Chapter 24

THE THRESHOLD OF MONARCHY[24]

[Footnote 24: Personal details are abundant in Antommarchi, Montholon, Las Cases and Gourgaud; likewise in the memoirs of the brothers Joseph and Lucien, of the ladies Junot, de Rémusat, de Genlis, and Avrillon, of Barante, Barras, Bourrienne, Chaptal, Chateaubriand, Constant, de Gerardin, Mallet du Pan, Méneval, Thiébault, and Rapp; in Lord Holland's recollections and in the following books: Aubenas: Vie de Josephine; Ducrest: Mémoires sur Josephine; Bouilly: Mes récapitulations; Lamartine: Histoire de la Restauration; Lacretelle: Histoire du Consulat; Bégin: Histoire de Napoléon, and Stenger: La Société Française pendant le Consulat.]

Bonaparte at Maturity -- Ability and Opportunity -- Personal Appearance -- Mind and Manners -- Personal Habits -- The Man of France -- The Consular Court -- The First Consul's Cynicism -- The Feud between Bonapartes and Beauharnais -- Disuse of the Republican Calendar -- The "Genius of Christianity."

Bonaparte was now thirty-four. Thus far he had been not alone the tool of fate nor yet entirely the architect of his own fortunes; he had been both. In Corsica his immature powers had been thwarted by conditions beyond his control. During the Revolution he had caught at every straw which would spare his life and give him a living. Until his marriage he was a soldier of fortune, and fortune made it difficult, either by professional excellence or political scheming, to grasp any of her favors. Accordingly he went without them, suffering, erring, dreaming, philosophizing, observing, and gathering the experience which made him mature at the age when most men are still boys. The observer can descry no revolution in his character when opportunities began to open. There are the same unscrupulous enterprise, the same determination to seize the chances of the hour, the same ability to make the most of circumstances; but the grist is now wheat and the resultant output is flour.

Every success is made introductory to another effort, and his scheming shows the same overweening self-confidence as that of his boyhood. Only now his plans unfold, not in the chill blasts of habitual failure, but in the mild breezes of prospering influences. Many historians proclaim the existence of a great life-scheme, declaring that with satanic powers the boy had prearranged every detail of his manhood. Of this there is not the slightest proof. All that is clear is the continued use, by a great mind tempered in the fires of experience, of ever greater opportunities as they arose. Like all men of commanding ability, Bonaparte belonged, not to one age, but to all ages. His elemental nature made the time and place and conditions in which he actually lived a means to his end, exactly as another century and another environment would have been. Whatever he might have been elsewhere or in another age, he was the personification of France as she was in his time, when he arrived by her desire and connivance at the height of his power.

[Sidenote: 1803]

"Calm on a fiery steed"; thus he desired that the great painter of the time, David, should portray him for posterity. Thus he firmly decided both to appear and to be. But the trustworthy portraits of the time, varying strangely, according to the artist and the mood of the sitter, leave in the composite a quite different impression, expressed by Lamartine as that of a "restless flame." His massive brow jutting over piercing blue eyes, his fine-cut nose, his thin curved lips, his strong short chin, all crowned by scant lank chestnut hair and firmly set on a sturdy neck, gave an impression of manly strength; so, too, did his long bust. But his rather muddy complexion, his short stature, his fine and exquisitely modeled hands and feet, the former dazzling in their clear white skin, the easy comfort of supple hat, loose garments, and wrinkled footwear, were evidence of a nervous temperament, impatient of physical discipline. His voice was ordinarily soft and caressing, but his address was cold and haughty, especially to strangers; when roused, however, his speech was brief, sharp, incisive. His gestures were inelegant and his carriage uneasy; his French was incorrect, and the expression of his face had little or no connection with his language. His smiles were forced, but his laughter was hearty. "Smite brass with a glove," he said, "and it is mute, but strike it with a hammer and you get its ring." So he was almost rude in addressing persons of importance, but he was neither affected nor arrogant. It is the universal testimony of those who saw him that his presence was grave and noble, even majestic. De Staël declared that "more and less than human, comparison was impossible."

His imagination was considered by his poet contemporaries to be prodigious: his word memory was poor, but he recalled figures with accuracy, in numbers and details that were bewildering; and he mastered the reports of finance and statistics in such perfection as to stun his agents and ministers. He had an intimate acquaintance with the persons, lives, and family archives of his officers, and as he paced with his hands behind his back, his head on one side, his lips mechanically working from side to side, he could open any pigeonhole of his memory and dictate facts, figures, orders, suggestions for hours. Enemies like Rémusat and Talleyrand thought him ill-bred, but they admitted that his judgment was infallible, and his capacity for work beyond compare; that, at least, of four men in one. He was an indefatigable reader, especially in the fields of law, philosophy, administration, and war; and in conversation with great specialists he could draw from their stores by apt question the exact explication of difficult points in such a skilful way as to infatuate and fascinate the great men whose society he sought.

Time was his most precious commodity, and for every stage and state of life he had a routine from which he deviated most unwillingly. In these years his days were spent in the careful husbanding of every hour. He rose at seven, summoned his secretaries, and saw both letters and papers opened before his eyes. He read all the former, and heard full reports of the latter, the periodicals, and journals, English and German, as well as French. Meantime he was thoroughly rubbed from head to foot with a silk brush, sprayed with perfumed alcohol, and dried with a sponge. This was varied by frequent baths, for cleanliness, not for invigoration. He then shaved himself before a glass held in position by his body-servant, the Mameluke Rustan. He then slipped quickly into his clothes, all made of the finest, softest materials procurable; his ordinary uniform being the green coat of his chasseurs with a colonel's epaulettes, white nankin breeches, and varnished boots with spurs. Having taken his handkerchief and snuff-box from an attendant, he passed through the door into his office and worked until ten, when a plain breakfast, some simple dish with a single glass of wine, was set before him on a little mahogany table. Having eaten, he took an easy posture on the sofa, spending a short time in reflection, often in light sleep; then rousing himself swiftly, he resumed his dictation, pacing the floor with knitted brow. The late afternoon was devoted to outdoors and the reception of visitors, his dinner hour was seven, the evening was given to relaxation, and at ten he was asleep. When affairs were urgent, as they very often were, he rose again at midnight, took some light refreshment, chocolate or ices, and wrapped in a gown resumed his work with secretaries at hand for the purpose. His labors terminated, he retired once more and fell at once into a sound sleep. When overwhelmed with anxiety he withdrew from the Tuileries to the quiet of Malmaison.

Visionaries might say in vain and beautiful phrase, as they did then and do now, that, having harvested his laurels and exhausted the glories of conquest, he should turn to ameliorate the race, to guide a great nation with the easy reins of popular law in the brilliant paths illuminated by the light of the century. The ideal nation referred to did not exist. It was because the despotism of monarchy and the madness of revolution had shown the utter absence of self-control in the nation--because the French as a whole were avid not of virtue but of pleasure, not of self-denial but of luxury, not of stern morality but of glory--because Bonaparte was a man after their own heart, that he had some justification in his reply to a demand for liberty of the press: "In a moment," said he, "I should have thirty royalist journals and as many Jacobin ones, and I should have to govern with a minority." Many an earnest, liberty-loving French statesman of to-day has had cause in the bitterness of his heart to recall the language. As the ministries in France topple, and a dozen legislative factions, having each its journal, combine for no other purpose than the sport of overturning the government, it is, alas! too often a minority which neither governs nor rules, but guides the public career by a (p.~255) kind of sufferance. This occurs because control of the government, even for a short time, means the autocratic control of power, patronage, and honor, as it was arranged by Bonaparte for his own purposes.

There is no doubt that the First Consul realized what he had done and whither he was going. The conspiracies had seriously affected his nerves; more and more he withdrew from the society of all but a few confidants, and surrounded himself with a more rigid etiquette. Mme. Bonaparte gathered to the Tuileries ever larger numbers of the fortune-hunting nobility, who hoped that Bonaparte's elevation would yet prove a stepping-stone to restore the Bourbons. These elegant persons laughed in their sleeves at what they heard and saw. The dress and state of the monarchy were restored, but neither the chief magistrate himself, nor the late republicans who had made good their position at court, had the manners or the morals of those for whom the social institutions of royalty had been developed. The returning nobles thought it very funny that the great man liked seclusion, and found what amusement he took in ghost-stories, in the sighing of the wind, in brusque sallies of coarse wit, or in the rude familiarities of bluff intimacy with plain people; they considered it very absurd that his vices were commonplace and perhaps even worse; they thought it laughable that the newcomers slipped on the polished floors, and it seemed most entertaining that the gentlewomen of the old régime who, like Mme. de Rémusat, had accepted permanent positions as ladies of the palace, were often subjected to treatment and put into positions not foreseen in the training they had received from courtly tutors.

But, for all this, it was not merry at the Tuileries. The chief grew timid and dark before his own achievements, as he sought to master difficulties which ambition does not foresee, but with which it must reckon. No one liked less than Bonaparte to ride abroad surrounded by guards, or to muse in green alleys where, as at Malmaison, every tree was at times the post of a patrol. Yet even he could not alter the necessity, and the system of espionage was extended about him like a cage for his protection. As to friends, they grew fewer and fewer; for one of the First Consul's maxims was the cynical aphorism of Machiavelli, that friends must always be treated as if one day they might be enemies. Even the notion of duty, not to speak of its practice, was foreign to him; generosity, honesty, and sincerity were utopian conceptions of which his world and his experience had never known. The attractive visions and ideals of virtue which mingled with the speculations of Rousseau or Voltaire had become, like the mirage of the desert, empty illusions that heighten the barrenness of self-interest and ambition beneath them. Human greed, passion, vanity--such, Bonaparte declared, are the motive forces by which kings rule; the justice of governors was for him the safeguarding of comfort, of material prosperity, and of the superstitions which under the name of religion create a moral power necessary to the public order.

In the circle immediately surrounding Bonaparte there was much quarreling and jealousy. Josephine having been barren since her second marriage, would the succession go to her children or to her husband's relatives? This was becoming a serious question. Joseph Bonaparte had kept the new order in touch with the republican idea by his skilful diplomacy both in society and in foreign negotiation. He was disposed to yield to his arbitrary brother in any extremity, and his beautiful wife was a tower of strength to the family interest. The vigorous and able Lucien had risen to the height of his chances, and, having acquired a handsome fortune while occupying the post of French minister to Madrid, began to assert his old democratic independence. He was now a widower, and refusing to marry the queen regent of Etruria, espoused a wife from among the people, and this step eventually cost him the penalty of exile. Josephine was successful in making a match between her daughter Hortense and her husband's third brother, Louis; but although at a later time the Emperor contemplated bequeathing his power to their son, for the present their quarrels, instead of appeasing, intensified the Bonaparte-Beauharnais feud. It was sometimes said in loud whispers that the only solution of the impending difficulties was the divorce of the First Consul from his wife; but the question was not yet seriously discussed. The consular pair had never been married by ecclesiastical form, and many have since suggested that it was a discontented husband who had spoken in the manifest partiality for easy divorce which Bonaparte displayed in discussing the civil code. Jerome had been among the officers blockaded in the West Indies by the English fleet. Having escaped to the United States, he became desperately enamored of Elizabeth Patterson, a beautiful woman of Baltimore, and in December, 1803, married her. The pre-nuptial contract is couched in language which proves that her father understood the risks he was taking. As might have been and was expected, the First Consul was furious, refusing to recognize the marriage or the child born of it, and forbidding his sister-in-law to live in France. In a short time the unworthy object of his wrath deserted his family, and returned, with few qualms apparently, to his elder brother's fold and a share in the splendors of the Empire.

The Bonaparte women were clever intriguers. Madame Mère lived quietly in her own home, where, to her son's exasperation, she continued to speak the Corsican dialect and to save money; it is said that she always distrusted the permanency of her son's elevation. Elisa, now Mme. Bacciocchi, was a shrewd woman of the world, and with Lucien's aid formed a literary coterie of which Chateaubriand was the illumination. Pauline returned from San Domingo to marry Prince Borghese, and became notorious for her conjugal infidelities. Caroline, the wife of Murat, chafed under her husband's intellectual inferiority, but used her position with skill in behalf of her family. Of all his connections none was more useful to the head of the State than Fesch, who was easily persuaded to reënter the Church, and not long after the Concordat became Archbishop of Lyons and cardinal. The republican calendar still nominally survived, but after the reconciliation of State and Church the celebration of the ten-day festival of Décadi, instituted under the republic, fell into disuse, the Church resumed the observance of Sunday, and among the diligent attendants at mass on that day was the First Consul. His near relationship with an ecclesiastical dignitary did not tend to weaken the bonds which tied his government to the religious sentiment of the common people.

In the great world outside the Tuileries there was for a moment peace. Nothing was left of Jacobinism or revolutionary ferment. Old names were restored to streets and places, just as every one now wore the garments of the ancient régime, except the impoverished aristocrats, who in mild protest continued to wear the trousers of the sansculottes. Even they, however, had got back a small portion of their properties, and the newly rich saw in the confirmation of personal government by a consul through a so-called republic the guarantee that restitution of the rest to its former owners would never be required of them. Both alike were therefore satisfied with what was sure. Thus in the same way monarchists and republicans were equally gratified, the latter with a semblance of democratic government, the former with a reality which might end in royalty, the full fruition of their yearnings. In short, public confidence was restored, and showed itself in a respectable, temperate decency of living which had been foreign to Paris under the Directory. Everything appeared as if society were performing its normal functions in commerce, trade, industry, and religion. Even art and literature revived as if upon a solid substructure of permanent organic life. Mme. de Staël had fought gallantly for notoriety and for the attention of the great, so dear to her woman's heart in spite of all its philosophy; but Bonaparte never forgave her persistent self-seeking, nor the insight into his character which she and her friends displayed, and he discovered that the air of Paris disagreed with her. Chateaubriand, a noble of high imaginative power and brilliant literary gifts, after several unsuccessful ventures as a romantic youth, had finally published in 1797 an "Essay on Revolutions," which was intended to be a peacemaker in the struggle of ideas, to mediate between the monarchy and the republic. It was imbued with atheism and the philosophy of Rousseau. Very soon after its appearance the author was the subject of a remarkable conversion, and at once began the composition of his treatise on the "Genius of Christianity," that exquisitely literary and pious work which established his fame. Although he had been hitherto unknown to Bonaparte, his book was so opportune in its far-reaching influence that men could not rid themselves of the feeling that the writer was sponsor for the Concordat. Eloquent and poetic in style, the dissertation is nevertheless arid in opinion and scanty in argument. Its life was therefore ephemeral, but its influence while it lasted was supreme; as a reward for its composition, Chateaubriand was made the French representative first in Rome, afterward in the republic of Valais.