Chapter 25

BIRTH OF THE KING OF ROME[38]

[Footnote 38: References as before, and Helfert: Marie Louise. Welschinger: La censure sous le premier empire. Wertheimer: Die Heirat der Erzherzogin Marie Louise mit Napoleon I. Montbel: Le duc de Reichstadt. Welschinger: Le roi de Rome.]

England Under the Continental System -- End of Constitutional Government in France -- Napoleon's Personal Rule -- Wealth of his High Officials -- Literature and the Empire -- Mme. de Stael's Aspirations -- Her Attempts to Win Napoleon -- Her Genius Saved by Defeat -- The Decennial Prizes -- Pregnancy of Maria Louisa -- The Heir of the Napoleon Dynasty.

[Sidenote: 1810-11]

It would be idle to suppose that during the winter of 1810-11 the Spanish situation was not thoroughly appreciated by the imperial bridegroom at Paris, or that he underrated the ultimate effects of what was taking place in the Iberian peninsula if the process were to go on. Still less is it probable that with the direction of all his energy toward that quarter he could not have quenched the uncertain and spasmodic efforts of Spanish patriotism, either by arts of which he was a master, or by making a desert to call it a peace. No; every indication is that his eye was still fixed on England at her vital point, and that he took his measures in the North to deal her such a thrust that the life-blood which sustained the Peninsular war would either flow inefficacious, or be turned away altogether from Spain, and change the ever-doubtful success of Wellington into assured disaster. Wealthy as England was, it was certain that her credit could not long hold out in view of the lavish subsidies she was constantly granting to continental powers, while the expeditions to Spain, Holland, and Sicily were even more costly, inconclusive as they had so far been. In 1810 English bank-notes were twenty per cent. below par, and the sovereign could be exchanged on the Continent for only seventeen francs instead of the twenty-five it usually brought. Business failures were becoming ominously frequent in London, and panic was stalking abroad. What must be the necessary result if the continental embargo were more thoroughly enforced? The enormous contraband trade of the North was now virtually at an end. Where English merchants had so far been able to secure at least half of the prices obtained from the consumers by smugglers, they could now no longer secure even that doubtful market at any price; the incorporation of Holland and the North Sea shores into France left virtually no opening into Europe for them except through Russia. The fate of England and of the world seemed to hang on how far the Czar could or would keep the engagements which he had made at Tilsit.

This might not have been so completely true if the French finances had been desperate; but they were not--that is, the Emperor's personal finances were not. After the legislative assembly met in December, 1809, it was soon clear to France that the farce of constitutional government under the Empire was nearly played out. Not only were the members of the senate, who should have retired according to the constitution, kept in their seats by a decree of the body to which they belonged, but an imperial edict appointed the deputies for the new departments without even the form of an election. Fontanes retired from the presidency of the senate to become grand master of the university; the grand chamberlain of the palace was appointed in his stead. The Emperor had already sold to private corporations the canals which belonged to the state; the legislature ratified the illegal act. The penal code was now ready. It contained the iniquitous and dangerous penalty of confiscation for certain crimes, thus punishing the children for the faults of their sires, and opening a most tempting avenue to the courts for indulgence in venality under legal forms. There was little debate, and the code was adopted in its entirety as presented.

The reason for this paralysis of constitutional government is clear. Even the immense war indemnities taken from conquered states did not suffice for the maintenance of the enormous armies which covered Europe like swarms of locusts. The marshals and generals were insatiate, and the greed of the civil administrators was scarcely less. From the top to the bottom of the public service every official stood with open hand and hungry eyes. This state of things was directly due to Napoleon's policy of attaching everybody to himself by personal ties, and in giving he had the lavish hand of a parvenu. The recipients were never content, hoarding their fees, and becoming opulent, pursuing all the time each his personal ambitions, and ofttimes returning insolence for favors. To meet these enormous expenditures there had been inaugurated throughout Europe a system of what may be termed private confiscations, the vast dimensions of which can never be justly estimated. German princes and Spanish grandees, English merchants and the Italian clergy, had all been wrung dry; timorous statesmen, crafty churchmen and sly contractors, unprincipled financiers and ambitious politicians, not one was forgotten or overlooked in the accumulation of hoards which, having long been called the army chest, were now erected into the dignity of an "extraordinary domain."

Kept so far in a decent obscurity, these ill-gotten possessions, which belonged, if not to their original owners, then to the state, were, in the low condition of public morality, not merely recognized--they were actually increased from new sources of supply. The confiscated palaces, forests, lands, and fisheries, the proceeds from the sale of American ships, values of every kind, were all made the private property of the Emperor. If any of these rills of revenue should run dry, the criminal code with its legislation of confiscation might be relied on to supply a menace strong enough to express inexhaustible treasure from storehouses yet untouched. One orator declared this barbaric fund to have been in the Emperor's hands a "French Providence, which made the laurel a fertile tree, the fruits of which had nourished the brave whom its branches covered." Napoleon had found the crown moneys sufficient for himself. Berthier now had a revenue of one million three hundred and fifty thousand eight hundred francs, and Davout was scarcely less regal with one of nine hundred and ten thousand; Ney had only seven hundred and twenty-eight thousand, and Massena five hundred thousand; Soult was ambitious to increase his income of three hundred and five thousand by securing the Portuguese crown. What with the great public charities endowed from this extraordinary fund, what with the great public works in Paris and elsewhere which had been carried on by its means, the total expenditures had been more than four hundred and thirty million francs. The total receipts had risen to about seven hundred and sixty millions, and there were therefore still in the Emperor's purse upward of three hundred millions. He could not be called destitute or even poor.

The same years which saw the extinction of the remnants of legislative independence saw likewise the establishment of six state prisons, in which were to be confined those disaffected persons who were too powerful to be left at liberty, but whose trials in open court would have revealed troublesome facts. The censorship of the press was likewise reestablished with iron rigidity, and the publishers purchased the meager immunities they were permitted to enjoy by the payment of whatever pensions the Emperor chose to grant to needy men of letters. Chenier the poet, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, the author of "Paul and Virginia," and others enjoyed, in addition to decorations of the Legion of Honor, substantial incomes that were virtually paid by their fellow-craftsmen; while a chosen few--including Gros, Gerard, Guerin, Lagrange, Monge, and Laplace--were elevated to the new baronage. Even Carnot did not hesitate to accept employment and place from Napoleon. At first he solicited a loan for the relief of his urgent necessities. This the Emperor made unnecessary by ordering the War Office to pay all arrears in his rations and other perquisites, by giving him a commission to prepare a volume on fortification, and by according him a pension of ten thousand francs. The ponderous sledge-hammer of the censorship was apparently forged to kill a gnat. Nothing is known to the history of literature so subservient and humble as the conduct of the great majority of French writers and artists under the Empire.

There was one exception--Mme. de Stael. That overestimated woman had gained the halo of martyrdom by the so-called persecution of the Emperor. But the persecution was, in the opinion of keen observers, more on her part than his. The Committee of Public Safety had found her an intriguer, and had called upon her husband to remove her from Paris; the Directory kept her under watch at Coppet, and ordered her arrest should she return to France. Her aspirations were boundless, and Mallet du Pan, royalist agent, said that she shamelessly flaunted her charms on public occasions. In 1796, aspiring to rule the country through her friends, she wrote to Bonaparte, who was in Italy, that the widow Beauharnais was far from possessing the necessary qualities to supplement those of a genius such as he was, and on his return to Paris she at once made suspicious advances to win his favor. Bourrienne declares that he saw one of her letters to Bonaparte, in which she flatly stated that they two, she herself and her correspondent, had been created for each other. Mention has elsewhere been made of the coldness with which Bonaparte treated her when by her own request she was presented to him in Talleyrand's drawing-room. Not long afterward, at the reception given by the minister of foreign affairs to the conqueror of Italy, the indefatigable seeker for notoriety addressed the latter once again.

The scene is given in the memoirs of Arnault. At first she plied her suit with fulsome compliment. Bonaparte listened coldly, and the conversation flagged. In despair she blurted out, "General, what woman could you love the most?" "My own," was the stinging reply. ("Quelle femme?" "La mienne.") Woman and wife being the same word in French, Napoleon's retort was a disdainful pun. "Very well; but which would esteem you the highest?" she persisted. "The best housekeeper." "Yes, I understand; but which one would be for you the foremost among women?" "She who should bear the most children, madame," was the icy rejoinder, as the harried and disgusted soldier turned on his heel. Somewhat later she said to Lucien in a melting voice, "I am but a fool in my desire to please your brother. I am at a loss when I wish to converse with him. I choose my language and modify my expressions; I want to make him think of me and occupy himself with me. It ends in my being and feeling as silly as a goose." When the complacent Lucien reported the language his brother replied: "I know her thoroughly.... She declared to one who informed me that since I would neither love her nor permit her to love me, there was nothing left but for her to hate me, as she could not remain indifferent. What a virago!" In a letter to Joseph, dated March nineteenth, 1800, the future Emperor wrote: "M. de Stael is in the depths of misery, and his wife is giving dinners and balls. If you should continue to see her, would it not be well to have the woman allow her husband one thousand or one thousand two hundred francs a month? Have we already reached a time when, without any protest from decent people, not merely morality but the most sacred ties which bind children to their parents can be trampled under foot? Suppose we judge Mme. de Stael as we should a man,--only, of course, as a man inheriting the fortune of M. de Necker,--one who had long enjoyed the prerogatives of a distinguished name, and who should leave his wife in misery while he lived in abundance: could we associate with a man like that?"

Soon afterward the battle of Marengo was fought. All her passion being now turned into hate, the scheming woman openly desired Bonaparte's defeat. Thenceforward she was an avowed and bitter enemy; he would have called her a conspirator. The ten years of her banishment, as she herself declared, were occupied in wandering from court to court in England, Russia, Prussia, and Sweden, engaged in the task of undermining the Emperor's name and fame, and in fomenting the coalitions which eventually ruined him. As Bonaparte became an ultra-imperialist she became an ultra-liberal. Her book on Germany, published in 1810, was a laudation, in the main just and fair, of a regenerated land; but it held up to France as a model the achievements of the country which was now her bitterest foe. The censors gave it a fictitious renown by ordering its complete suppression.

When, in November, 1810, the decennial prizes, instituted as a spur to literature and science, were distributed, the judges could find nothing in science later than 1803 worthy of their favor; but the prize-winners, old as they were, were all men of real distinction. The names of the literary men who were crowned are now known only to the student of history. Napoleon demanded why the name of Chateaubriand had been omitted from the list, as it was. He may have remembered, as one of his detractors suggests, that in that writer's great book the Roman doctrine of obedience to constituted authority was attractively presented; or else, and more probably, he may have wished his list of authors to be more brilliant. The Emperor may have instituted those prizes, as his apologists declared he himself said that he did, to keep active minds from occupying themselves with politics; but the exhibition of how the Empire had crushed out originality and fecundity in the French brain must have appalled him, whatever were his thoughts.

During the winter of 1810-11 Napoleon's private life was virtually devoted to beneficence. In addition to the favors granted to Carnot, he lavished money on other objects, some not so worthy. Canova, who had been called from Rome to make a portrait-statue of the Empress, obtained a substantial grant for the learned societies of that city. Chenier, like Carnot, had been a pronounced adversary of the Empire. He now sought employment under it, and was made inspector-general of the university, an office which he did not live long to enjoy. All the old favorites were remembered in a general distribution of good things. Talleyrand having just lost an immense sum by the failure of a trusted bank, the Emperor came to his relief by purchasing one of his minister's most splendid palaces for more than two million francs. The court resided sometimes at St. Cloud, sometimes at Rambouillet, sometimes at the Trianon, but for the most part at Fontainebleau, where the ceremonious life, to which all concerned were now well accustomed, was marked by none of the old awkwardness and friction, but ran as brilliantly as lavish expenditure could make it.

The pregnancy of the Empress was celebrated with great festivities, during which Napoleon performed one of his most applauded acts--the endowment of a vast maternity hospital. The Empress was brought into great prominence as the president of a society consisting of a thousand noble ladies under whose patronage the charity was placed.

The unconcealed and ecstatic delight of the prospective father found vent in delicate and tender attention to the mother of his child, and until her deliverance he was a gentle, devoted, and considerate husband. His whole nature seemed transformed. When in the early morning of March twentieth, 1811, word was brought that the Empress was in labor, and that a false presentation made it of instant necessity to choose between the life of the mother and that of the child, the feelings of the Emperor can better be imagined than described.

If the expected heir should die his dynasty would be jeopardized, his enemies would once more be making appointments over his grave, the hopes of a lifetime might be shattered. But there was not a moment's wavering. "Think only of the mother," he cried. The fears of the attending physician were vain, after all, and the man-child, coming without a cry into the world and lying breathless for seven minutes as if hesitating to accept or decline his destiny, finally gave a wail as at last he caught the breath of life. Napoleon turned, caught up his treasure, and pressed it to his bosom. A hundred guns announced the birth, and the city burst into jubilations, which were reechoed throughout Europe from Dantzic to Cadiz. Festival succeeded festival, and for an interval men believed that the temple of Janus would be again closed. No boy ever came on the earthly stage amid such splendors, or seemed destined to honors such as appeared to await this one. The devotion of the father was passionate and unwavering. It lasted even after he had been deserted and betrayed by the mother, after the child had been estranged and turned into an Austrian prince.