The Life of Napoleon I (Complete)

This seems consonant with what we know of Gourgaud's character: frank, volatile, and sensitive, he could never have long sustained a policy of literary and diplomatic deceit. He was not a compound of Chatterton and Fouché. His "Journal" is the artless outpouring of wounded vanity and brings us close to the heart of the hero-worshipper and his hero. At times the idol falls and is shivered but love places it on the shrine again and again, until the fourth anniversary of Brienne finds the spell broken. Even before he leaves St. Helena the old fascination is upon him once more; and then Napoleon seeks to utilize his devotion for the purpose of a political mission. Gourgaud declines the rôle of agent, pledges his word to the Governor, and keeps it; but, thanks to[pg.564] British officialism or the seductions of the Opposition, hero-worship once more gains the day and enrolls him beside Las Cases and Montholon. This we believe to be the real Gourgaud, a genuine, lovable, but flighty being, as every page of his "Journal" shows.

One cannot but notice in passing the extraordinary richness of St. Helena literature. Nearly all the exiles kept diaries or memoirs, or wrote them when they returned to Europe. And, on the other hand, of all the 10,000 Britons whom Napoleon detained in France for eleven years, not one has left a record that is ever read to-day. Consequently, while the woes of Napoleon have been set forth in every civilized tongue, the world has forgotten the miseries causelessly inflicted on 10,000 English families. The advantages possessed by a memoir-writing nation over one that is but half articulate could not be better illustrated. For the dumb Britons not a single tear is ever shed; whereas the voluble inmates of Longwood used their pens to such effect that half the world still believes them to have been bullied twice a week by Lowe, plied with gifts of poisoned coffee, and nearly eaten up by rats at night. On this last topic we are treated to tales of part of a slave's leg being eaten off while he slept at Longwood—nay, of a horse's leg also being gnawed away at night—so that our feelings are divided between pity for the sufferers and envy at the soundness of their slumbers.

Longwood was certainly far from being a suitable abode; but a word from Napoleon would have led to the erection of the new house on a site that he chose to indicate. The materials had all been brought from England; but the word was not spoken until a much later time; and the inference is inevitable that he preferred to remain where he was so that he could represent himself as lodged in cette grange insalubre.^[582][pg.565] The third of the Longwood household to depart was the surgeon, OMeara. The conduct of this British officer in facilitating Napoleon's secret correspondence has been so fully exposed by Forsyth and Seaton that we may refer our readers to their works for proofs of his treachery. Gourgaud's "Journal" reveals the secret influence that seduced him. Chancing once to refer to the power of money over Englishmen, Napoleon remarked that that was why we did not want him to draw sums from Europe, and continued: "Le docteur n'est si bien pour moi que depuis que je lui donne mon argent. Ah! j'en suis bien sûr, de celui-là!"^[583] This disclosure enables us to understand why the surgeon, after being found out and dismissed from the service, sought to blacken the character of Sir Hudson Lowe by every conceivable device. The wonder is that he succeeded in imposing his version of facts on a whole generation.

The next physician who resided at Longwood, Dr. Stokoe, was speedily cajoled into disobeying the British regulations and underwent official disgrace. An attempt was then made, through Montholon, to bribe his successor, Dr. Verling, who indignantly repelled it and withdrew from his duty.^[584]

There can be no doubt that Napoleon found pleasure in these intrigues. In his last interview with Stürmer, the Austrian Commissioner at St. Helena, Gourgaud said, in reference to this topic: "However unhappy he [Napoleon] is here, he secretly enjoys the importance attached to his custody, the interest that the Powers take in it, and the care taken to collect his least words." Napoleon also once remarked to Gourgaud that it was better to be at St. Helena than as he was at Elba.^[585] Of the same general[pg.566] tenour are his striking remarks, reported by Las Cases at the close of his first volume:

In terseness of phrase, vividness of fancy, and keenness of insight into the motives that sway mankind, this passage is worthy of Napoleon. He knew that his exile at St. Helena would dull the memory of the wrongs which he had done to the cause of liberty, and that from that lonely peak would go forth the legend of the new Prometheus chained to the rock by the kings and torn every day by the ravening vulture. The world had rejected his gospel of force; but would it not thrill responsive to the gospel of pity now to be enlisted in his behalf? His surmise was amazingly true. The world was thrilled. The story worked wonders, not directly for him, but for his fame and his dynasty. The fortunes of his race began to revive from the time when the popular imagination transfigured Napoleon the Conqueror into Napoleon the Martyr. Viewed in this light, and thrown up into telling relief against the sinister policy of the Holy Alliance of the monarchs, the dreary years spent at St. Helena were not the least successful of his career. Without them there could have been no second Napoleonic Empire.

Not that his life there was a "long-drawn agony." His health was fairly good. There were seasons of something like enjoyment, when he gave himself up to outdoor recreations. Such a time was the latter part of 1819 and the first half of 1820: we may call it the Indian summer of his life, for he was then possessed with a passion for gardening. Lightly clad and protected by a [pg.567] broad-brimmed hat, he went about, sometimes spade in hand, superintending various changes in the grounds at Longwood and around the new house which was being erected for him hard by. Or at other times he used the opportunity afforded by the excavations to show how infantry might be so disposed on a hastily raised slope as to bring a terrific fire to bear on attacking cavalry. Marshalling his followers at dawn by the sound of a bell, he made them all, counts, valets, and servants, dig trenches as if for the front ranks, and throw up the earth for the rear ranks: then, taking his stand in front, as the shortest man, and placing the tallest at the rear (his Swiss valet, Noverraz), he triumphantly showed how the horsemen might be laid low by the rolling volleys of ten ranks.^[586] In May or June he took once more to horse exercise, and for a time his health benefited from all this activity. His relations with the Governor were peaceful, if not cordial, and the limits were about this time extended.

Indoors there were recreations other than work at the Memoirs. He often played chess and billiards, at the latter using his hand instead of the cue! Dinner was generally at a very late hour, and afterwards he took pleasure in reading aloud. Voltaire was the favourite author, and Montholon afterwards confessed to Lord Holland that the same plays, especially "Zaïre," were read rather too often.

During this same halcyon season two priests, who had been selected by the Bonapartes, arrived in the[pg.568] island, as also a Corsican doctor, Antommarchi. Napoleon was disappointed with all three. The doctor, though a learned anatomist, knew little of chemistry, and at an early interview with Napoleon passed a catechism on this subject so badly that he was all but chased from the room. The priests came off little better. The elder of them, Buonavita by name, had lived in Mexico, and could talk of little else: he soon fell ill, and his stay in St. Helena was short. The other, a Corsican named Vignali, having neither learning, culture, nor dialectical skill, was tolerated as a respectable adjunct to the household, but had little or no influence over the master. This is to be regretted on many grounds, and partly because his testimony throws no light on Napoleon's religious views.

Here we approach a problem that perhaps can never be cleared up. Unfathomable on many sides of his nature, Napoleon is nowhere more so than when he confronts the eternal verities. That he was a convinced and orthodox Catholic few will venture to assert. At Elba he said to Lord Ebrington: "Nous ne savons d'où nous venons, ce que nous deviendrons": the masses ought to have some "fixed point of faith whereon to rest their thoughts."—"Je suis Catholique parce que mon père l'étoit, et parce que c'étoit la religion de la France." He also once or twice expressed to Campbell scorn of the popular creed: and during his last voyage, as we have seen, he showed not the slightest interest in the offer of a priest at Funchal to accompany him. At St. Helena the party seems to have limited the observances of religion to occasional reading of the Bible. When Mme. Montholon presented her babe to the Emperor, he teasingly remarked that Las Cases was the most suitable person to christen the infant; to which the mother at once replied that Las Cases was not a good enough Christian for that.

Judging from the entries in Gourgaud's "Journal," this young General pondered more than the rest on religious questions; and to him Napoleon unbosomed his thoughts.—Matter,[pg.569] he says, is everywhere and pervades everything; life, thought, and the soul itself are but properties of matter, and death ends all. When Gourgaud points to the majestic order of the universe as bearing witness to a Creator, Napoleon admits that he believes in "superior intelligences": he avers that he would believe in Christianity if it had been the original and universal creed: but then the Mohammedans "follow a religion simpler and more adapted to their morality than ours." In ten years their founder conquered half the world, which Christianity took three hundred years to accomplish. Or again, he refers to the fact that Laplace, Monge, Berthollet, and Lagrange were all atheists, though they did not proclaim the fact; as for himself, he finds the idea of God to be natural; it has existed at all times and among all peoples. But once or twice he ends this vague talk with the remarkable confession that the sight of myriad deaths in war has made him a materialist. "Matter is everything."—"Vanity of vanities!"^[588]

Mirrored as these dialogues are in the eddies of Gourgaud's moods, they may tinge his master's theology with too much of gloom: but, after all, they are by far the most lifelike record of Napoleon's later years, and they show us a nature dominated by the tangible. As for belief in the divine Christ, there seems not a trace. A report has come down to us, enshrined in Newman's prose, that Napoleon once discoursed of the ineffable greatness of Christ, contrasting His enduring hold on the hearts of men with the evanescent rule of Alexander and Cæsar. One hopes that the words were uttered; but they conflict with Napoleon's undoubted statements. Sometimes he spoke in utter uncertainty; at others, as one who wished to believe in Christianity and might perhaps be converted. But in the political testament designed for his son, the only reference to religion is of the diplomatic description that we should expect from the author[pg.570] of the "Concordat": "Religious ideas have more influence than certain narrow-minded philosophers are willing to believe: they are capable of rendering great services to Humanity. By standing well with the Pope, an influence is still maintained over the consciences of a hundred millions of men."

Equally vague was Napoleon's own behaviour as his end drew nigh. For some time past a sharp internal pain—the stab of a penknife, he called it—had warned him of his doom; in April, 1821, when vomiting and prostration showed that the dread ancestral malady was drawing on apace, he bade the Abbé Vignali prepare the large dining-room of Longwood as a chapelle ardente; and, observing a smile on Antommarchi's face, the sick man hotly rebuked his affectation of superiority. Montholon, on his return to England, informed Lord Holland that extreme unction was administered before the end came, Napoleon having ordered that this should be done as if solely on Montholon's responsibility, and that the priest, when questioned on the subject, was to reply that he had acted on Montholon's orders, without having any knowledge of the Emperor's wishes. It was accordingly administered, but apparently he was insensible at the time.^[589] In his will, also, he declared that he died in communion with the Apostolical Roman Church, in whose bosom he was born. There, then, we must leave this question, shrouded in the mystery that hangs around so much of his life.

The decease of a great man is always affecting: but the death of the hero who had soared to the zenith of military glory and civic achievement seems to touch the very nadir of calamity. Outliving his mighty Empire, girt around by a thousand miles of imprisoning ocean, guarded by his most steadfast enemies, his son a captive at the Court of the Hapsburgs, and his Empress openly faithless, he sinks from sight like some battered derelict. And Nature is more pitiless than man. The Governor[pg.571] urges on him the best medical advice: but he will have none of it. He feels the grip of cancer, the disease which had carried off his father and was to claim the gay Caroline and Pauline. At times he surmises the truth: at others he calls out "le foie" "le foie." Meara had alleged that his pains were due to a liver complaint brought on by his detention at St. Helena; Antommarchi described the illness as gastric fever (febbre gastrica pituitosa); and not until Dr. Arnott was called in on the 1st of April was the truth fully recognized.

At the close of the month the symptoms became most distressing, aggravated as they were by the refusal of the patient to take medicine or food, or to let himself be moved. On May 4th, at Dr. Arnott's insistence, some calomel was secretly administered and with beneficial results, the patient sleeping and even taking some food. This was his last rally: on the morrow, while a storm was sweeping over the island, and tearing up large trees, his senses began to fail: Montholon thought he heard the words France, armée, tête d'armée, Joséphine: he lingered on insensible for some hours: the storm died down: the sun bathed the island in a flood of glory, and, as it dipped into the ocean, the great man passed away.

By the Governor's orders Dr. Arnott remained in the room until the body could be medically examined—a precaution which, as Montchenu pointed out, would prevent any malicious attempt on the part of the Longwood servants to cause death to appear as the result of poisoning. The examination, conducted in the presence of seven medical men and others, proved that all the organs were sound except the ulcerated stomach; the liver was rather large, but showed no signs of disease; the heart, on the other hand, was rather under the normal size. Far from showing the emaciation that usually results from prolonged inability to take food, the body was remarkably stout—a fact which shows that that tenacious will had its roots in an abnormally firm vitality.^[590][pg.572]

After being embalmed, the body was laid out in state, and all beholders were struck with the serene and beautiful expression of the face: the superfluous flesh sank away after death, leaving the well-proportioned features that moved the admiration of men during the Consulate.

Clad in his favourite green uniform, he fared forth to his resting-place under two large weeping willow trees in a secluded valley: the coffin, surmounted by his sword and the cloak he had worn at Marengo, was borne with full military honours by grenadiers of the 20th and 66th Regiments before a long line of red-coats; and their banners, emblazoned with the names of "Talavera," "Albuera," "Pyrenees," and "Orthez," were lowered in a last salute to our mighty foe. Salvos of artillery and musketry were fired over the grave: the echoes rattled upwards from ridge to ridge and leaped from the splintery peaks far into the wastes of ocean to warn the world beyond that the greatest warrior and administrator of all the ages had sunk to rest.

His ashes were not to remain in that desolate nook: in a clause of his will he expressed the desire that they should rest by the banks of the Seine among the people he had loved so well. In 1840 they were disinterred in presence of Bertrand, Gourgaud, and Marchand, and borne to France. Paris opened her arms to receive the mighty dead; and Louis Philippe, on whom he had[pg.573] once prophesied that the crown of France would one day rest, received the coffin in state under the dome of the Invalides. There he reposes, among the devoted people whom by his superhuman genius he raised to bewildering heights of glory, only to dash them to the depths of disaster by his monstrous errors.

Viewing his career as a whole, it seems just and fair to assert that the fundamental cause of his overthrow is to be found, not in the failings of the French, for they served him with a fidelity that would wring tears of pity from Rhadamanthus; not in the treachery of this or that general or politician, for that is little when set against the loyalty of forty millions of men; but in the character of the man and of his age. Never had mortal man so grand an opportunity of ruling over a chaotic Continent: never had any great leader antagonists so feeble as the rulers who opposed his rush to supremacy. At the dawn of the nineteenth century the old monarchies were effete: insanity reigned in four dynasties, and weak or time-serving counsels swayed the remainder. For several years their counsellors and generals were little better. With the exception of Pitt and Nelson, who were carried off by death, and of Wellington, who had but half an army, Napoleon never came face to face with thoroughly able, well-equipped, and stubborn opponents until the year 1812.

It seems a paradox to say that this excess of good fortune largely contributed to his ruin: yet it is true. His was one of those thick-set combative natures that need timely restraint if their best qualities are to be nurtured and their domineering instincts curbed. Just as the strongest Ministry prances on to ruin if the Opposition gives no effective check, so it was with Napoleon. Had he in his early manhood taken to heart the lessons of adversity, would he have ventured at the same time to fight Wellington in Spain and the Russian climate in the heart of the steppes? Would he have spurned the offers of an advantageous peace made to him from Prague in 1813? Would he have let slip the chance of keeping the[pg.574] "natural frontiers" of France after Leipzig, and her old boundaries, when brought to bay in Champagne? Would he have dared the uttermost at all points at Waterloo? In truth, after his fortieth year was past, the fervid energies of youth hardened in the mould of triumph; and thence came that fatal obstinacy which was his bane at all those crises of his career. For in the meantime the cause of European independence had found worthy champions—smaller men than Napoleon, it is true, but men who knew that his determination to hold out everywhere and yield nothing must work his ruin. Finally, the same clinging to unreal hopes and the same love of fight characterized his life in St. Helena; so that what might have been a time of calm and dignified repose was marred by fictitious clamours and petty intrigues altogether unworthy of his greatness.

For, in spite of his prodigious failure, he was superlatively great in all that pertains to government, the quickening of human energies, and the art of war. His greatness lies, not only in the abiding importance of his best undertakings, but still more in the Titanic force that he threw into the inception and accomplishment of all of them—a force which invests the storm-blasted monoliths strewn along the latter portion of his career with a majesty unapproachable by a tamer race of toilers. After all, the verdict of mankind awards the highest distinction, not to prudent mediocrity that shuns the chance of failure and leaves no lasting mark behind, but to the eager soul that grandly dares, mightily achieves, and holds the hearts of millions even amidst his ruin and theirs. Such a wonder-worker was Napoleon. The man who bridled the Revolution and remoulded the life of France, who laid broad and deep the foundations of a new life in Italy, Switzerland, and Germany, who rolled the West in on the East in the greatest movement known since the Crusades and finally drew the yearning thoughts of myriads to that solitary rock in the South Atlantic, must ever stand in the very forefront of the immortals of human story.

[pg.576]

APPENDIX II

THE BATTLE OF WATERLOO

Some critics have blamed me for underrating the rôle of the Prussians at Waterloo; but after careful study I have concluded that it has been overrated by some recent German writers. We now know that the Prussian advance was retarded by Gneisenau's deep-rooted suspicion of Wellington, and that no direct aid was given to the British left until nearly the end of the battle. Napoleon always held that he could readily have kept off the Prussians at Planchenoit, that the main battle throughout was against Wellington, and that it was decided by the final charge of British cavalry. The Prussians did not wholly capture Planchenoit until the French opposing Wellington were in full flight. But, of course, Blücher's advance and onset made the victory the overwhelming triumph that it was.

An able critic in the "Saturday Review" of May 10, 1902, has charged me with neglecting to say that the French left wing (Foy's and Bachelu's divisions) supported the French cavalry at the close of the great charges. I stated (p. 502) that French infantry was not "at hand to hold the ground which the cavaliers seemed to have won." Let me cite the exact words of General Foy, written in his Journal a few days after the battle (M. Girod de L'Ain's "Vie militaire du General Foy," p. 278): "Alors que la cavalerie française faisait cette longue et terrible charge, le feu de notre artillerie était déjà moins nourri, et notre infanterie ne fit aucun mouvement. Quand la cavalerie fut rentrée, et que l'artillerie anglaise, qui avait cessé de tirer pendant une demi-heure, eut recommencé son feu, on donna ordre aux divisions Foy et Bachelu d'avancer droit aux carrés qui s'y étaient avancés pendant la charge de cavalerie et qui ne s'étaient pas repliés. L'attaque fut formée en colonnes par échelons de régiment, Bachelu formant les échelons les plus avancés. Je tenis par ma gauche à la haie [de Hougoumont]: j'avais sur mon front un bataillon en tirailleurs. Près de joindre les Anglais, nous avons reçu un feu très vif de mitraille et de mousqueterie. C'était une grêle de mort. Les carrés ennemis avaient le premier rang genoux en terre et présentaient une haie[pg.577] de baïonettes. Les colonnes de la 1're division ont pris la fuite les premières: leur mouvement a entrainé celui de mes colonnes. En ce moment j'ai été blessé...."

This shows that the advance of the French infantry was far too late to be of the slightest use to the cavalry. The British lines had been completely re-formed.[pg.578]