes of complaint. For the infidelities, the coldness, the neglect with which she afflicted Napoleon when he was a raw young soldier, and for the first time knew the graces and charms of a pretty woman, she had to pay the penalty of years of misery, helpless jealousy, sometimes even violence. By a process which is not uncommon in married life, and especially among those whose fortunes have undergone considerable modification, the woman's love grew as the man's waned. Napoleon sometimes was decent enough to endeavour to conceal his infidelities, at others he seems to have been cynically indifferent to the feelings of his wife; and on one occasion he treated her as only a brute could do. Sometimes, as Taine has told us, he went the length of telling her the details of his amours, replying to her tears and her reproaches with, "I have a right to answer all your objections with an eternal 'Moi.'"
When in 1806–7 Napoleon was in Poland, there was a reversal of the parts which the husband and wife played towards each other in the other epoch of their married life, when Josephine was in Paris and Napoleon was in Italy. The reader will remember the letters of impassioned ardour in which the young soldier addressed in those days the tepid wife—how he pressed her to follow him, to be always near him. When Napoleon went to Poland there is a repetition of the same thing; but it is Josephine that longs to go to Napoleon, it is Napoleon that likes their separation. When Josephine did not get the summons she so eagerly longed for, poor Josephine—she was only a superstitious, weak Creole creature after all—would try to master her feverish impatience and her apprehensions in a characteristic way:
"Every evening," says the Duchesse d'Abrantès, "she used to consult the cards in order to learn whether she would receive the desired orders or not."
Josephine sends letter after letter, resorts to every species of tender coquetry. Much of all this is to be found in the following little extract from one of Napoleon's letters:
"An officer brings me a carpet from you. It is rather short and narrow, but I thank you none the less for it."
Meantime Napoleon keeps protesting that there is only one woman in the world for him. "All these Polish women are French, but to me there is but one woman in the world." "In the deserts of Poland one thinks little of beauties," he writes in another letter. Following this description of Poland was the announcement—not altogether consistent—that the noblesse of the province had given a ball in his honour: "Very beautiful women, very rich, dressed in Paris fashion." This, at least, was a tolerable and an inhabited "desert."
XXIII.
MADAME WALEWSKA.
Poor Josephine's apprehensions turned out to be well founded. Napoleon met in Warsaw the only woman who ever made a real impression upon him since the days when his fiery young fancy so glowed with love for Josephine. And it was here, also, that Napoleon met the only woman, except Josephine, who showed any desire to be faithful to him in disaster as in the days of his glory. Napoleon first saw Madame Walewska at that very ball which he mentioned in his letter to Josephine. Napoleon afterwards said of her: "She was a charming woman, an angel. One might say that her soul was as beautiful as her face." She is thus described at the moment when Napoleon saw her for the first time:
"She was two-and-twenty, fair, with blue eyes, and a skin of dazzling whiteness; she was not tall, but perfectly formed, with an exquisite figure. A slight shadow of melancholy lay on her whole person, and rendered her still more attractive. Recently married to an old nobleman of bad temper and extremely rigid views, she seemed to Napoleon like a woman who has been sacrificed and who is unhappy at home. This idea increased the passionate interest the Emperor felt in her as soon as he saw her."
The records of the time show that in this case Napoleon was prompt and strong; but his lovemaking was never of a very refined order. Thirty-seven years of age, a great General, with Europe gradually falling at his feet, he conducted his siege of a woman after the fashion of an attack on a fortified town. The courtship, indeed, is one of the most curious in history; I can but glance at it for more reasons than one. Says Constant:
"The day after the ball the Emperor seemed to me in an unusually agitated state. He walked about the room, sat down, got up, and walked about again. Immediately after luncheon he sent a great personage to visit Madame Walewska for him, and to present to her his homage and his entreaties. She proudly refused proposals made too brusquely, or was it perhaps the coquetry innate in woman that suggested to her to refuse?"
Napoleon, however, wrote a letter which in some degree made up for his brusqueness, and the young Countess promised to visit him.
The Emperor, while waiting for her, walked about the room and displayed as much impatience as emotion. Every moment he inquired the time. Madame Walewska arrived at last, but in what a state!—pale, dumb, her eyes bathed in tears.
Everybody knows the end of the story. Madame Walewska, after the disappearance of Napoleon from her native country, remained in shadow; she made her presence felt for the first time when reverses began to come. Then she wrote to her old lover, and she visited him in the island of Elba after his first dethronement. But perhaps the favour she conferred on him that he valued most was that she gave him a son. In due time the son lived to be one of the chief advisers and Ministers of Napoleon III., and died before the war in which the whole Napoleonic dynasty went down.
In the meantime poor Josephine comes part of the way to her husband, but he tells her to go back; the weather, he says, is bad, the roads unsafe. "Return to Paris," he writes to her; "be happy and contented." In another letter containing the same advice, he says: "I wish you to be gay and to give a little life to the capital." And, finally, one can see to the depths of the tragedy when one reads between the lines of this sentence in one of these letters:
"I wish you to have more strength. I am told you are always crying. Fie! How ugly that is!"
Josephine might well be "always crying." It was the visit to Poland and the love of Countess Walewska that led to her own final downfall. It gave Napoleon the idea of having children, founding a dynasty—in other words, of divorcing his wife.
XXIV.
THE DIVORCE.
Napoleon contemplated a divorce from Josephine, it will be remembered, at an early period of their married life. However, he and she got over their difficulties, and divorce did not finally come from any rupture of affection. I find it hard to decide what Napoleon really felt at this period of his life. His present apologist sees in his conduct in this, as in almost every other circumstance, nothing but sublime unselfishness; sublime unselfishness was not in Napoleon's nature. On the other hand, even Taine admits that he had sensibility, though he contends that it was a sensibility rather of nerves than of heart. At all events, there are plenty of passages to show that he did not separate from Josephine without considerable wrench of feeling. When it was suggested to him in 1804 that he ought to look for an heir, he cried out:
"It is from a feeling of justice that I will not divorce my wife. My interests, perhaps the interests of the system, demand that I should marry again. But I have said to myself: 'Why should I put away that good woman simply because I have become greater?' No, it is beyond me. I have the heart of a man, I am not the offspring of a tigress. I will not make her unhappy."
Knowing how much of an actor Napoleon was, it is hard to say whether these excellent sentiments were what he really felt, or desired other people to think he felt; or may not these sentences be the compensation he thought himself bound to make for what he was contemplating? One of the subtle tricks of self-love and selfishness is to imagine that verbal remorse is a sufficient justification for unworthy acts. In 1809, however, the decision so often contemplated was finally made, and was the result of the liaison with Madame Walewska. When Napoleon was in the apogee of his power and glory he spent three months at Schönbrunn, and during that period Madame Walewska was his companion. When she became enceinte Napoleon's hesitation came to an end; he determined to have an heir to his throne.There is a curious domestic scene—told with French verve, and also with that slight spice of cynicism which one finds in most things French—when Napoleon was making his final announcements to Josephine. She had fought against the divorce for a long time; but finally, weak-willed, luxury-loving, very much afraid of her husband, she began to yield. When the final moment approached, however, she could not resist bringing into the last action all the batteries of her woman's arts. Napoleon had dined, and then had been left alone with the Empress. M. de Bausset tells what followed:
"Suddenly I heard loud cries proceeding from the Emperor's drawing-room, and emitted by the Empress Josephine. The usher, thinking she was ill, was about to open the door, but I prevented him, saying that the Emperor would call for help if he thought right. I was standing near the door when Napoleon opened it, and, perceiving me, said hastily: 'Come in, Bausset, and shut the door.' I entered the drawing-room and saw the Empress lying on the floor uttering piercing cries. 'I shall not survive it,' she kept repeating. Napoleon said to me: 'Are you strong enough to lift Josephine and carry her to her apartments, by the private staircase communicating with her room, so that she may have all the care and attention her state requires?' With Napoleon's help I raised her in my arms, and he, taking a candlestick off the table, lighted me and opened the door of the drawing-room. When we reached the head of the staircase, I pointed out to him that it was too narrow for me to carry her down without running the risk of a fall. Napoleon called an attendant, gave him the candle, and himself took hold of Josephine's legs to help me to descend more gently. When she felt the efforts I was making to save myself from falling, she said, in a low voice: 'You are holding me too tightly' I then saw that I need be under no uneasiness as to her health, and that she had not lost consciousness for a moment. The Emperor's agitation and anxiety were extreme. In his trouble he told me the cause of all that had occurred. His words came out with difficulty and without sequence, his voice was choked and his eyes full of tears. He must have been beside himself to give so many details to me, who was so far from his councils and his confidence. The whole scene did not last more than seven or eight minutes."
M. Lévy does not give the curious scene which took place when the divorce was being decided on; it is one of the instances in which Napoleon exhibited that extraordinary sensibility which is one of the contradictions in his strange make-up. I quote the passage as given by Taine:
"He tosses about a whole night, and laments like a woman; he melts and embraces Josephine; he is weaker than she. 'My poor Josephine, I can never leave you;' folding her in his arms he declares that she shall not quit him; he abandons himself wholly to the sensation of the moment; she must undress at once, sleep by his side, and he weeps over her. 'Literally,' she says, 'he soaked the bed with his tears.'"
On the evening of December 15, 1809, Napoleon and his wife signed the deed annulling the marriage. "The Emperor," says Mollien, "was no less moved than she, and his tears were genuine."
XXV.
AFTER THE DIVORCE.
And it is in the few days after the divorce that for the first time in all that strangely busy career—every moment of which was devoted to work in some form or another—Napoleon for the first time lets sentiment get the better of him, and falls into the idle languor of regret and grief. He left the Tuileries on the very night of the divorce "as if he could not endure the solitude," and went "almost alone" to the Trianon. He spent three days there all by himself, refusing to see even his Ministers, the first and the last time in all his reign when business was suspended; and two or three days after the divorce he could not keep away from Josephine, and went to visit her at Malmaison, whither she had retired. She returned the call a few days later by coming to the Trianon; indeed, the position had that mixture of tragedy and comedy which one sees in those dramas that set forth the strange surprises that the divorce laws of America sometimes produce.
"During dinner," says Mademoiselle Avrillon, "the Empress seemed happy and quite at ease, and any one would have thought that their Majesties had never parted."
He also provided a magnificent income for her—eighty thousand pounds, afterwards increased to one hundred thousand pounds. Poor Josephine was not thereby saved from herself; as in the days of her married life she continued to make debts, and over and over again Napoleon had to remonstrate with her. Once he sent M. Mollien as the messenger of his reproaches.
On his return from Malmaison the Minister informed the Emperor of Josephine's wretchedness at having displeased him; Napoleon interrupted Mollien, exclaiming, "You ought not to have made her cry!"
Josephine, on her side, asked after the child which Napoleon had by his new wife, had it brought to see her; and, finally, when disaster came upon her husband, offered to rejoin him once more. She died in 1814, before his final overthrow.
There have been many better women than Josephine, but the same softness, womanliness, weaknesses that gave her the empire she once held over Napoleon's heart, have enabled her to retain a tender place in the memory of posterity. She is one of the popular heroines of the great historic drama.
- ↑ "An Aide-de-Camp of Napoleon: Memoirs of General Count de Ségur." Translated by H. A. Patchett Martin. (London : Hutchinson.) "Napoleon and the Fair Sex." Translated from the French of Frédéric Masson. (London : Heinemann.) " The Private Life of Napoleon." Translated from the French of Arthur Lévy. (London : Bentley.)