The Modern Regime, Volume 1

1143 (return)
[ Burkhardt, "Die Renaissance in Italien," passim.—Stendhal, "Histoire de la peinture en Italie"(introduction), and" Rome, Naples, et Florence," passim.—"Notes par le Comte Chaptal": When these notes are published, many details will be found in them in support of the judgment expressed in this and the following chapters. The psychology of Napoleon as here given is largely confirmed by them.]

1144 (return)
[ Roederer, III, 380 (1802).]

1145 (return)
[ Napoleon uses the French word just which means both fair, justifiable, pertinent, correct, and in music true.]

1146 (return)
[ "Mémorial."]

1147 (return)
[ De Pradt, "Histoire de l'Ambassade dans la grande-duché de Varsovie en 1812," preface, p. X, and 5.]

1148 (return)
[ Roederer, III., 544 (February 24, 1809). Cf. Meneval, "Napoléon et Marie-Louise, souvenirs historiques," I., 210-213.]

1149 (return)
[ Pelet de la Lozère," Opinions de Napoléon au conseil d'état," p.8.—Roederer, III., 380.]

1150 (return)
[ Mollien, "Mémoires," I., 379; II., 230.—Roederer, III., 434. "He is at the head of all things. He governs, administrates, negotiates, works eighteen hours a day, with the clearest and best organized head; he has governed more in three years than kings in a hundred years."—Lavalette, "Mémoires," II., 75. (The words of Napoleon's secretary on Napoleon's labor in Paris, after Leipsic) "He retires at eleven, but gets up at three o'clock in the morning, and until the evening there is not a moment he does not devote to work. It is time this stopped, for he will be used up, and myself before he is."—Gaudin, Duc de Gaëte, "Mémoires," III. (supplement), p.75. Account of an evening in which, from eight o'clock to three in the morning, Napoleon examines with Gaudin his general budget, during seven consecutive hours, without stopping a minute.—Sir Neil Campbell, "Napoléon at Fontainebleau and at Elbe," p.243. "Journal de Sir Neil Campbell a' l'ile d'Elbe": I never saw any man, in any station in life, so personally active and so persistent in his activity. He seems to take pleasure in perpetual motion and in seeing those who accompany him completely tired out, which frequently happened in my case when I accompanied him.. . Yesterday, after having been on his legs from eight in the morning to three in the afternoon, visiting the frigates and transports, even to going down to the lower compartments among the horses, he rode on horseback for three hours, and, as he afterwards said to me, to rest himself."]

1151 (return)
[ The starting-point of the great discoveries of Darwin is the physical, detailed description he made in his study of animals and plants, as living; during the whole course of life, through so many difficulties and subject to a fierce competition. This study is wholly lacking in the ordinary zoologist or botanist, whose mind is busy only with anatomical preparations or collections of plants. In every science, the difficulty lies in describing in a nutshell, using significant examples, the real object, just as it exists before us, and its true history. Claude Bernard one day remarked to me, "We shall know physiology when we are able to follow step by step a molecule of carbon or azote in the body of a dog, give its history, and describe its passage from its entrance to its exit."]

1152 (return)
[ Thibaudeau, "Mémoires sur le Consulat," 204. (Apropos of the tribunate): "They consist of a dozen or fifteen metaphysicians who ought to be flung into the water; they crawl all over me like vermin."]

1153 (return)
[ Madame de Rémusat, I., 115: "He is really ignorant, having read very little and always hastily."—Stendhal, "Mémoires sur Napoleon": "His education was very defective....He knew nothing of the great principles discovered within the past one hundred years," and just those which concern man or society. "For example, he had not read Montesquieu as this writer ought to be read, that is to say, in a way to accept or decidedly reject each of the thirty-one books of the 'Esprit des lois.' He had not thus read Bayle's Dictionary nor the Essay on the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. This ignorance of the Emperor's was not perceptible in conversation, and first, because he led in conversation, and next because with Italian finesse no question put by him, or careless supposition thrown out, ever betrayed that ignorance."—Bourrienne. I., 19, 21: At Brienne, "unfortunately for us, the monks to whom the education of youth was confided knew nothing, and were too poor to pay good foreign teachers.... It is inconceivable how any capable man ever graduated from this educational institution."—Yung, I., 125 (Notes made by him on Bonaparte, when he left the Military Academy): "Very fond of the abstract sciences, indifferent to others, well grounded in mathematics and geography."]

1154 (return)
[ Roederer, III., 544 (March 6, 1809), 26, 563 (Jan. 23, 1811, and Nov. 12, 1813).]

1155 (return)
[ Mollien, I., 348 (a short time before the rupture of the peace of Amiens), III., 16: "It was at the end of January, 1809, that he wanted a full report of the financial situation on the 31st of December, 1808 .... This report was to be ready in two days."—III., 34: "A complete balance sheet of the public treasury for the first six months of 1812 was under Napoleon's eyes at Witebsk, the 11th of August, eleven days after the close of these first six months. What is truly wonderful is, that amidst so many different occupations and preoccupations.... he could preserve such an accurate run of the proceedings and methods of the administrative branches about which he wanted to know at any moment. Nobody had any excuse for not answering him, for each was questioned in his own terms; it is that singular aptitude of the head of the State, and the technical precision of his questions, which alone explains how he could maintain such a remarkable ensemble in an administrative system of which the smallest threads centered in himself."]

1156 (return)
[ 200 years after the death of Napoleon Sir Alfred Ayer thus writes in "LANGUAGE, TRUTH AND LOGIC": 'Actually, we shall see that the only test to which a form of scientific procedure which satisfies the necessary condition of self-consistency is subject, is the test of its success in practice. We are entitled to have faith in our procedure just so long as it does the work it is designed to do—that is, enables us to predict future experience, and so to control our environment.' And on the Purpose of Inquiry: 'The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful. The surest way to end them is to establish beyond question what should be the purpose and the method of philosophical inquiry.' (SR.)]

1157 (return)
[ An expression of Mollien.]

1158 (return)
[ Meneval, I., 210, 213.—Roederer, III., 537, 545 (February and March, 1889): Words of Napoleon: "At this moment it was nearly midnight."—Ibid., IV., 55 (November, 1809). Read the admirable examination of Roederer by Napoleon on the Kingdom of Naples. His queries form a vast systematic and concise network, embracing the entire subject, leaving no physical or moral data, no useful circumstance not seized upon.—Ségur, II., 231: M. De Ségur, ordered to inspect every part of the coast-line, had sent in his report: "'I have seen your reports,' said the First Consul to me, 'and they are exact. Nevertheless, you forgot at Osten two cannon out of the four.'—And he pointed out the place, 'a roadway behind the town.' I went out overwhelmed with astonishment that among thousands of cannon distributed among the mounted batteries or light artillery on the coast, two pieces should not have escaped his recollection."—"Correspondance," letter to King Joseph, August 6, 1806: "The admirable condition of my armies is due to this, that I give attention to them every day for an hour or two, and, when the monthly reports come in, to the state of my troops and fleets, all forming about twenty large volumes. I leave every other occupation to read them over in detail, to see what difference there is between one month and another. I take more pleasure in reading those than any young girl does in a novel."—Cadet de Gassicourt, "Voyage en Autriche"(1809). On his reviews at Schoenbrunn and his verification of the contents of a pontoon-wagon, taken as an example.]

1159 (return)
[ One ancient French league equals app. 4 km. (SR.)]

1160 (return)
[ Bourrienne, II., 116; IV., 238: "He had not a good memory for proper names, words, and dates, but it was prodigious for facts and localities. I remember that, on the way from Paris to Toulon, he called my attention to ten places suitable for giving battle.... It was a souvenir of his youthful travels, and he described to me the lay of the ground, designating the positions he would have taken even before we were on the spot." March 17, 1800, puncturing a card with a pin, he shows Bourrienne the place where he intends to beat Mélas, at San Juliano. "Four months after this I found myself at San Juliano with his portfolio and dispatches, and, that very evening, at Torre-di-Gafolo, a league off, I wrote the bulletin of the battle under his dictation" (of Marengo).—De Ségur, II., 30 (Narrative of M. Daru to M. De Ségur Aug. 13, 1805, at the headquarters of La Manche, Napoleon dictates to M. Daru the complete plan of the campaign against Austria): "Order of marches, their duration, places of convergence or meeting of the columns, attacks in full force, the various movements and mistakes of the enemy, all, in this rapid dictation, was foreseen two months beforehand and at a distance of two hundred leagues.... The battle-field, the victories, and even the very days on which we were to enter Munich and Vienna were then announced and written down as it all turned out.... Daru saw these oracles fulfilled on the designated days up to our entry into Munich; if there were any differences of time and not of results between Munich and Vienna, they were all in our favor."—M. de La Vallette, "Mémoires," II., p. 35. (He was postmaster-general): "It often happened to me that I was not as certain as he was of distances and of many details in my administration on which he was able to set me straight."—On returning from the camp at Bologna, Napoleon encounters a squad of soldiers who had got lost, asks what regiment they belong to, calculates the day they left, the road they took, what distance they should have marched. and then tells them, "You will find your battalion at such a halting place."—At this time, "the army numbered 200,000 men."]

1161 (return)
[ Madame de Rémusat, I., 103, 268.]

1162 (return)
[ Thibaudeau, p.25, I (on the Jacobin survivors): "They are nothing but common artisans, painters, etc., with lively imaginations, a little better instructed than the people, living amongst the people and exercising influence over them."—Madame de Rémusat, I., 271 (on the royalist party): "It is very easy to deceive that party because its starting-point is not what it is, but what it would like to have."—I., 337: "The Bourbons will never see anything except through the Oeil de Boeuf."—Thibaudeau, p.46: "Insurrections and emigrations are skin diseases; terrorism is an internal malady." Ibid., 75: "What now keeps the spirit of the army up is the idea soldiers have that they occupy the places of former nobles."]

1163 (return)
[ Thibaudeau, pp.419 to 452. (Both texts are given in separate columns.) And passim, for instance, p.84, the following portrayal of the decadal system of worship under the Republic: "It was imagined that citizens could be got together in churches, to freeze with cold and hear, read, and study laws, in which there was already but little fun for those who executed them." Another example of the way in which his ideas expressed themselves through imagery (Pelet de la Lozère, p. 242): "I am not satisfied with the customs regulations on the Alps. They show no life. We don't hear the rattle of crown pieces pouring into the public treasury." To appreciate the vividness of Napoleon's expressions and thought the reader must consult, especially, the five or six long conversations, noted on the very evening of the day they occurred by Roederer; the two or three conversations likewise noted by Miot de Melito; the scenes narrated by Beugnot; the notes of Pelet de la Lozère and by Stanislas de Girardin, and nearly the entire volume by Thibaudeau.]

1164 (return)
[ Pelet de la Lozère, 63, 64. (On the physiological differences between the English and the French.)—Madame de Rémusat, I., 273, 392: "You, Frenchmen, are not in earnest about anything, except, perhaps, equality, and even here you would gladly give this up if you were sure of being the foremost.... The hope of advancement in the world should be cherished by everybody.... Keep your vanity always alive The severity of the republican government would have worried you to death. What started the Revolution? Vanity. What will end it? Vanity, again. Liberty is merely a pretext."—III., 153 "Liberty is the craving of a small and privileged class by nature, with faculties superior to the common run of men; this class, therefore, may be put under restraint with impunity; equality, on the contrary, catches the multitude."—Thibaudeau, 99: "What do I care for the opinions and cackle of the drawing-room? I never heed it. I pay attention only to what rude peasants say." His estimates of certain situations are masterpieces of picturesque concision. "Why did I stop and sign the preliminaries of Leoben? Because I played vingt-et-un and was satisfied with twenty." His insight into (dramatic) character is that of the most sagacious critic. "The 'Mahomet' of Voltaire is neither a prophet nor an Arab, only an impostor graduated out of the École Polytechnique."—"Madame de Genlis tries to define virtue as if she were the discoverer of it."—(On Madame de Staël): "This woman teaches people to think who never took to it, or have forgotten how."—(On Chateaubriand, one of whose relations had just been shot): "He will write a few pathetic pages and read them aloud in the faubourg Saint-Germain; pretty women will shed tears, and that will console him."—(On Abbé Delille): "He is wit in its dotage."—(On Pasquier and Molé): "I make the most of one, and made the other."—Madame de Rémusat, II., 389, 391, 394, 399, 402; III., 67.]

1165 (return)
[ Bourrienne, II., 281, 342: "It pained me to write official statements under his dictation, of which each was an imposture." He always answered: "My dear sir, you are a simpleton—you understand nothing!"—Madame de Rémusat, II., 205, 209.]

1166 (return)
[ See especially the campaign bulletins for 1807, so insulting to the king and queen of Prussia, but, owing to that fact, so well calculated to excite the contemptuous laughter and jeers of the soldiers.]

1167 (return)
[ In "La Correspondance de Napoleon," published in thirty-two volumes, the letters are arranged under dates.—In his '"Correspondance avec Eugène, vice-roi d'Italie," they are arranged under chapters; also with Joseph, King of Naples and afterwards King of Spain. It is easy to select other chapters not less instructive: one on foreign affairs (letters to M. de Champagny, M de Talleyrand, and M. de Bassano); another on the finances (letters to M. Gaudin and to M. Mollien); another on the navy (letters to Admiral Decrès); another on military administration (letters to General Clarke); another on the affairs of the Church (letters to M. Portalis and to M. Bigot de Préameneu); another on the Police (letters to Fouché), etc.—Finally, by dividing and distributing his letters according as they relate to this or that grand enterprise, especially to this or that military campaign, a third classification could be made.—In this way we can form a concept of the vastness of his positive knowledge, also of the scope of his intellect and talents. Cf. especially the following letters to Prince Eugène, June II, 1806 (on the supplies and expenses of the Italian army); June 1st and 18th, 1806 (on the occupation of Dalmatia, and on the military situation, offensive and defensive). To Gen. Dejean, April 28, 1806 (on the war supplies); June 27, 1806 (on the fortifications of Peschiera) July 20, 1806 (on the fortifications of Wesel and of Juliers).—"Mes souvenirs sur Napoleon", p. 353 by the Count Chaptal: "One day, the Emperor said to me that he would like to organize a military school at Fontainebleau; he then explained to me the principal features of the establishment, and ordered me to draw up the necessary articles and bring them to him the next day. I worked all night and they were ready at the appointed hour. He read them over and pronounced them correct, but not complete. He bade me take a seat and then dictated to me for two or three hours a plan which consisted of five hundred and seventeen articles. Nothing more perfect, in my opinion, ever issued from a man's brain.—At another time, the Empress Josephine was to take the waters at Aix-la-Chapelle, and the Emperor summoned me. 'The Empress,' said he, 'is to leave to-morrow morning. She is a good-natured, easy-going woman and must have her route and behavior marked out for her. Write it down.' He then dictated instructions to me on twenty-one large sheets of paper, in which everything she was to say and to do was designated, even the questions and replies she was to make to the authorities on the way."]

1168 (return)
[ One French league equals approximately 4 km. 70,000 square leagues then equal 1,120,000 km.2, or 400,000 square miles or 11% of the United States but 5 times the size of Great Britain. (SR.)]

1169 (return)
[ Cf. in the "Correspondance" the letters dated at Schoenbrunn near Vienna, during August and September, 1809, and especially: the great number of letters and orders relating to the English expeditions to Walcheren; the letters to chief-judge Régnier and to the arch-chancellor Cambacérès on expropriations for public benefit (Aug. 21, Sept. 7 and 29); the letters and orders to M. de Champagny to treat with Austria (Aug. 19, and Sept. 10, 15, 18, 22, and 23); the letters to Admirable Decrès, to despatch naval expeditions to the colonies (Aug.17 and Sept. 26); the letter to Mollien on the budget of expenditure (Aug. 8); the letter to Clarke on the statement of guns in store throughout the empire (Sept. 14). Other letters, ordering the preparation of two treatises on military art (Oct. 1), two works on the history and encroachments of the Holy See (Oct. 3), prohibiting conferences at Saint-Sulpice (Sept. 15), and forbidding priests to preach outside the churches (Sept. 24).—From Schoenbrunn, he watches the details of public works in France and Italy; for instance, the letters to M. le Montalivet (Sept.30), to send an auditor post to Parma, to have a dyke repaired at once, and (Oct. 8) to hasten the building of several bridges and quays at Lyons.]

1170 (return)
[ He says himself; "I always transpose my theme in many ways."]

1171 (return)
[ Madame de Rémusat, I., 117, 120. "1 heard M. de Talleyrand exclaim one day, some what out of humor, 'This devil of a man misleads you in all directions. Even his passions escape you, for he finds some way to counterfeit them, although they really exist.'"—For example, immediately prior to the violent confrontation with Lord Whitworth, which was to put an end to the treaty of Amiens, he was chatting and amusing himself with the women and the infant Napoleon, his nephew, in the gayest and most unconcerned manner: "He is suddenly told that the company had assembled. His countenance changes like that of an actor when the scene shifts. He seems to turn pale at will and his features contract"; he rises, steps up precipitately to the English ambassador, and fulminates for two hours before two hundred persons. (Hansard's Parliamentary History, vol. XXVI, dispatches of Lord Whitworth, pp. 1798, 1302, 1310.)—"He often observes that the politician should calculate every advantage that could be gained by his defects." One day, after an explosion he says to Abbé de Pradt: "You thought me angry! you are mistaken. Anger with me never mounts higher than here (pointing to his neck)."]

1172 (return)
[ Roederer, III. (The first days of Brumaire, year VIII.)]

1173 (return)
[ Bourrienne, III., 114.]

1174 (return)
[ Bourrienne, II., 228. (Conversation with Bourrienne in the park at Passeriano.)]

1175 (return)
[ Ibid., II., 331. (Written down by Bourrienne the same evening.)]

1176 (return)
[ Madame de Rémusat, I., 274.—De Ségur, II., 459. (Napoleon's own words on the eve of the battle of Austerlitz): "Yes, if I had taken Acre, I would have assumed the turban, I would have put the army in loose breeches; I would no longer have exposed it, except at the last extremity; I would have made it my sacred battalion, my immortals. It is with Arabs, Greeks, and Armenians that I would have ended the war against the Turks. Instead of one battle in Moravia I would have gained a battle of Issus; I would have made myself emperor of the East, and returned to Paris by the way of Constantinople."—De Pradt, p.19 (Napoleon's own words at Mayence, September, 1804): "Since two hundred years there is nothing more to do in Europe; it is only in the East that things can be carried out on a grand scale."]

1177 (return)
[ Madame de Rémusat, I., 407.—Miot de Melito, II., 214 (a few weeks after his coronation): "There will be no repose in Europe until it is under one head, under an Emperor, whose officers would be kings, who would distribute kingdoms to his lieutenants, who would make one of them King of Italy, another King of Bavaria, here a landmann of Switzerland, and here a stadtholder of Holland, etc."]

1178 (return)
[ "Correspondance de Napoleon I.," vol. XXX., 550, 558. (Memoirs dictated by Napoleon at Saint Hélène.)—Miot de Melito, II., 290.—D'Hausonvillc, "l'Église Romaine et le Premier Empire, passim.— Mémorial." "Paris would become the capital of the Christian world, and I would have governed the religious world as well as the political world."]

1179 (return)
[ De Pradt, 23.]

1180 (return)
[ "Mémoires et Mémorial." "It was essential that Paris should become the unique capital, not to be compared with other capitals. The masterpieces of science and of art, the museums, all that had illustrated past centuries, were to be collected there. Napoleon regretted that he could not transport St. Peter's to Paris; the meanness of Notre Dame dissatisfied him."]

1181 (return)
[ Villemain, "Souvenir contemporaines," I., 175. Napoleon's statement to M. de Narbonne early in March, 1812, and repeated by him to Villemain an hour afterwards. The wording is at second hand and merely a very good imitation, while the ideas are substantially Napoleon's. Cf. his fantasies about Italy and the Mediterranean, equally exaggerated ("Correspondence," XXX., 548), and an admirable improvisation on Spain and the colonies at Bayonne.—De Pradt. "Mémoires sur les revolutions d'Espagne," p.130: "Therefore Napoleon talked, or rather poetised; he Ossianized for a long time... like a man full of a sentiment which oppressed him, in an animated, picturesque style, and with the impetuosity, imagery, and originality which were familiar to him,... on the vast throne of Mexico and Peru, on the greatness of the sovereigns who should possess them.. .. and on the results which these great foundations would have on the universe. I had often heard him, but under no circumstances had I ever heard him develop such a wealth and compass of imagination. Whether it was the richness of his subject, or whether his faculties had become excited by the scene he conjured up, and all the chords of the instrument vibrated at once, he was sublime."]

1182 (return)
[ Roederer, III., 541 (February 2, 1809): "I love power. But I love it as an artist.... I love it as a musician loves his violin, for the tones, chords, and harmonies he can get out of it."]

CHAPTER II. HIS IDEAS, PASSIONS AND INTELLIGENCE.

I. Intense Passions.

On taking a near view of the contemporaries of Dante and Michael Angelo, we find that they differ from us more in character than in intellect.1201 With us, three hundred years of police and of courts of justice, of social discipline and peaceful habits, of hereditary civilization, have diminished the force and violence of the passions natural to Man. In Italy, in the Renaissance epoch, they were still intact; human emotions at that time were keener and more profound than at the present day; the appetites were ardent and more unbridled; man's will was more impetuous and more tenacious; whatever motive inspired, whether pride, ambition, jealousy, hatred, love, envy, or sensuality, the inward spring strained with an energy and relaxed with a violence that has now disappeared. All these energies reappear in this great survivor of the fifteenth century; in him the play of the nervous machine is the same as with his Italian ancestors; never was there, even with the Malatestas and the Borgias, a more sensitive and more impulsive intellect, one capable of such electric shocks and explosions, in which the roar and flashes of tempest lasted longer and of which the effects were more irresistible. In his mind no idea remains speculative and pure; none is a simple transcript of the real, or a simple picture of the possible; each is an internal eruption, which suddenly and spontaneously spends itself in action; each darts forth to its goal and would reach it without stopping were it not kept back and restrained by force1202 Sometimes, the eruption is so sudden, that the restraint does not come soon enough. One day, in Egypt,1203 on entertaining a number of French ladies at dinner, he has one of them, who was very pretty and whose husband he had just sent off to France, placed alongside of him; suddenly, as if accidentally, he overturns a pitcher of water on her, and, under the pretence of enabling her to rearrange her wet dress, he leads her into another room where he remains with her a long time, too long, while the other guests seated at the table wait quietly and exchange glances. Another day, at Paris, toward the epoch of the Concordat,1204 he says to Senator Volney: "France wants a religion." Volney replies in a frank, sententious way, "France wants the Bourbons." Whereupon he gives Volney a kick in the stomach and he falls unconscious; on being moved to a friend's house, he remains there ill in bed for several days.—No man is more irritable, so soon in a passion; and all the more because he purposely gives way to his irritation; for, doing this just at the right moment, and especially before witnesses, it strikes terror; it enables him to extort concessions and maintain obedience. His explosions of anger, half-calculated, half-involuntary, serve him quite as much as they relieve him, in public as well as in private, with strangers as with intimates, before constituted bodies, with the Pope, with cardinals, with ambassadors, with Talleyrand, with Beugnot, with anybody that comes along,1205 whenever he wishes to set an example or "keep the people around him on the alert." The public and the army regard him as impassible; but, apart from the battles in which he wears a mask of bronze, apart from the official ceremonies in which he assumes a necessarily dignified air, impression and expression with him are almost always confounded, the inward overflowing in the outward, the action, like a blow, getting the better of him. At Saint Cloud, caught by Josephine in the arms of another woman, he runs after the unlucky interrupter in such a way that "she barely has time to escape";1206 and again, that evening, keeping up his fury so as to put her down completely, "he treats her in the most outrageous manner, smashing every piece of furniture that comes in his way." A little before the Empire, Talleyrand, a great mystifier, tells Berthier that the First Consul wanted to assume the title of king. Berthier, in eager haste, crosses the drawing-room full of company, accosts the master of the house and, with a beaming smile, "congratulates him."1207 At the word king, Bonaparte's eyes flash. Grasping Berthier by the throat, he pushes him back against the wall, exclaiming, "You fool! who told you to come here and stir up my bile in this way? Another time don't come on such errands."—Such is the first impulse, the instinctive action, to pounce on people and seize them by the throat; we divine under each sentence, and on every page he writes, out-bursts and assaults of this description, the physiognomy and intonation of a man who rushes forward and knocks people down. Accordingly, when dictating in his cabinet, "he strides up and down the room," and, "if excited," which is often the case, "his language consists of violent imprecations, and even of oaths, which are suppressed in what is written."1208 But these are not always suppressed, for those who have seen the original minutes of his correspondence on ecclesiastical affairs find dozens of them, the b..., the p... and the swearwords of the coarsest kind.1209

Never was there such impatient touchiness. "When dressing himself,1210 he throws on the floor or into the fire any part of his attire which does not suit him.... On gala-days and on grand ceremonial occasions his valets are obliged to agree together when they shall seize the right moment to put some thing on him... He tears off or breaks whatever causes him the slightest discomfort, while the poor valet who has been the means of it meets with a violent and positive proof of his anger. No thought was ever more carried away by its own speed. "His handwriting, when he tries to write, "is a mass of disconnected and undecipherable signs;1211 the words lack one-half of their letters." On reading it over himself, he cannot tell what it means. At last, he becomes almost incapable of producing a handwritten letter, while his signature is a mere scrawl. He accordingly dictates, but so fast that his secretaries can scarcely keep pace with him: on their first attempt the perspiration flows freely and they succeed in noting down only the half of what he says. Bourrienne, de Meneval, and Maret invent a stenography of their own, for he never repeats any of his phrases; so much the worse for the pen if it lags behind, and so much the better if a volley of exclamations or of oaths gives it a chance to catch up.—Never did speech flow and overflow in such torrents, often without either discretion or prudence, even when the outburst is neither useful nor creditable the reason is that both spirit and intellect are charged to excess subject to this inward pressure the improvisator and polemic, under full headway,1212 take the place of the man of business and the statesman.

"With him," says a good observer,1213 "talking is a prime necessity, and, assuredly, among the prerogatives of high rank, he ranks first that of speaking without interruption."

Even at the Council of State he allows himself to run on, forgetting the business on hand; he starts off right and left with some digression or demonstration, some invective or other, for two or three hours at a stretch,1214 insisting over and over again, bent on convincing or prevailing, and ending in demanding of the others if he is not right, "and, in this case, never failing to find that all have yielded to the force of his arguments." On reflection, he knows the value of an assent thus obtained, and, pointing to his chair, he observes:

"It must be admitted that it is easy to be brilliant when one is in that seat!"

Nevertheless he has enjoyed his intellectual exercise and given way to his passion, which controls him far more than he controls it.

"My nerves are very irritable," he said of himself, "and when in this state were my pulse not always regular I should risk going crazy."1215

The tension of accumulated impressions is often too great, and it ends in a physical break-down. Strangely enough in so great a warrior and with such a statesman, "it is not infrequent, when excited, to see him shed tears." He who has looked upon thousands of dying men, and who has had thousands of men slaughtered, "sobs," after Wagram and after Bautzen,1216 at the couch of a dying comrade. "I saw him," says his valet, "weep while eating his breakfast, after coming from Marshal Lannes's bedside; big tears rolled down his cheeks and fell on his plate." It is not alone the physical sensation, the sight of a bleeding, mangled body, which thus moves him acutely and deeply; for a word, a simple idea, stings and penetrates almost as far. Before the emotion of Dandolo, who pleads for Venice his country, which is sold to Austria, he is agitated and his eyes moisten.1217 Speaking of the capitulation of Baylen, at a full meeting of the Council of State,1218 his voice trembles, and "he gives way to his grief, his eyes even filling with tears." In 1806, setting out for the army and on taking leave of Josephine, he has a nervous attack which is so severe as to bring on vomiting.1219 "We had to make him sit down," says an eye-witness, "and swallow some orange water; he shed tears, and this lasted a quarter of an hour." The same nervous and stomachic crisis came on in 1808, on deciding on the divorce; he tosses about a whole night, and laments like a woman; he melts, and embraces Josephine; he is weaker than she is: "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 alongside of him, and he weeps over her; "literally," she says, "he soaked the bed with his tears."—Evidently, in such an organism, however powerful the superimposed regulator, there is a risk of the equilibrium being destroyed. He is aware of this, for he knows himself well; he is afraid of his own nervous sensibility, the same as of an easily frightened horse; at critical moments, at Berezina, he refuses to receive the bad news which might excite this, and, on the informer's insisting on it, he asks him again,1220 "Why, sir, do you want to disturb me?"—Nevertheless, in spite of his precautions, he is twice taken unawares, at times when the peril was alarming and of a new kind; he, so clear headed and so cool under fire, the boldest of military heroes and the most audacious of political adventurers, quails twice in a parliamentary storm and again in a popular crisis. On the 18th of Brumaire, in the Corps Législatif, "he turned pale, trembled, and seemed to lose his head at the shouts of outlawry.... they had to drag him out.... they even thought for a moment that he was going to faint."1221 After the abdication at Fontainebleau, on encountering the rage and imprecations which greeted him in Provence, he seemed for some days to be morally shattered; the animal instincts assert their supremacy; he is afraid and makes no attempt at concealment.1222 After borrowing the uniform of an Austrian colonel, the helmet of a Prussian quartermaster, and the cloak of the Russian quartermaster, he still considers that he is not sufficiently disguised. In the inn at Calade, "he starts and changes color at the slightest noise"; the commissaries, who repeatedly enter his room, "find him always in tears." "He wearies them with his anxieties and irresolution"; he says that the French government would like to have him assassinated on the road, refuses to eat for fear of poison, and thinks that he might escape by jumping out of the window. And yet he gives vent to his feelings and lets his tongue run on about himself without stopping, concerning his past, his character, unreservedly, indelicately, trivially; like a cynic and one who is half-crazy; his ideas run loose and crowd each other like the anarchical gatherings of a tumultuous mob; he does not recover his mastery of them until he reaches Fréjus, the end of his journey, where he feels himself safe and protected from any highway assault; then only do they return within ordinary limits and fall back in regular line under the control of the sovereign intellect which, after sinking for a time, revives and resumes its ascendancy.—There is nothing in him so extraordinary as this almost perpetual domination of the lucid, calculating reason; his willpower is still more formidable than his intelligence; before it can obtain the mastery of others it must be master at home. To measure its power, it does not suffice to note its fascinations; to enumerate the millions of souls it captivates, to estimate the vastness of the obstacles it overcomes: we must again, and especially, represent to ourselves the energy and depth of the passions it keeps in check and urges on like a team of prancing, rearing horses—it is the driver who, bracing his arms, constantly restrains the almost ungovernable steeds, who controls their excitement, who regulates their bounds, who takes advantage even of their viciousness to guide his noisy vehicle over precipices as it rushes on with thundering speed. If the pure ideas of the reasoning brain thus maintain their daily supremacy it is due to the vital flow which nourishes them; their roots are deep in his heart and temperament, and those roots which give them their vigorous sap constitute a primordial instinct more powerful than intellect, more powerful even than his will, the instinct which leads him to center everything on himself, in other words egoism.1223