Chapter 4

BONAPARTE AND TALLEYRAND[3]

[Footnote 3: Aside from the archives, national and state, and the Correspondence of Napoleon, official and unofficial publications, together with documents published by Pallain, Vivenot, and Bailleu, the best special authorities are Hüffer: Der Rastadter Congress, and Criste: Rastadt, L'Assassinat des Ministres Français (original in German). Then follow the memoirs and studies already enumerated, with Desbrière: Projets de débarquement aux Îles Britanniques.]

Bonaparte in Switzerland -- Arrival at Rastadt -- A Royalist Portrait of Him -- His Affectation of Simplicity -- Reception by the Directory -- First Threat of Invading England -- Career of Talleyrand -- His Relations with Bonaparte -- Men and Parties in Paris.

In the complications of his far-reaching designs, the return of Bonaparte to Paris was a matter of consequence to him, an affair to be managed with diplomacy and an eye to dramatic effect. To appease the Directory, the insubordinate plenipotentiary explained in his despatches that he had acted as he did because Austria had made herself stronger than ever in the long interval, which was probably true; and that the possibility of further successful warfare had been jeopardized by the early arrival of winter, which had left him no choice in hastening the conclusion. This was not flatly untrue, for Marmont noted in his diary that it was October thirteenth when the first new snow fell on the mountain peaks, and that he had marked his general's surprise at the fact: the treaty was signed on the seventeenth. Nevertheless, the season was later than usual, and the plea of weather was a pretext to hide the negotiator's own purposes. In his rôle as an Italian deliverer, Bonaparte remained until the middle of November to consolidate the new republics and await the assembling of delegates at Rastadt. Then, traveling sedately by Turin and the Mont Cenis pass through Chambéry, he reached Geneva. Switzerland was ripe for his presence. The first step was to arrest Bontemps, a Genevese banker who had assisted Carnot in his flight to Nyon, where he was still in concealment. The second was to focus the revolutionary movement in the district of Vaud, and to strengthen its preparations for throwing off the Bernese dominion by organizing an ovation for himself at Lausanne: a democrat must be fêted only by democrats.

"Nothing too far" being manifestly his motto at this period, he then passed by easy stages to Rastadt, where he arrived on November twenty-fifth, and immediately asserted for himself a nominal supervision of the arrangements. The King of Sweden had claimed representation both as Duke of Pomerania and as a guarantor of the peace of Westphalia; for that reason he had sent as his delegate Count Fersen, a shrewd agent, once Swedish ambassador in Paris, the friend of Marie Antoinette, and known everywhere as an intimate counselor of the Bourbons. Bonaparte, outraged at such effrontery, summoned the envoy to his presence, and, trampling on the forms of a hollow politeness, informed him with a few biting words that his presence was not desired. The envoy tarried long enough to assure himself that Austria was quite as hostile as France, and returned to Stockholm. It annoyed Bonaparte even more to find that the imperial delegates had not yet arrived. But he passed the interval with considerable satisfaction in an exchange of pleasantries with the various personages who were on the ground. "How," said he to Stadion, garbed as a canon of Würzburg, "can the station of an ecclesiastical prince of the empire, a man who is both warrior and spiritual minister, accord with the precepts of the Scriptures, with the poverty and the lowliness of early Christianity?" "Where will your master live?" he said to the agent from the Bishop of Mainz, "when he loses his present residence?" The hollow shells of worn-out institutions rattled wherever this innovator stepped. At last Cobenzl arrived, and the urgent affair of the transfer of Mainz was promptly concluded. That fortress was to be occupied by French troops on the thirtieth, the day in which Austria was to take possession of Venice. Then, leaving Treilhard and Bonnier, the rude and insolent French plenipotentiaries, in a position of arrogant superiority to their colleagues, he set out for Paris, and after a triumphal progress throughout northern France, a region not before familiar to him, arrived, on December fifth, at his residence on Chantereine street. With its usual facility in that line, the Paris municipality soon after dubbed this rather insignificant byway the Street of Victory. Mme. Bonaparte, who had been visiting Rome, where her brother-in-law Joseph was now French minister, rejoined her husband at Christmas.

In the papers of the Comte d'Antraigues was found a pen-portrait of Bonaparte as he appeared at Venice, and it will no doubt, with due allowances, stand for the few months later when he became the idol of Paris. Sucy, a government commissioner of much sense, overpowered by the importance of passing events, wrote in August to a friend that he could not enter upon such voluminous details as would be necessary to depict Bonaparte, but warned his correspondent against supposing that the general had attained the height of his ambition, using the words previously quoted in another connection, "I can even add that I know no other end for him but the throne or the scaffold." But Antraigues was fortunately more communicative: "Bonaparte is a man of small stature, of sickly hue, with piercing eyes, and something in his look and mouth which is cruel, covert, and treacherous; speaking little, but very talkative when his vanity is engaged or thwarted; of very poor health because of violent humors in his blood. He is covered with tetter, a disease of such a sort as to increase his vehemence and his activity. He is always full of his projects, and gives himself no recreation. He sleeps but three hours every night, and takes no medicine except when his sufferings are unendurable. This man wishes to master France, and, through France, Europe. Everything else, even in his present successes, seems but a means to the end. Thus he steals without concealment, plunders everything, is accumulating an enormous treasure of gold, silver, jewels, and precious stones. But he cares for it only as a means. This same man, who will rob a community to the last sou, will without a thought give a million francs to any person who can assist him. If such a person has hate or vengeance to gratify, he will afford every opportunity to do so. Nothing stands in the way of his prevailing with a man he thinks will be useful; and with him a bargain is made in two words and two minutes, so great is his seductive power. The reverse side of his methods is this: the service rendered, he demands a complete servility, or he becomes an implacable enemy; and when he has bought traitors, their service rendered, he observes but little secrecy concerning them. This man abhors royalty: he hates the Bourbons, and neglects no means to wean his army from them. If there were a king in France other than himself, he would like to have been his maker, and would desire royal authority to rest on the tip of his own sword; that sword he would never surrender, but would plunge it into the king's heart, should the monarch cease for a moment to be subservient."

On Bonaparte's passage through Chambéry, he had been visibly affected by a shout from the multitude hailing him as the father of his soldiers. There were countless homes in France into which the letters of absent sons had sent the same epithet, and the nation at large thought of him in that rôle as a simple, benevolent man, devoted to his country and to her liberties. His histrionic talents, like his other gifts, were of the highest order, and for the moment this ideal must not be shattered. He therefore appeared to the French public as devoted to the principle of equality, which the Revolution considered the guarantee of free institutions. In the "Moniteur," the official journal of the time, may be read every detail of his conduct. Instead of waiting for visits from those in place, he made the advances. His clothes were plain, his manners were simple, his dignity was moderated to a proper respect for himself and others. The carriage in which he drove had but two horses, and there was no suite in attendance, either abroad or at home. Often the passers-by saw him walking alone in the small garden of his unostentatious dwelling, apparently resting from the fatigues of his campaigns. In short, there was nothing recognizable of the conquering potentate who had kept such state at Milan, except the affected simplicity of his personal life and conduct. "At first sight," wrote Talleyrand, whose acquaintance Bonaparte sought immediately on reaching Paris, "he struck me as a charming figure; the laurels of twenty victories are so becoming to youth, a handsome eye, a pale complexion, and a certain tired look."

There were a few proper assumptions of great dignity, as for instance when, on December tenth, 1797, a grand festival was celebrated in the classic style for the formal reception by the Directory of the treaty of Campo Formio from the hands of its negotiator. Talleyrand pronounced a glowing eulogium. Bonaparte, with impressive mien, replied in a few short, terse sentences, which closed with the significant utterance: "When the happiness of the French people shall rest upon the _best_ organic laws, all Europe will become free." Barras closed with a long, dreary tribute to the Directory, and at the end imprinted the kiss of fraternity on the young general's brow. The other members of the executive hurried to display a feigned cordiality in following his example. The two councils united in a banquet to the hero of the hour. The public was overpowered by the harmony of its rulers. Bonaparte's studied modesty might have shown the directors how false was their position. As had been said long before to Pepin, the title of king belongs to him who has the power. In private the skilful minister of foreign affairs was no less adroit than the young conqueror, and lavished his courtier arts in the preservation of apparent unity.

The greatest danger to Bonaparte's ambitions was that he should by some mishap become identified with a party. Thus far, chiefly by absence from the seat of government, he had successfully avoided that pitfall. The Parisian populace did not even identify him with the Fructidorians; and, though not entirely forgetful of the Day of the Sections, they flocked to see him wherever it was known he would be. When asked if their interest did not gratify him, he replied that it meant nothing; they would crowd in the same way to stare if he were on his way to the scaffold. He appears to have felt that long residence would diminish his prestige, which for his purposes would be a disaster, and consequently he seems carefully to have conveyed the impression that he was but a visitor. Sandoz-Rollin, the Prussian minister in Paris, believed that the soldiers sent into France from Italy were intended for use in the capital. Exactly what was planned he did not know, for Bonaparte was not yet thirty, and therefore ineligible, at least under the constitution, to the Directory. Others believed that, Austria having been vanquished, England was to be struck--first through a fight between the two fleets, and then by the landing on her shores of a large body of veterans from the Army of Italy, under their victorious commander. In fact, Monge had formally stated, on December tenth, that "the government of England and the French republic cannot both continue to exist"; and during the winter Thomas Paine exercised his powers as a pamphleteer on the theme of England's approaching bankruptcy, while the public crowded one of the theaters to stare at stage pictures representing the invasion of England. As Bonaparte's almost superhuman diligence had ever open and ready two or more possibilities, this direct invasion may already have been a third choice. In the report which he made in February of the following year after a visit to Dunkirk, he distinctly set forth the studied policy of his whole career; viz., to keep three possibilities in working order, a pretense of invasion, a system of barring England from continental commerce, and a blow at the trade of Great Britain in the Orient. Otherwise there is nothing for it but a peace. But his dealings with every Italian power and with Austria had shown a definite policy of striking, not at the heart to produce desperation, but at the limbs, where the blow would be quite as deadly and resistance less furious. All the natural and successive steps of preparation for such an enterprise had been taken by the government during the summer of 1797. Corfu and Zante, and with them the possessions of Venice in the Levant, were secured and kept; a fleet was collected and equipped from the spoils of northern Italy; Naples was temporarily neutralized; and plans had then been carefully elaborated with experts, among whom was Monge, for the seizure of Malta and the disruption of Turkey by an attack on Egypt.

In all this Talleyrand had been a brilliant and unscrupulous agent. Born of a noble family, his lameness closed other careers and drove him for distinction into the Church, where, under the old régime, the traditions of ecclesiastical feudalism still lingered. In his youth he was the friend of the infamous Mme. du Barry, and owed his early promotion to her influence. When he was treasurer of the French clergy and bishop of Autun, Mirabeau said of him that he would "offer his very soul at a price, and he would do well, for he would exchange dung for gold." During the first years of the Revolution he led the liberal clergy; finally he went to such extremes in secularizing the Church that the Pope excommunicated him. His private life had been scandalous from the first, and he was avowedly a passionate gambler. It was with a sense of relief that he abandoned the Church to become the most unscrupulous statesman and the most adroit diplomatist of his time. It was he who in 1791 laid before the Legislative Assembly the dazzling scheme of national education which afterward was modified and adopted by Napoleon. He forecast the years of radical excess, and had himself sent in 1792 as a secret diplomatic agent to London, where, with occasional visits to Paris, he resided in the main for two years. The English could not endure his duplicity, and finally drove him from their country. The Convention having declared him an emigrant, he sailed for America, and spent some time in the United States, where, being coldly treated in political and social circles, he devoted himself to an analytical study of the people and their institutions. The revocation in 1796 of the decree pronouncing him an emigrant was obtained by Mme. de Staël's influence, and he immediately returned to France. It is characteristic of him that during these years he was successively a representative of the King, of Danton, and of the Directory.

To the Institute of France, of which learned body he had been made a member during his absence, he presented on his return his brilliant studies of colonization in general, and of the respective relations between the United States and the rival powers of France and England. But politics, not literature, was his trade. At once he began to study the situation of his own land, and observed with profound penetration both the instability of the government and the straits of the Directory. Accordingly, though nominally their man, and accepting from them the ministry of foreign affairs, he attached himself at once to Bonaparte, in the hope, as he explains in his memoirs, of using the conqueror to restore the monarchy. The latter had the perspicacity to encourage the relation, and from that moment possessed in the very center of affairs an able and congenial representative. It is known that Talleyrand's public letters to Bonaparte were accompanied with private supplements which often ran in a sense quite opposite to that of the main sheet. For instance, nothing could be more satisfactory to the directors than his open account of Fructidor; but it is known that the private letter mercilessly analyzed the situation as impossible and unstable. Attempting a corrupt bargain with the American envoys, Pinckney, Marshall, and Gerry, in regard to the protection of American commerce, he was mercilessly exposed by the indignant ministers, and finally compelled by public opinion to resign from his office. But even in disgrace he continued in Paris as the unscrupulous prime mover of French politics, until restored to power by Bonaparte, when he again accepted the position from which he had been driven, and successfully elaborated in practice the schemes of his superior.

There were, however, two other men, Barras and Sieyès, who, after the eighteenth of Fructidor, were left in an unendurable position. Both these men were also boundlessly venal. The former was Bonaparte's "ancient friend"; Fructidor made him the general's creature. Like Talleyrand, both were for the present the devoted satraps of a master who could pay not only with prospective power, but with present cash; ultimately they also hoped to use him for their own ends in the restoration of monarchy. Sieyès, now president of the Ancients, was both weak and vain. But, posing as an oracular constitution-maker, he was admitted as such to the councils of Talleyrand and Barras. Both his pride and his interests being thus engaged, he had apparently become as ardent a follower of Bonaparte as were the other two. Rewbell was so occupied with the foreign policy of the Revolution, and Merlin with the internal administration on Jacobin lines, that neither one nor the other gave any thought to the ulterior consequences of Fructidor. François de Neufchâteau was posing as the wit of the epoch, Larévellière was its prophet; neither was of even the slightest importance. Augereau, seeing himself duped by the disbanding of the Rhine army, had been disenchanted, and was for a while the relentless enemy of his old chief. A few mediocrities both in the army and in politics were in sympathy with Augereau; but as England was the one foe left, the general of the Army of England was virtually the commander of the whole. Not one of the division generals disobeyed his orders.