tfVOlSlOf THE SOUL OF NAPOLEON . .:'r .• -1/ A'<. //i of Tragedy — Napoleon and Raynouard — Concerning Voltaire — A Reading by Talma — Napoleon and the Public Taste — Love and Tragedy — A Literary Ghost — The Emperor's Criticism of the Mneid, Book II. — His Opinion of the Iliad — Dislike of Shakespeare — A Hypercritical View 10 CONTENTS CHAPTER IV PAGE The Imperial Theatre . . . .75 Talma and Bonaparte — The Actor coaches the First Consul — The Emperor coaches the Actor — Friendly Relations of the Twain — Napoleon on Critics and his Love for Cinna — Concerning Mademoiselle Mara and her Sister — An Un- expected Scene — Mademoiselle Bourgoin and Chaptal — Ayi Imperial Rebuke CHAPTER V Mademoiselle George . . . .87 Standards of Beauty — Lessifig's View — George an Ama- zonian Type — Her Attraction for Bonaparte — Their First Meeting at Saint-Cloud — Affected Nervousness of the Actress — Napoleon as a Lover — Espionage of Talleyrand — Bonaparte criticises the Actress — His Generosity to George — A Visit to the Titileries — Josephine's Fit of Jealousy — Napoleon's Coronation — George visits an Emperor — Napoleon and his Bonnes Fortunes — Where George dis- appointed her Lover — Her Veneration for Napoleon — A Costly Rendezvous CHAPTER VI Napoleon and Weimar .... 105 The Cult of Napoleon — Goethe on the Corsican — The Congress of Erfurt — Honouring the Sage — Lannes, Maret and Goethe — Presentation to the Emperor — Ecce Homo '■ — The Emperor and Werther — Politics and Fate — Napoleon's Manoeuvre — Miiller on the Interview — Talleyrand's Version of the Meeting — Preparations for Erfurt — An Imperial Opinion upon Athalie — Goethe and Dedication — Talleyrand on Napoleon's Learning — Johann von Miiller — The Emperor on Christianity — Tragedy, the School of Kings — Wieland is presented — Les genres tranches — History and Romance — Wieland at the Palace — Tacitus and the Annals — Napoleon's Opinion — Wieland's Eloquence — The Great Painter of Antiquity — Livy and Tacitus — The World's Happiest Age ? CHAPTER VII The Imperial Art-Patron . . . 129 A Specious Sentiment — Art, Merit, and the Napoleonic Cult — The Corsican's Native Materialism — A Political Monument — Artists a " Waspish Lot " — Art to Order — Feeding the Fraternity — Economy in Public Architecture — CONTENTS 11 PAGE Chapter VII. — contd. A Napoleonic Art — The Emperor's Dislike of Architects — Some Prices paid to Famous Artists — The Corsican a Con- noisseur without Pretensions — Insistence on the Napoleonic Legend — How to hurt Englishmen — The Imperial Reclame — Napoleon's Art Collectiofi at La Malmaison — A List of Pictures CHAPTER VIII David, the Imperial Painter . . 141 David in 1797 — His Meeting with Bonaparte — A Visit to the Atelier — A Soldier's Blunt Criticism — " These Military Philistines " — David's Promotion — Bonaparte crossing the Alps — David and his School — A Lover of the Limelight — David and the Coronation — A Painter's Whole Ambition — Girard and the Coronation Picture — A Happy Suggestion — Pauline Bonaparte and Gerard — Napoleon's Satisfaction — David and the Legion — The Douglas Portrait of the Emperor — David and the Peerage CHAPTER IX Canova and Napoleon . . .157 Canova a Great Philanthropic Spirit — Bonaparte and the Sculptor — Canova' s Independence — The Condition of Rome — Modelling the First Consul — Napoleon as a Sculptor's Subject — An Heroic Statue of the Corsican — Mars and Venus — The Ingenue Pauline — A Chatsworth Treasure — Canova and the French Capital — A Bust af Marie Louise — The Farnese Hercules — The Pope's Art Patronage — The Borghese Marbles — The Sculptor's Style — Napoleon and Rome — The Corsican's Cautiousness — Art and Religion — Protestants and Catholics — Arrogance of the Priests — Napoleon on CcBsar — " The Great Man of the Great People " — The Corsican and the Pope — Canova' s Advice to the Emperor — Oligarchic Venice — A Candid Admission — The Day of Wagram — Canova and Marriage — Monsieur de Bouclon's Canonisation CHAPTER X The Imperial Musician . . . .179 Napoleon on Music — Italian Musicians versus German — National Value of Opera — Napoleon no Musician — His Plans for the Musical Art — The Eroica Symphony of Beethoven — Salaries of Official Singers — A Siirprise for Vatican Celibates — La Belle Grassini — The Southern Temperament — Grassini's Disobedience — Proud Monsieur Paer — Grassini, Wellington and Napoleon — An Intellectual Singer 12 CONTENTS CHAPTER XI PAGE Religion of Napoleon . . . .189 Modern Views of Religiosity — Newman and Manning — Alen and the Atheistic View — Napoleon after the Egyptian Campaign — Real Value of Religion — The Corsican's Essential Unbelief — "An Instinct of Spiritualism " — A Sound German View — The Chevalier de Beauterne — A Napoleonic Press-Agent — The Napoleonic Expression — Man's Simian Disposition — " Christ is no Man " — Beau- terne's Puerilities — Cardinal Fesch on his Nephew — Religion postulates a Calvary — Monsieur de Norvins — Napoleon's Mind too positive for Belief — His Taste for Religions Discussion — The Murder of Enghien — Napoleon's Cynical Explanation — His Choice of National Religious — His Political Horror of Atheists CHAPTER XII The Imperial Educationist . . .205 Action, the Royal Quality in Man — The Necessity of Religious Training — Dislike of Precocity in Children — Geography and History essential in Early Years — Linguistic Talent no Test of Mentality — Are the Classics valuable ? "Bending the Mind to Labour" — Value of Geometrical Studies — The Age of Puberty and its Mystic Revolutions — The Imperial Catechism — Monsieur de Portalis, imperio- maniac — Napoleon and God — Some Questions and Answers — Contempt for Ordinary Intelligence — Cardinal Caprara's Rdle — Napoleon and his Opportunity — The Super-Caligula CHAPTER XIII Napoleon and Journalism . . .217 The Press after Brumaire — Difference between French and English Journalism — Wholesale Suppression of Sheets — Liberty of the Press ceases — Newspaper Morality — Napoleon's Journalistic Precis — Monsieur Fi6vie, Chief Censor — Le Moniteur becomes Official Organ — Napoleon's Private Paper — Value of Official Organs — Government's Duty to the Nation — Liicus a non Lucendo — A Newspaper without News — Monsieur Suard, Editor — Le Journal des Dibats — Napoleon and Fractious Editors — Le Mercure de France — Monsieur de Chateaubriand — Napoleon's own Press Agency — Beugnot and the Emperor — Les Idiologues — La Route d'Antibes — The Adaptable Sub-Editor — The CONTENTS 13 Chapter XIII. — contd. PAGE Hundred Days — Napoleon's Opinion of the Press — Caustic Remarks on Journalists and Writers — His Earliest Venture as a Newspaper-Owner — The Courrier de I'Armie — Napoleon's Personal Corps of Special Correspondents CHAPTER XIV Bonaparte versus De Stael . . . 233 Bonaparte attracts de Stael — Bonaparte' s Natural Antipathy for Coriune — Augeteau and Madame — Chez M. de Talley- rand — Constant and Covinne — Benjamin's Little In- advertence — De Stael and her Spokesman — Intrigues against Bonaparte — High Political Ambitions — IJne Femme in- comprise — Her Work on Literature — Constant is dismissed — De Stael's Comment — Bernadotte and Corinne — Delphine appears — Bonaparte's Comments — A Pen-Portrait of Corinne — Madame at Weimar, in Vienna and Stockholm — Corinne' s Regard for England — Her Son Augustus — Some Fatherly Advice — Projected Visit to America — De I'Alle- magne — A Machine a Mouvement — Napoleon disgusted with her Views — Goethe and de Stael's Work on Germany — The Visit to Russia — " The Conscience of Europe " — Stein and de Stael — Her Essay on Suicide — Goes to London — Byron's Opinion of Corinne — Death in 1S17 — Gourgaud and Madame — Napoleon's Impartial Opinion of her Qualities CHAPTER XV BioGi — Chateaubriand — Stendhal . . 253 An Unstoried Celebrity — Biogi and Bonaparte — Philosopher and Artist — Biogi a)id the Military Art — The Corsican's Affection for him — Poisons and Antidotes — The Battle-field of Rivoli — Berthier and Bonaparte — Biogi dislikes Army Men — Bonaparte as Connoisseur — Gros and tlie Areola Picture — Biogi's Description of the Corsican — M. de Chateaubriand — The Vicomte and the First Consul — A Mutual A ntipathy — Le Gdnie du Christianisme — Essentially anti-Catholic — Chateaubriand's Egotism — The Little Man and the Big Quarry — The Vicomte is dismissed — His Colossal Vanity — His Obsession as to Napoleon — Some Expressions of Opinion — " Napoleon and Myself" — Beyle, alias Stendhal — His Literary Pedigree — The Individualistic Touch — His Connection with Napoleon — Stendhal's Idolatry — His Impartiality — France and the Empire — Napoleon's Dead-heads — Stendhal and the ex-Empress Eugenie — An Author's Discretion — Stendhal, Megalomaniac — Napoleon's Trust in him — Afi Imperial Present — The "Soul" of the Imperial Army — Stupid Officialdom — Napoleon, France's 14 CONTENTS Chapter XV. — contd. Greatest Man — His Best Achievement — " The Great Emperor " — A Change of Temper — A Literary Man's Philosophy — Napoleon diminishes — A Final Recantation — " Napoleon was our only Religion " CHAPTER XVI Imperial Official Theatre . . . 273 One of Napoleon's Chief Ambitions — Instructions to Cham- pagny — Authors and their Rights — Assurance of Remunera- tion — Where Napoleon failed — Imperial Art mediocre — Limitations of Patronage — Genius discovers itself — Always its own Patron — Imperial Epoch tmfavourable to Art — Some Liberal Awards — Tragedy, not Comedy — The Thidtre-Franfais — Decree of Moscow — Napoleon a Real Benefactor — Schools of Dramatic Art — His Liberality to the Histrions — The Dresden Bill — His Practical Patronage — His Friends among the Illuminati — Did he like Artists? — Remarks by Rimusat — After Marengo — A Line from Cinna — The Murder of Enghien CHAPTER XVII Conclusion ..... 288 Kircheisen's Bibliography of Napoleon — One Book wanting — The Temperamental Aspect of Bonaparte — The ' Napoleon" Test of Nationality — A Modern Imitator — The Imperishable Corsican Bibliography ..... 289 Index ...... 298 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS THE REAL NAPOLEON. By Vigneux TALMA AS NERO MADEMOISELLE GEORGE THE CORONATION. By David THE CHATSWORTH NAPOLEON. By Canova PAULINE BONAPARTE AS VENUS VICTRIX. By Canova MADAME DE STAEL, 1804. By Godefroy DAEDALUS AND ICARUS. By Canova ' Front ispiece To face page 76 5> 100 J> 154 M 168 X. 218 5> 248 278 15 CHAPTER I THE GENESIS OF NAPOLEON The Rule of Heredity — Man the Supersimian — Role of the Spinal Column — A Cynical Truism — Napoleon's Sple?idid Equipment — Lord Acton's View — Social Origins of the Bonapartes — Their Middle-class Status — The Nursery of Fame — Corsica and its Natives — Napoleon s Regard for his Island Home — Bonaparte's Ligurian Ancestry — King Theodore of Corsica — His Relationship to the Bonapartes — Paoli and Boriaparte pere — The Bonapartes as Men of Law — A Lawyer s Importance in Ajaccio — Ancestral Prel elisions of Bona- parte pere — Phetiomenal Types and Neiv Blood — Factions of the Mala and Buona Parte — Ajaccio and Napoleon's Ancestors — The Aristocrats of the Pale — The Provincialism of the Bonapartes — Their Love of Learning — Their Esprit de Foyer — The Spirit of the Clan — Napoleon's Mania of Superiority — His Jealousy of Famous Men — His Opinion about Ccesar, Hannibal, Alexander — Relations with his Master Genei-als — Le Harnais Militaire — Napoleon's Master Passion REPRODUCTION of the immediate and normal stock is the rule of heredity, the experts tell us ; whereas reproduc- tion of the remote and phenomenal is the exception. The supersimian called Man inherits intuitions, instincts, predispositions and temperamental traits from his ancestors, even as he reproduces their physical attributes and tendencies. This being the case, we deduce correctly when we say man's destiny is not so much what is to be, as what has been, and those eugenists are probably right who declare the drab and unpoetical truth — namely, that in the last analysis man's spinal cord is his very self, his nature and potential — that which fits or unfits him for the fight in life, which determines his character, his courage and his driving force, which makes him the clever or the inept animal among the human herd, which decides for his annals as they shall be — humble, mediocre, or the opposite. Fontenelle, the distinguished nephew of the great Corneille, told the unhappy truth, we fear, when he said that for supreme success or domination in the world there was one prime requisite, and he named it when he wrote the phrase: "a callous heart in a sound body." Put this axiom of worldly wisdom beside one of the profoundest and most cogent verdicts we have yet seen contributed to the explanation of the eternal Corsican — in effect, that the wonderful mind of Napoleon was lodged in a wonderful body,' ^ Napoleon : The Last Phase. i8 GENEALOGY OF NAPOLEON 19 and we find ourselves on the way to divining the i personality of the being whom Cardinal Newman \ once described as a Miracle of Nature, And yet Lord Acton was, after all, right : the more we study the Corsican in the light of histori- cal documents, the less a Colossus does he appear, though perhaps he grows nearer, being found to be so human a creature, to the sympathetic student's heart. Not only as a man and a statesman does he lose stature, as we investigate the method by which he sought at all costs to stamp one vast impression of himself upon the page of History ; he even dwindles as a soldier, and the day has gone for good, we think, when men could solemnly accept such a verdict as the following, rendered by Lockhart and subscribed to in the main by two generations of the Victorian century : " Nations yet to come will look back upon his history, as to some grand and supernatural romance. The fiery energy of his youthful career, and the magnificent progress of his irresistible ambition have invested his character with the mysterious grandeur of some heavenly appear- ance ; and when all the lesser tumults and lesser men of our age shall have passed away into the darkness of oblivion, history will still inscribe one mighty era with the majestic age of Napoleon." Given the theory of ancestral environment, the genealogy of Napoleon becomes of first-class importance if we wish to understand, or come near to an understanding of, that momentous personality which to a large extent has set the 20 THE GENESIS OF NAPOLEON fashion in spectacular greatness ever since its appearance in the world at the close of the eighteenth century. In the case of great men, says Stendhal, biographers are apt to fall into one of two excesses : either they attribute a fabulous ancestry to their heroes, or else out of sheer envy and malice, they seek to show that those of whom they ^vrite were of far lower and meaner origin than was actually the case. This has been so with Napoleon, though all attempts either to exalt or to abase him in respect of his ancestry, have resulted only in forcing us to recognise the truth of La Bruyere's assertion — namely, that there are no families in the world, whether exalted or plebeian, which, could we accurately trace their pedigrees, would not be found to touch the loftiest origins, at one particular point, and the lowliest at some other. The Bonapartes had already been several genera- tions in Corsica when Napoleon was born, and his four great-grandfathers, Bonaparte, Paravisino (Paravicini), Ramolino and Pietra-Santa were all of grandparents born in the highland canton of Lunegiana, under the Ligurian Apennines and about forty miles direct east from Genoa. There is little doubt, we think, for all the attempts to confer an exalted social ancestry upon Napoleon, that his forbears for six generations before his birth had occupied in Corsica a local position corresponding, we may suppose, to the minor lairds of Scotland, and there is no question that the subsequent ennobling of certain Corsican TRIBE OF BUONAPARTE 21 families about 1770 — including the Bonapartes — by a royal decree of Louis XVI., was due solely to the policy of bringing the newly annexed islanders into social and political alignment with the system in France, even as Napoleon was to ennoble certain of his " gentle peasants " of Holland in 1810. That in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the tribe of Buonaparte had occupied high political position in Italy, is much less certain than that their name had been inscribed on several civic golden books, like that of Treviso, simply because members of the race had filled more or less important magistracies and alderman- ships in their home towns ; and on the whole we are of opinion not only that so titanic an energy, physical and mental, as that of Napoleon could never have sprung from a very ancient line of leisurely or even refined aristocrats, but that this very energy, whether in its personal, its political or in its social symptoms, bore at all times the impress of having come from the common source of nearly all names which achieve a universal fame — to wit, the educated or upper classes, as apart from the patriciate, and of course education here means very much more than mere instruction, or academic learning. Corsica is far from being without its ancient chronicle, and Seneca is said to have declared of its inhabitants that their first law was the law of vengeance. A Corsican writer of the Middle Ages, Petrus Cyrnoeus, already told the world that " the Corsicans are a factious race and live 22 THE GENESIS OF NAPOLEON only for glory. Vengeance is the mainspring of their code of honour, and in order to avenge an insult or an injury, they will move heaven, earth and hell to obtain full satisfaction. Whether he be dead or alive, beware of the Corsican who has not avenged himself on an aggressor." The stories of Corsican vendette^ we are all acquainted with, and even Napoleon was the object of one of these throughout his career, his enemy, Pozzo di Borgo, a distant relative by marriage, never having forgiven him the fact that when both were candidates for a colonelcy of Corsican national guards, the preference had been given to the future emperor. We are inclined to think, however, that too much importance has been attached to Pozzo' s diplomatic activities during the Empire, more particularly when it is asserted that ideas of vengeance were really the inspiration of his enmity for Napoleon, as well as of the many intrigues by which he sought to destroy the imperial fabric. The method of attaining to fame by attacking one who has already attained to fame has, it is well known, been a favourite one among doomed mediocrities of all ages, and the Emperor's relentless compatriot does not appear ever at any time to have proved insensible of his opportunity. Napoleon has been accused of having had no love for Corsica, just as he has been accused of looking upon France " as a throne rather than a nation," to quote an illustrious Russian. Here, in point, is what the Emperor himself, when at St Helena, had to say of his native island : A RACIAL PUZZLE 23 " The Corsicans have always had something in them of a race apart, and this is due to their insular position, which preserves them from con- tact with the mixed peoples of the mainland. Corsican highlanders possess an energy of char- acter and a firmness of soul which are entirely peculiar to them. And as for the beauty of that little island — nothing could exceed it. Even the very presence of its soil I could note with eyes closed, and I have never known its like anywhere. I can see myself there in my earliest years and my first affections, tricking my way round the mountain precipices, cUmbing the loftiest peaks, careering down the passes and playing in the silent valleys, ever the most devoted of partisans in my family's feuds, and taking sides with all my kith and kin in a vendetta which went back seven generations. ... I even thought of taking refuge there in 1815, and am certain that I should have won over all the inhabitants, who would have accepted me as their King and who would have been to me as one great family. Do you think that even fifty thousand of the Allied troops would have ventured to attack me there ? And even if they had, to what end — to gain what ? " Are the Corsicans to be numbered among the racial puzzles of the w^orld ? They are said to have sprung originally from some remote Iberian stock, and characteristics which have been found among the people of Albania, of the Basque countries and the Berbers of Northern Africa, are admitted by anthropologists to be common 24 THE GENESIS OF NAPOLEON to the inhabitants of the island. In the course of the early ages, the Phoenicians — as in Ireland, be it noted, which is famous for its reproduction of the Napoleonic type — the Carthaginians, the Ligurians and the Iberians founded smkll and nomadic colonies, until the Greeks finally estab- lished a civilisation there some six centuries before Christ. Subsequently, on account of their piratical practices, they were driven thence by the people of Etruria, who succeeded in finally and permanently impressing their cachet on the islanders. The Bonapartes, as we have seen, were of Ligurian origin, and in the earliest days of Roman civilisation, the people of Liguria were held to be of Germano-Gallic rather than Italic stock, which was short and broad-headed, while the Ligurians were tall and long-headed — the family type of the Napoleons, to which their great chief proved, however, an exception. All writers, ancient as well as modern, agreed in attributing one salient characteristic to the Corsicans — namely, that they appeared to con- sider themselves superior to other races, and would voluntarily engage in no servile or menial work ; the native was sober, obliging, hospitable, grateful, a firm friend, a terrible enemy, logical, practical, inclined to be sultanic in his treatment of women, intriguing and always very curious to know what the other man was doing, expansive with his friends, silent and reserved ^\4th strangers. A German writer, Razel, declares that until the eighteenth century no Corsican generation had THE PROUD ISLANDERS 25 existed which had not known either invasion or civil wai' — an important point. Diodorus Siculus said of these islanders that the hardest Roman slave-masters dared not subject them to the ordinary tasks of other helots on account of their rebellious and intract- able character. "They will not live in slavery," says Strabo, " and if they do not kill themselves before submitting to the degradation of low menial work, they so conduct themselves as to make their masters regret the money expended on their purchase." After the fall of the Roman Empire, Corsica, in the seventh century, they teach, came under the domination of Constan- tinople and then received that strong religious impress which informs the general character of the native with a mysticism that is hardly to be differentiated from superstition. Charlemagne handed them over to the Popes in the tenth century, and the Saracens carried fire and sword through the island in the eleventh, after which a feudalism of a Germanic type settled for some centuries upon the country, administered and inspired in the main by high Ligurian officials. Nevertheless the spirit of the clan was ever so powerful a characteristic of Corsican society, that the feudal lords practised a larger liberalism in their exactions from, and their dealings with, the proud islanders than was customary, under the system, with less independent races. Every Corsican became a rebel at the first sign of oppression on the part of his lord, and so there 26 THE GENESIS OF NAPOLEON grew up a society of men who would acknowledge no masters — another important point. It is not surprising, therefore, to find them in 1730 declaring an entire independence of Genoa and, at the outbreak of hostilities, inaugurating a theological council which, by assertixig that justice was on the side of the revolting islanders, gave to the who'e uprising the character of a holy war. The Genoese called in the help of several corps of German troops of the Emperor Charles VI., under the command of the Prince of Wurtembcrg, who was only too pleased to sign a treaty of peace with the invincible islanders in 1732. In 1736 a German adventurer of noble birth. Baron Theodore von Neuhof, arrived in the port of Aleria, and having assured the popular leaders of his possession of great influence at the courts of Europe, offered to undertake the final liberation of the island from Genoese tyranny. Eventually, after the distribution of considerable largess, Theodore was named King of Corsica, and besides founding a nobility, also inaugur- ated many civic reforms, invited foreign in- dustrialists to take up residence in Corsica, disciplined the army and ultimately attacked Genoa. Success did not attend on his extra- insular military expeditions, however, and he soon found himself obliged to have recourse to his great diplomatic and political friends on the mainland. He left the island, appointing a regency of four persons, one of whom was Jacopo Ornano, a blood relation of the Bonapartes. CHARLES DE BONAPARTE 27 Theodore came back in 1738, but only for a short while, and left again for the Continent, entrusting all interests to his great-nephew Baron Drost, who afterwards, be it noted, married a lady of the Bonaparte tribe. The King again returned to the island in 1743, provided with plenty of arms and munitions ; he had grown despotic, however, during his exile, and being badly received by the popular leaders, went back to London, where he was arrested for debt and spent several years in the Fleet, until released by the good offices of Horace Walpole. All of which we mention only to show that the adventure of bold and successful usurpation was certainly not lacking among the inspirations which sub- sequently moved the young soldier of Italy to exalted self- promotion. In the stirring days when Paoli took command of affairs in Corsica, he employed the services of Charles Bonaparte, father of Napoleon, as personal secretary. This gentleman had married, at the age of eighteen, a beautiful girl of fifteen, Letitia Ramolino. It is worth noting that apart from the fact that this alliance was a genuine love match — always an important condition for the children issuing — it contained many other elements of a Romeo-and-Juliet type, since the Ramolini were really of the Genoese faction, while the Bonapartes were of the insurgent side — Guelphs and Ghibellines, again, on a minor scale, or Capulets and Montagues of Verona. Like the honourable wife and mother she ever proved 28 THE pENESIS OF NAPOLEON herself, Letitia gave up her life with singular devotion to the interests of her husband's people, and ruled the family home at Ajaccio with the impartial severity and justice of a Roman matron. The old home of the Bonapartes no longer exists, it may be said, for all the venal assurances of the local ciceroni. The actual house, near the site of the present one, was much smaller, and the Bonaparte family rented only half of it at that— some indication, we may presume, that their means were of a limited extent.^ In 1771 Charles Bonaparte, who was a Doctor of Law, had been appointed a kind of executive judge [giudice assesore) to the high court of Ajaccio, a town which boasted at that time a population of 3000 inhabitants. The name Napoleon was common enough in Corsica in several families with which the Bonapartes were connected, and w^as spelled impartially Napoleone, Nabulione, Lapulione, Napollone, and was probably derived from the old Genoese patronymic Nebulone. The Bonapartes had relatives in nearly all classes of the local society, but the majority of the allied families were small landowners who also engaged in the wine and corn trades. Charles Bonaparte, as a member of the high court — with £40 a year as a stipend ! — was admittedly the ^ It has been estimated that the Bonapartes lived for several years on less than ^loo a year. Those who are at all acquainted with the tndnages of provincial Italy are well aware that such a sum is often made to go to very respectable lengths — for middle-class Italians. AN ISLAND COmiUNITY 29 head of the family aUiance, more particularly when he had been chosen member of the com- mission of twelve representative Corsican nobles. There is no doubt whatever, we think, that though Bonaparte yere was disposed to be something of a spendthrift and a high liver, he was a man of considerable refinement, great literary tastes, ever looking to the advancement of his family. To this end, indeed, he engaged in several schemes which caused his integrity to be called in question more than once, and like the good time-server he was, saw no harm in making the public treasury pay the limit for his services. So we find him writing to M. de Calonne, in 1784, asking for assistance : " I am the father of seven children, Monseigneur, the eighth already on its way, and being almost without fortune for the reasons herein mentioned, have the honour to solicit your protection and your justice in favour of my poor family. . . ." In no country in the world is the principle of equality and fraternity carried into practice to the same extent as in Corsica, says Prosper de Merimee in his work En Corse, and if real democracy has a home anywhere, it is certainly in this island where the employers and employed live on terms of tribal famiharity, the result being that "rich and poor," to quote the Frenchman, " hold the same ideas, since they are always exchanging them." The wealthiest man in Ajaccio in those days was, it is recorded, worth about £8000 — a certain Signor Baciocchi, of whose family the world has also heard. 30 THE GENESIS OF NAPOLEON It is fairly well established now that the Bonapartes of Ajaccio had but few documents going to prove that their line had once been •"Nk^ either a very ancient or a very splendid one. The alliances which the family had made since their J arrival on the island were in all probability what the French term " tres honorables," meaning very respectable, but by no means very exalted. Charles Bonaparte would appear to have been highly proud of his connection with the minor squires Bozzi and Ornano, through which con- nections the oldest Corsican blood was trans- mitted to the Napoleons. By Letizia's side, they claimed descent from the mighty Colonna gens of the twelfth century, and in the days of his own greatness Napoleon emphasised this claim on behalf of his then exalted tribe. With regard to the many expedients to which Bonaparte pere resorted in order to establish beyond question the nobility of his blood, it has to be remembered in his lasting favour that by proving a patrician ancestry, he not only guarded against the possi- bility of seeing his patent revoked — an unconscion- able dishonour to a Corsican — but also assured to his sons and daughters the best possible education at governmental expense, as so-called King's scholars. If, as we are assured on high authority, the Corsicans were genuine democrats to a man, we may be certain that Charles Bonaparte was moved to make his ancestral pretensions rather that his children might benefit, than for any advantage he was likely to derive himself from "DIE WUNDERBARE SAFT " 31 doing so. We are not aware, at all events, that \ anyone has ever accused a single member of the Imperial family of having shown traits of that social meanness which goes by the name of snobbery. The patent of nobility granted to the House of Bonaparte by the Government of Louis XVI. was made out, it may be said, not so very long ago, as family pedigrees count — namely, in 1771 — a year which, Scotsmen will hardly require to be told, saw the birth of the author of Waverley. We express a personal view, of course, when we venture the opinion that it is only the really new families that ever produce phenomenal types.^ And by the term new we mean those families which have up til] their production of a rare entity — nigroque simillima cycno — remained in quiet obscurity, unknown, not unhonoured, but un- sung. Very old and well-known races of the world must necessarily have gathered in the process of the ages, not only experience, but also all the philosophic outlook — mostly sceptical, if not con- temptuous and altogether pessimist — with which experience, in the long run, cannot fail to invest the wisdom of reflective men. Such a philosophy of scepticism is wholly adverse, however, to great ^ We admit a certain vagueness here. Our opinion is based on the assumption that blood has no absolute standard, or specific type, but that the varieties of its quality must be as the number of human kinds and characters. Consequently the fusion, or combination, which is likely to produce a human phenomenon — and mankind has produced but a few, historically considered — would normally recur about once in every two or more cycles, as History has shown, we think. Assuming certain figures, it is a simple "probability" sum. 32 THE GENESIS OF NAPOLEON performance in any domain of human activity, seeing that in the longest space of time allotted to man, hardly more than the bases of any enduring fame can be securely laid. Who had heard — apart from Marius, himself not a Csesar — of the family of Julius before the conqueror of Gaul had brought the Julian gens into promi- nence ? What sort of men did Cromwell come from ? Who was Luther's grandfather ? How long were Aristotle's ancestors resident at Stagira ? What were the Habsburgs doing before Rudolph's day ? Or who, apart from a few musicians, ever heard of the Wellesleys before Wellington's age ? Or of the Churchills before the days of Marlborough? We are of opinion, consequently, that Nature provides her portents from especial fusions of new blood based on the selective principle. This idea leads, of course, to the conclusion that no man who is not especially called to great perform- ance can by any labour of his own achieve a high destiny, or renown. Nor do we think that oppor- tunity, or environment, or luck, or any other of many moot conditions can explain the advent of an overwhelming personality in the world. Blood — the wonderful juice, as Goethe called it — seems to us to provide the key to the mystery of individual phenomenalism on the earth, and it appears to be new blood at that. All of which leads us to the view that there is really nothing subjective in creation, and that man is merely an instrument through which nature expresses itself and its design. " QUO PATRE ORTUS ? " 33 The story of the Bonapartes and their origin appears to be a case in point. It seems to be established that the tribe of Buonaparte cannot trace a clear descent, under that name, before the twelfth century. It was only during the quarrels of the Guelphs and GhibelHnes that families came to be known either as members of the good side or Imona parte, or as members of the mala parte or bad side, entirely according to the political point of view of the particular partisan. The Bonapartes, as a result of these quarrels, issued with the patronymic Buona Parte for their family name. What it had been before those days no one apparently knows for certain, though, of course, conjecture is not wanting ; some genealo- gists tracing their origin to the hereditary Roman Caesars, others to the Byzantine Caesars, some giving them affiliation with the Orsini and Colonna houses, while others go back the whole way to the great House of Macedon. But if the original family had been of high standing or great antiquity, there would have been no possibility of its concealing itself, for any political reason, under the generic sobriquet of a faction. Hence we are inclined to the view^ that the original Bonaparte tribe was either of the modest middle classes, or else of the nameless or foundling type, and consequently belonged to the new tyjDC which we have tried to suggest. All honest attempts to trace their ascent before the twelfth century to the Janfelds, podesia at San Stefano, or to Castruccio Castracani, the dictator of Lucca, 34 THE GENESIS OF NAPOLEON have been unsuccessful. Indeed we have nothing positively certain of the Bonaparte family until they had become fairly settled in Corsica, and the first public document which bears the signa- ture of a Bonaparte is dated 14th May 1485 — about the time when Richard III. was making his last stand for the crown of England. The Bonapartes moved to Ajaccio about the first decade of the sixteenth century, where a certain Francis Bonaparte was generally kno^vn to his fellow-citizens as the Moor, whether from his bronzed complexion, or from the fact that he had served under Ludovico Moro, we know not. He had a son Gabriel who served in the Genoese mercenaries and afterwards became a priest and subsequently a canon of the diocese. An illegitimate half-brother of this gentleman, Luca by name, once had his face severely slapped by an Ornano in the streets of Ajaccio. He waited some years for his vendetta and then murdered the assailant on the steps of his home, affixing the offending hand, pierced by a dagger, to a panel of the hall-door. Blood of this particular cuvee cannot but have contributed to the for- midable personality of the great descendant. Even up to 1550 the Bonapartes considered them- selves, as immigrants from Liguria, to be of much superior stock to the islanders, and one Jerome Bonaparte, a son of the aforesaid Gabriel, the priest — whom we may charitably suppose to have become a widower before he took Orders — appears about 1579 as a strenuous supporter of MEDIEVAL PETTIFOGGERS 35 a kind of social and political Pale which was established to the exclusion of the islanders and in favour of the immigrants from the mainland. One Pozzo di Borgo took up the cause of the islanders, and thus prepared the way for a political vendetta which was to declare itself on a higher level, more than two centuries later, between descendant members af the same two clans. This Jerome Bonaparte, a lawyer by the way, married the daughter of a prosperous landed proprietor, whose inheritance he added to by lucky speculations as well as by successful claims to property formerly in the possession of his bride's family. It is about the time of this worthy that we find the Bonaparte tribe engaged in the wine and corn trades, among them Augustus Bona- parte, brother of Jerome, who w^as also an elder of the community of Ajaccio, and once dis- tinguished himself by cornering the bread supplies to his own personal profit. For the most part, however, the Bonarpartes engaged in the pro- fession of attorney, a business calculated, we suppose, to give its practitioners more than ordinary opportunities for studying human nature. The Corsican attorney of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was, more- over, a man of considerable prominence in his community and corresponded, in a large measure, to the municipal solicitor of our own time, his role being socially, politically and commercially of first-class importance within his own environment. The profession required much energy in those 36 THE GENESIS OF NAPOLEON days, for the local attorney counted for some- thing in little things as well as big. Even the hiring out of a dun cow or the sale of a little patch of land required a contract. However modest their means, a Corsican couple would scorn to enter into the marriage contract without first visiting a lawyer. And even promises of marriage were registered at his office, for the failure of one of the two contracting parties to keep the plighted word would inevitably mean a bloody family feud. Then the office of the lam^er was the especial rendezvous of the parolanti, or interveners, the people who under- took to settle matters, to talk the other fellow over, or to compromise a quarrel, or even to bring together the parties to a vendetta, in order to debate the question whether, after all, there was any real motive for vengeance on either side — the results of all such matters being duly recorded by the essentially impartial pettifogger who, of course, did not fail to collect his honorarium. He also it was who engrossed the petitions sent up to the higher powers by the little people, and if a man thought his forte was that of street- sweeping, the lawyer drew up his formal request to the municipal authorities and forwarded it with his own recommendation to the proper quarter. A notorious bandit of veteran standing, anxious to make his soul, as the saying is, and desirous of seeing the old home before he died, would send an agent to the lawyer from his mountain lair, offering to surrender to the civic THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 37 powers a portion of his plunder, provided his previous offences were condoned and the ban of legal excommunication removed. On another occasion the attorney might draw up a deed after the following fashion : — " The noble and magnificent Giuseppe Carbone having on May 5 slain a bandit, and having therefore acquired the right, according to the civil and criminal statutes of the island of Corsica, to designate for reprieve any other bandit now under sentence of death, desires that clemency shall be extended to Carolo Perfetto recently convicted of murder and perjury." The noble and magnificent Carbone, having performed this act of justice, returns home with a clear conscience, not unmindful of the fact that he has assured himself a firm ally in Carolo Perfetto, should he ever require assistance in a little matter of blood-letting, or even in a case where well-considered perjury would be likely to help his fortunes over the rough spots. Francis Bonaparte succeeded Jerome as the lawyer of Ajaccio, but does not appear to have added to the family wealth, and it would appear that from 1625, when this ancestor sold the property of La Villetta, near Ajaccio, the terri- torial possessions of the Bonapartes began to dwindle very rapidly. In 1632, indeed, the record shows that he was forced to pledge a small golden relic, with his arms engraven on the same, for about twelve shillings. Francis was, in due course, succeeded by his son, Sebastian Bonaparte, 38 THE GENESIS OF NAPOLEON whose eldest, Charles, became the father of Joseph Bonaparte. This worthy married a daughter of the squirearchic Corsican family of Bozzi in which the baptismal name Napoleon was common and whose ancestors had served under the French King Henri II. when the English lost Calais in the middle of the sixteenth century. This is the point at which the Italian Bonaparte stock receives its first infiltration of pure Corsican blood : by the small but ancient territorial properties which enter into the family with that alliance, the Napoleons become Corsicans of Corsica, and the old prejudices of the Genoese Pale pass for ever. A son of this marriage, Sebastian Nicholas, became the husband of Maria Tusoli, a daughter of one of the fiery factionaries of the island and also a Corsican of the purest blood. They had three children, Joseph, Napoleon and Lucien, and from the marriage of the first of these, Joseph, with Maria Paravisino. sprang Charles Bonaparte, the father of the mighty Napoleon. Letitia, his wife, was of the Ramolini tribe, whose ancestors were squires of Istria and officers in the armies of Venice. It is clear, therefore, from all which precedes that at no point of the known line do there appear to be any conditions which might contri- bute to a transmission of artistic leanings in the Bonaparte family. On the contrary, everything seems to mark the men out for professions which are the extreme opposite of anything artistic ; while the women, wholly unlettered and in the GENS BUONAPARTIANA 39 main somewhat jmysannes in speech, in manner and in their meticulous housewifery, seem to be chosen for their " points " and as hkely in all cases to " throw " healthy children. All their men, indeed, are apt and clever animals and all their women unfailing breeders, the only spiritual tendency observable in any of the stock being the insistence with which each father decides that the sons shall have the best possible scholarly education, without which, they are fully well aware, no inferior can climb to higher social rank. "The Bonapartes," says de Rocca, in effect, "were not the richest people in Ajaccio; they were not even the best-born. On their arrival there, they occupied a very modest position in the town, but had derived from their Genoese ancestors that taste for letters and learning with- out which no man can change his condition in life. Beside this individual ambition we find a kind of racial ambition, a patient seeking for self- perfectioning which maintains them on a level above their contemporaries. In their little sphere they distinguish themselves by qualities of culture which raise them even when their means are dis- appearing. This solicitude for the family's future displays itself in the anxiety and craftiness with which they seek out patrons and protectors for their children ; as, for example, in their choice of prosperous and well-placed godfathers and god- mothers for their offspring. " This esprit de foyer, this tenaciousness of the Bonapartes in moving all influences in order to 40 THE GENESIS OF NAPOLEON assure to their children a better place in life, this tireless object from generation to generation — all such effort is seen at its highest in Charles Bonaparte, whose son, Napoleon, is marvellously served by fortunate circumstances in his begin- nings : he is just noble enough to qualify for a king's cadetship and a free education which will be much superior to anything which his rivals, the Republican generals, will have received. Thanks to the democratic community from which he springs, he cannot, when the Revolution begins to decimate them, be accounted one of the officers of the ci-devant. Had he come from Touraine, he could never have gone through the reign of terror and not been proscribed. It is the Corsican spirit of the clan which makes Napoleon give a throne to his brothers and sisters, and he distributes crowns among them just as the Corsican elders distribute their civic patronage among their own kith and kin. With- out seeking to decide what Napoleon owed in his mental formation to his ancestors of Corsica and Liguria, we may say that the foresight of his fathers prepared him for his destiny, while his native island furnished him at once with the elements of his grandeur and his destruction." The true Corsican's mania of superiority obsessed the Emperor to the end of his days, as his judgments of all great men clearly show, and we have covered much ground in our quest of a single criticism of any great historical character, which might be said to possess an impartial ring. " WHO BUT MUST LAUGH " 41 " Napoleon," declared Madame de Remusat, " was jealous of all the great men of the world. He feared all signs of superiority and few who were near him ever failed to hear him express a predilection for mediocrities." When at St Helena his secretary, Baron Gourgaud, once mentioned Louis XI. and Henri IV. as being possible rivals in respect of per- sonal popularity in France. The fallen Emperor answered, as the Baron tells : " Saint Louis was an ass ; a just man, if you will, but he never achieved anything worthy of note. And as for that goat's-beard Henri IV. — he was an old fool. Louis XIV. was certainly the greatest King of his race. He and myself alone will count in our history ; only he and I had such great armies," and he does not fail to point out that Napoleon differed from Louis in one important consideration — namely, that the former com- manded his legions in person, and that the Roi- Soleil was never anything but a chef de parade. The Emperor does not deny that Alexander. Hannibal, Caesar, possessed " qualities." Never- theless his criticism of their various campaigns goes to indicate that their wars possessed nothing of the splendour and eclat, whether in conception or results, of his own. Alexander, he admits, calculated profoundly, executed boldly, led with judgment ; but " we cannot point in the case of the Macedonian to any manoeuvre which can be said to be worthy of a great general." Alexander appears to be simply a brave soldier — a grenadier i 42 THE GENESIS OF NAPOLEON like Leon Aune, this guardsman being about the equivalent of our own famous Shaw of the House- hold Cavalry, who fell at Waterloo. Hannibal he admits to have been the boldest and most audacious of all the conquerors of Antiquity — so adventurous, so sure, so great in all things, as he says of the Carthaginian who had crossed both the Pyrenees and the Alps. " Yet, voyez-vous, this march of Hannibal from Collioure to Turin was quite a simple matter — a mere holiday tramp ; and as for the difficulties of the passage of the Alps, why, there were really none," is a commentary reported by Damas Hinard in his Opinions de Napoleon, vol. i., p. 79. Contrary to accepted historical opinion, which places (we think) the Carthaginian, as a patriot and a strategist, higher than all other conquerors, whether modern or ancient. Napoleon declares him inferior to Turenne and Conde, a comparison which would place him on a plane about equal to that of Marlborough. Turenne would, had he suddenly arrived on the field of Wagram, have at once understood the tactical dispositions, Napoleon explams. But not so Hannibal. In regard to Caesar, whom the world has long been taught to look upon as the nearest known approach to the perfect prince among men : Napoleon deals with the Roman Colossus in an especial manner, for Caesar, he thinks, is the only spirit of all time that in any way challenges his own glory. Caesar, too, is inferior as a general to both Turenne and Conde and, par consequent. " —IF SUCH A MAN THERE BE ? " 43 much less than the vietor of AusterHtz. And Gourgaud shows us how the Emperor even envies the great JuUus his renown as an historian ; for after dictating a series of commentaries to his secretary, he turns to the latter, saying : " There you have something worth more than Caesar's. He gives no dates ; I do." And, we are assured by Hinard, the Emperor disliked to be told that it was Caesar's habit to take his ordinary rest on the night preceding a great battle. As for Gustavus Adolphus, the only respectable commander produced by the Thirty Years' War, in our opinion : " In eighteen months," pooh-poohs Napoleon, " this wonder gained one battle, lost another and was killed in a third. They are, indeed, not wrong who say ihat history is a romance. Men still talk of the wondrous exploits of this Swede, and of ourselves they will say— perhaps nothing'! Yet Gustavus added nothing to the technical science of war ! " And, again, Charles XII. was a man who showed no results for his career ; the Marechal de Saxe — the soldier who met the Bloody Duke at Fontenoy — was brave " but not by any means an eagle." Even Frederick the Great — to whom Napoleon surely owed his ideas about horse artillery — fails to meet with the approval of the Corsican, who declares in almost the same words which old Wurmser had used about himself in the Italian Campaign of 1796 : 44 THE GENESIS OF NAPOLEON " Frederick breaks all the rules of war. What distinguishes him is not so much his skill in manoeuvres as his audacity. There was nothing very fine in his tactics at Rosbach, and cer- tainly he is not in the same class with Turenne. Frederick, for all his great military qualities, did not understand the proper use of artillery." So, then, we see that Alexander is only brave and that Hannibal, Caesar and Frederick are not on the same level as Turenne, Napoleon, of course, being, by construction, above them all. He is not more generous in dealing with his own lieu- tenants, whose glory he will only allow to reflect his own, as Madame de Remusat tells us in her Memoir es, adding, " and if they distinguished themselves, he would say that they only did their duty." When Davout, who had just won the battle of Auerstadt, really the decisive factor in the Jena Campaign, met his Emperor at Head- quarters, the day after, Napoleon, who had had sufficient time to compare and appraise the re- spective merits of Auerstadt and Jena, looked at ^ his lieutenant very darkly, saying : ^ "Vous n'avez pas mal fait — You didn't do so badly." He is careful, too, to move his generals from one force to another, in order that none shall become too popular with any particular army. There shall be no " X of the Army of Y," as there had been a Bonaparte of the Army of Italy— if Napoleon can help it. In speaking of Hoche, whom, with Marceau, French experts rate on a " WHO WOULD NOT WEEP " 45 level equal to all that Bonaparte proved himself to be in Italy, the Emperor declared that, had it come to a definite rivalry between them, Hoche would have been crushed. Moreau, Napoleon admitted, was the only general sprung from the Revolution who was capable of causing him any anxiety. Yet he gives no credit to Moreau for the victory of Hohenlinden, which, far more than Marengo — too distant from the campaign's real political objective, Vienna — decided the sub- mission of Austria to Bonaparte's plans in 1800. Napoleon at St Helena described this great battle as a mere " rencontre heureuse," which — of course — disclosed no military talent. Then there was Massena — whom Disraeli, through the mouth of Sidonia, claimed as a fellow- Hebrew from the tribe of Manasseh : " Massena," said Napoleon, " possesses military talents before which we must bow." This general, it will be remembered, fought a three-day battle against the Russians under Korsakoff, at Zurich, in 1799, defeated them and saved France from invasion. Yet when Massena in 1804 wished to take the title Due de Zurich, in memory of the exploit which had won him the admiration of all France, Napoleon declined to sanction the choice on the ground that the suggested title was too German for a good Frenchman ! Massena had to content himself with the dukedom of Rivoli, which re- called a first-class Bonapartian exploit. Thie- bault, an admirer of the Emperor, tells us that the Corsican never quite forgave Massena, who 46 THE GENESIS OF NAPOLEON among soldiers and the people, held a reputation hardly inferior to that of Napoleon himself, and in order to destroy the Marshal's prestige with the public, sent him to conquer Portugal with forces entirely inadequate for the objecb in view. Furthermore, in order to make any likelihood of his great lieutenant's success all the more remote, two hot-heads like Ney and Junot, men whom only Napoleon himself could command, were given him as coadjutors. Massena, adds Thiebault, was too astute not to see through his master's motives, and at first refused to undertake the mission. Thiebault's conclusion is one that is of interest in these days of great military exploit : '' II semhle que le harnais militaire est idIus lyropice quaucun autre a provoquer, chez quiconque le porte, cette rage de gloire et cet entrainernent a speculer sur la defaite du rival qui j^orte ombrage.^^ To which we may add another opinion in point from the excellent Monsieur de Remusat, who writes in the following strain, to his equally excellent wife : — "It is amusing to hear these military men discuss one another ; how they run each other down, showing, or seeking to show, for how much good luck counts in successes which are won ; and tearing to shreds every reputation which outsiders like ourselves would have thought to be established on the most solid foundations." Taine was assuredly right when he declared that all independence — even its possibility — offended Napoleon, and that he could tolerate " —IF ATTICUS WERE HE ? " 47 around him only such spirits as wilhngly hugged the chains of their slavery. Napoleon himself admitted his obsession more than once, and com- pared himself at times to an artist, or to a lover : " I love power," he told Roederer, " but I love it as only an artist loves his art." And on another occasion : " I have only one passion and one mistress — France. I wake with her, I sleep with her. My only mistress is power, and I worked too hard in winning her, to allow myself easily to be robbed of her, or even to be envied for possessing her." Or again : " Ambition is so much a part of my tempera- ment, of my constitution, that it has become the very blood of my veins and the very air which I breathe." CHAPTER II THE IMPERIAL STUDENT Napoleon's Academic Tramijig — The Curriculum at Brienne — The Classical atid Language Course — On Literary Style — The Mathematical Studies — Religious Instructio?i — At the Ecole Mililaire — The Suhaltern- Sludent of Aiuvonnc — Impoiiance of History — Forma- tion of Literary Tastes — What Rousseau taught Napoleon — Machiavelli a Favourite — Was Bonaparte a Mason ? — Sojne Literary Attempts — His " Heart's Library" — So7ne English Books CERTAIN French writers, among them Monsieur Gustave Mouravit, agree in thinking that the psychic side of Napoleon is best divined from a study of his private hbraries. Supposing this method to be a fair test of the intellectual or spiritual formation of an individual, we cannot fail to derive much profit from tracing his literary tastes back to the days of his early training at Brienne, where the young Corsican spent six years. French provincial colleges, whether military or civil, have not, even in respect of the various curricula followed, changed very much within the past hundred years or so, and those who have, as so many Britons now do, passed a few years in a congregational school on the Continent, will have no difficulty at all in recon- structing for themselves the Academy of Brienne, severe and semi-monastic, where the youthful Bonaparte began his first steps in polite learning. Then, as now, the so-called literary course began with the seventh, or grammar class, after which the pupil started his cours d^humanites. As a King's Cadet and an officer-to-be, young Bona- parte naturally chose the classical side, and in due course ascended through " Sixieme Latine," Fifth, Fourth, Third, Second, to First, or " Rhetoric." Latin was an essential — though Napoleon in after life admitted to Wieland and Goethe that he was no great Latinist. Roman authors read all varied according to the Forms, the lower taking very simple works 50 " EN SIXIEME LATINE " 51 like those of Eutropius, or easy passages from the Selectse or Colloquia of Erasmus, the Fables of PhsediT-is. The middle forms read the Lives of Cornelius Nepos — De Viris lUustribus, we presume, the Eclogues, Caesar's Commentaries, Sallust's Jugurtha and Catiline. The higher classes read the Twenty-First Book of Livy, Cicero's Catiline and Pro Milone, the Odes and the Satires of Horace, the First, Second and Sixth Books of the ^neid, and the Fourth of the Georgics. The pupils in Rhetoric, we are told, were taught that there were three kinds of Oratory — namely, (1) the judicial ; (2) the demonstrative and (3) the deliberative. Three kinds of literary style — (1) the sublime style — " dont Vecueil est Venflure, fatras loompeux de paroles steriles " ; (2) the moderate style, like that of Telemaquey and (3) the simple style, of which La Bruyere was the chief model, and of which the literary professor of the Minimes acuminously observed : " ce style est j^lus difficile a attraper qiCon ne se V imagined Literature was taught with evidently more care for the training of the pupil's cultivable mind than is the case in British Public Schools, and a satisfactory knowledge was required from each youth concerning the main characteristics and methods of thought and expression of Homer, Virgil, Lucian, ^sop, Phsedrus, Theocritus, Milton, Voltaire, Tasso and Camoens. Voltaire's Essay on Epic Poetry, passages from the Death of Caesar and the Henriade were among the compulsory subjects, though Corneille, Racine, 52 THE IMPERIAL STUDENT Fenelon, Bossuet, Massillon, Flechier and Boileau were naturally the favourite authors in this congregational academy. The oracle of the Minimes was Boileau. A work by the Abbe Vertot, entitled History of the Knights of Malta, was looked upon as a classic and was learned by heart ; Greek and Roman history, lectures on the story of France from the days of the early kings and an account of the "prodigious conquests " of the British in India made up the History course. Geography was studied somewhat perfunctorily, though considerable attention was devoted to the British Isles. There was no mention of Physics or Natural History, but German was a fairly general subject and the Mathematical schools were good so far as they went, which was, for the highest Form, in Algebra, to Logarithms and the Theorem ; in Geometry, to advanced studies of the Straight Line and Circle ; in Trigonometry, to the Solution of Triangles. Religious instruction was also given in the form of discourses on difficult points in the Catechism and, of course, there were classes in Bible History, which the students for the most part looked upon as the most tedious of all lectures. Napoleon was not lacking in piety, Chuquet tells us, when he first arrived at Brienne ; but it is also certain that the general tone of the school towards religious matters was well cal- culated to kill any devotion he may once have entertained for the Church, and he left there a confirmed unbeUever, even as most of his con- DEVOTIONAL SPRINTERS 53 temporaries, who, after the manner of the esprits forts so fashionable in that age, affected, more especially in the upper lecture-rooms, to ridicule all matters connected with spiritual belief. It will interest those who have experience of this kind of foreign school-life to learn that the most popular professors among the priests were those who went through the daily Mass with the greatest dispatch. Thus a certain Pere Chateau, for example, was able to gallop through the ceremony au pas de charge, taking only four minutes and a half to celebrate a *' dead " mass ; a certain Pere Berton, an ex-grenadier, by the way, was a good second favourite, with a record of from nine to ten minutes ; while a very old stager, Pere Genin, could even beat the Missal hi less than fourteen minutes by the clock. On leaving Brienne and proceeding to the Military College in Paris, young Bonaparte's studies concerned themselves almost wholly with technical acquirements, and if the Corsican de- voted much time to other reading, we are not informed of the nature of the works which engaged his interest. It was not until 1785, when he was already a subaltern in the artillery, that he read Rousseau's Co7ifessions which, he afterwards admitted, much affected his world-philosophy at the time. It seems a startling fact in these days of rapid military promotion, but it is true that Bonaparte remained for over five years a second lieutenant before he received his first step. During these years — which were divided between 54 THE IMPERIAL STUDENT his regimental service and Corsica — the young subaltern gave himself up to all kinds of study which was likely to contribute to his intellectual formation, including original literary w^ork. " My sense of time-economy was always large," he declared subsequently to the Prince-Primate at Erfurt, " and even when I had nothing to do, I was quick to realise that I had no time to lose." When on garrison duty at Auxonne, he read scores of historical works, including, as he tells us, Marigny's History of the Arabs, several works dealing with the government of Venice, Buffon's Natural History, Mably's Observations on the His- tory of France, a work on Frederick the Great, Baron Tott's Souvenirs of Turkey, Barrow's History of England, ^lirabeau's Lelires de Cachet, Plato's Republic . The literary tastes of Napoleon may be said to have formed themselves during his garrison years from 1785 to 1791, and the possession of an extraordinary memory helped him to retain all that he read. It was about this time, too, that he began to show his preferences in regard to the theatre. He was no lover of the play of the comedy-of -manners type, and even of Moliere's plays he could say that they were mere drawing- room gossip — commerage de salon. His idea of the educative in the drama was based upon the stern realities of life, on destiny and on all those conditions of existence which reveal men unto themselves and force them to fight against the adverse fate which is ever ready to overwhelm INFLUENCE OF ROUSSEAU 55 the resigned and the supine. Like all true Italians, he was a lover of Tragedy, and it is a matter of record that himself, Joseph, Louis, Lucien and their sister Elisa enacted many of the masterpieces of Corneille and Racine at one time or another in private. Voltaire, Napoleon always held, was deficient in a proper understanding of men, their motives and their passions, and failed — like Tacitus — to appreciate the real nobleness which invariably inspires the ambitions and enterprises of all great men. Paul et Virginie attracted his interest in these days, as naturally did Montesquieu's Esprit des Lois. Men who associated with him at that time tell us how it was his habit to read aloud and so improve his French accent, which always remained bad — so much so indeed that sergeants, in reading the military orders of the day, used to mimic his pronunciation and say enfanterie for infanterie, and emphasise the ton nasillard which character- ised their young Corsican officer. Rousseau, the author of the Social Contract, of the Confessions and of Emile, counted for much in forming his philosophic outlook about this period, and helped him to attain that clear insight into men's character which distinguished the great intellectual rebel himself. In the days of Auxonne he thirsted, like Rousseau, after Justice and Liberty, fully agreed with Emile that " society was bad and much corrupted by ex- cessive civilisation," and sighed for the purity of character which he found among the heroes of 4 J 56 THE IMPERIAL STUDENT c^ 9 his favourite Ossian. And strong with the idea V '>^ that the Corsicans were the modern types of the ancient GaeUc warriors, he decided to write a history of his native island. In 1789 he trans- lated Boswell's Account of Corsica and con- cluded from a searching study of Cromwell that -J^ " revolutions provide a good opportunity for men *<^ ^who have audacity and courage." His study of Machiavelli pleases him, and from that philosopher he takes a phrase which is afterwards to help him generously on his life's journey : " It is better to be brutal with Fortune than to approach her with respect ; for Fortune is a woman, and he that seeks to win her must use > ^ violence rather than diplomacy." y"^ All and everything touching on the campaigns " -» of the great captains of the world helps to fill ^ up the busy days of mind-building, and he comes ^^ to the conclusion as a result of his researches in '^ military history that : ^ " In the last analysis, it is the soldier who governs ; one can only master a horse with boot and spur." The horse meaning, of course, the People. Chuquet is of opinion that Bonaparte became a Mason about the Valence period, and draws the conclusion therefrom that at any rate he had ceased to be a Catholic on taking up his com- mission ; a point of view which overlooks the fact that at the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century — the Age of Reason — Freemasonry counted all sorts and WANTED— A UTOPIA 57 conditions of prominent men within its fold, many of whom outwardly professed anti-Masonic religions and many who followed none at all. There is little doubt, in any case, that he was as favourable to Freemasonry as he was at heart antipathetic to Jewry, and in all probability haabeen initiated at some time or other into the lower degrees. About 1790, Lucien tells us, he wrote an essay in which, as Voltaire in his own day had done, he sought to show that the life i and teachings of Apollonius of Tyana — a mystical ^ contemporary of Christ — exceeded in their in- fluence on the then existing world all that which had been exerted by the Bethlehemite. It was in 1791 that the Academy of Lyons decided to award a prize, equal in value to about £60 of our own money, for the best essay dealing with the essential conditions of human happiness. The young officer — then in his twenty-third year — became a candidate for this award, and in due course sent in his contribution, the sentiments of which indicated his revolt against the animalism of Rousseau, who maintained, it will be remem- bered, that food, a female and rest were all- sufficient for a man's happiness. Bonaparte advocated the necessity of reasoned sentiment in the world as the proper inspiration of social happiness and progress — sentiment being the prmcipiu7n of society and reason the force which held it together. Self-isolation was opposed to nature ; sympathy was as much a craving of man's soul, as food for his body ; action was 58 THE IMPERIAL STUDENT always superior to philosophy, even as sane enthusiasm is always above philosophic indiffer- ence, and reasoned self-expression is, en somyne, the end of each man's life — these are, in effect, some of the points of view he advances as requisite for his new Utopia. He did not win the prize which was declared to be, if somewhat discursive, at least full of sound philosophy. The winner was Denou, eight years older than Bonaparte, a man who subsequently played a prominent role as a politician and an intellectual on a lower stage than his vast contemporary. In 1793 Commandant Bonaparte, of the 12th Battery of La Fere, published at his own expense his Souper de Beaucaire, a discussion, between five typical representatives of the social body, which treated of the existing political situation in France, and with especial reference to the city of Marseilles, which then aspired, it would seem, to play in Europe the role which had once belonged to oligarchic Venice. That such a condition of affairs could exist, indicated clearly the inherent weakness of the French Government, and the military representative at the Beaucaire supper- table — Bonaparte, of course — goes on to show that France can be saved only by a vigorous policy which shall prove acceptable to the whole of the nation, provided it be able to assert itself and re-establish order everywhere — a policy in which the sword must be allowed to play a capital role, given the conditions of the day, suggests our pragmatical officer, as we might presume. This NAPOLEON'S LIBRARY 59 pamphlet went the way of the majority of ecrits de circonstance ; it made no sensation in the world, and a day was to come when Napoleon could use bad language on his hypercritical and caustic brother Lucien reminding him of certain of the popular sentiments he then advanced. " Oubliez-lc," he would shout at the mocking Lucien ; " oubliez-le — forget it ! " ; and then goes on to lecture him on the virtue of gratitude among brothers. In concluding this chapter, we think it well to mention that the fallen Emperor's library at St Helena was bequeathed to the Duke of Reichstadt. It contained somewhat fewer than 500 volumes, which, we may suppose, were the favourite works of the wonderful soldier —his *' heart's library," to which the great disrated could turn at any time for recreation, forgetful- ness or consolation. The first masters of French literature were nearly all represented, for a part if not all of their masterpieces, and there lies not a little pathos in the fact that the works on which his youthful mind had fed at Brienne ever held the first place in his interest. Historical tomes were numerous, and among English books we find a translation of Gibbon, a translation of Paradise Lost and Hamilton's Memoirs of de Grammont. There is also a Bible in eight volumes and a history of Bonaparte as First Consul, in three volumes. These apart, it is History — History everywhere, the story of human action to which he was to contribute so vast a chronicle himself. 60 THE IMPERIAL STUDENT At the death of the Duke of Reichstadt, in the third decade of the nineteenth century, all these volumes passed into the possession of the Emperors of Austria, and are now shelved in the vast Hofburg Library in Vienna in a special section devoted to the legend of this mighty adversary of the House of Habsburg. CHAPTER III THE IMPERIAL CRITIC Frenchmen and Conieille — Value of Napoleotis Criticism — His Literanj Likes and Dislikes — His Opinion of Corneille and Moliere — A Discussion of Tragedy — Napoleon and Raynouard — Concerning Voltaire — A Reading by Talma — Napoleon and the Public Taste — Love and Tragedy — A Literary Ghost — The Emperor s Criticism of the Mneid, Book II. — His Opinion of the Iliad — Dislike of Shakespeare — A Hypercritical View FRENCHMEN are agreed, we think, in assigning to Corneille the place which Enghshmen give to Shakespeare, or Germans to Goethe ; and, as every school- boy knows, in France, England and Germany, there may be found large bodies of opinion which, excluding all possible competitors, home or foreign, accord their champion, as against the rest of the world's illuminati, a position corresponding to that which certain theological universities are wont to confer on their most distinguished scholar — namely, the degree of Solus. Although we prefer to leave to profounder judges of the literary arts all decisions in matters of this nature, and though far from accepting the literary criticism of the great soldier as possessing much value beyond that of an extraordinary judge of human nature and human motives, we maintain, nevertheless, that the judgments of so important a student as Napoleon may always be placed with, at least, corrective results beside those of really competent professional critical judges, and competent critics, it may be said, are nearly as rare as Napoleons. xA.s he has assured us himself, Napoleon was no great admirer of Shakespeare ; his regard for Goethe we have dwelt upon in another chapter, and shown that it Avas based partly on the psychological study of Werther and partly on the second-hand opinions, given to him by Talleyrand, by Lannes and by other men of purely political affairs, regarding the tremendous prestige that the Sage of Weimar 62 SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA 63 enjoyed among the conservative elements of Germany, Avhich then, as now, made the most of its chosen literary instruments. Shakespeare, said Napoleon, in effect, would never have enjoyed the universal renown which was his, had it not been that Voltaire, an exile in England desirous of flattering Englishmen, introduced the study of the English dramatist to Frenchmen. Hamlet^ the exile boasted, he only saw played once in his life, Macbeth twice, Othello once, and what he had seen of Shakespeare had not encouraged him to further study of the English style of drama. On the other hand, he had seen Le Cid eight times, Polyeucte six times, Cinna twelve times, CEdvpe nine times. The English dramatist he considered to be lacking in political insight and to possess a genius which was more applicable to the study of bourgeois or provincial situations and conditions than adapted for intrigues enacted on a grand and imposing plane, and held that the colonising gifts of the British, by spreading the English language, had done more towards universalising the Bard of Avon than any intrinsical genius shown by his works. " Corneille was, on the contrary," said Napoleon, " at the supreme head of all the tragical poets of all time. He had divined the real nature of politics, and had he been trained to affairs, would have made a great statesman. It is not his versification that I admire most, but his great sense of actualities, his vast knowledge 64 THE IMPERIAL CRITIC of the human heart, the profundity of his poHtical nous. France owes to the sentiments which he has voiced many glorious results. The fatalism of the ancients Corneille has replaced by the reasoned philosophy of State-politics, and he is the only one among the poets of France who has seized upon this truth. Had he lived in my time I would have created him a prince." So enthusiastic, indeed, was the Emperor for the great French poet that at one time he expressed his intention of ennobling the living descendants of Corneille and of granting them suitable pensions for the maintenance of their dignity. Of Moliere's comedies he was no great admirer, since tragedy, in his opinion, was the only form of the drama which had a really educative value, or any inspiration worthy of the name. Tartuffe, he admitted, however, to be one of the master- pieces of the stage, yet a piece for which he would not himself have granted a theatrical licence, owing to the way in which it ridiculed devotional piety. Racine he esteemed very highly, and had witnessed Bajazet seven times, Iphigenie ten times, and Phedre on an equal number of occa- sions. Mithridate, in respect of its famous plan of campaign, he declared to be worthless, although as a work of art this drama appealed to him, Racine representing, in his view, on the whole, the somewhat " easy-going philanthropism " of the latter half of the seventeenth century. Raynouard's Templiers he witnessed three times, and disapproving of it for political reasons, com- NAPOLEON OBJECTS 65 manded the author to come to the Tuileries in order to discuss Tragedy with him. The char- acter of King PhiHppe-le-Bel, in this piece, had, it may be said, been depreciated, although in the opinion of the Emperor he had been a good King and France had not been too rich in good monarchs. He had, said Napoleon, been the first to put the Pope in his place, and had worked for the people in his attempt to destroy the Order of the Templars — composed mainly of younger sons and possessing the third of the kingdom's wealth — which had ceased to possess any utili- tarian value, but had become dangerous to the State. The Emperor's conversation with Raynouard throws an interesting light upon his conception of the drama. " You should have represented the King," said Napoleon, " in the act of declaring to a Council of his Ministers that he intended to abolish the Order. The Grand Master would then refuse to dissolve the Brotherhood and Philippe would finally be compelled to sentence him to death." " My conception," replied Raynouard, " was to make the King a weak character in order to enhance the dramatic situation by leaving the spectator in doubt whether the King would prove harsh or merciful to the Order — whether he would suppress it, or not." " But," objects the Emperor, " the King in this case represents the nation, and the nation is opposed to the Templars, who are a band of oligarchs working for their own interest and 66 THE IMPERIAL CRITIC against that of the people. The latter must, therefore, be on the side of their real representa- tive — the King. Your correct dramatic situa- tion would have been to show Philippe bringing about a magnificent and spectacular coup d'etat by abolishing a veritable impei'ium in imperio. A King of France can be put on the stage only to be admired. Again, you must get this point into your head — namely, that Politics plays in modern drama the role that Fate played in the drama of the Ancients." And the Emperor goes on to show where the poet's technique fails in the following lines which Philippe addresses to the rebelHous Grand Master : — " Choose between my clemency and my hatred — The scaffold awaits you ! " " That," cries Napoleon, " is altogether wrong ! A King does not talk of his hatred, but of his justice. He may consign to the scaffold, but never talks of one." On the subject of Brutus, the work of Voltaire, whose style the Emperor declared to be full of turgidity and tinsel (de boursouflure et de clin- quant) and whose temperament was incapable of understanding men and matters, or the move- ment of the passions. Napoleon said : " The Romans were guided by the love of their country, just as we are by our honour. Now, Voltaire does not depict the true sublimity of Brutus sacrificing his children, despite his own DISLIKE OF VOLTAIRE 67 agony, for the safety of Rome ; he makes of iiim a monster of pride sacrificing them at a great crisis solely to the glorification of his own name. The whole tragedy is of a kind, and Lucretia becomes a madwoman who almost glories in the seduction which must make the ages talk of her." And of the same author's Mahomet he tells us that the Prophet is nothing better than an im- postor who might have been brought up at the Ecole Polytechnique ; he is made to murder his father — an entirely wrong idea, says Napoleon, who adds that really great men are never ciniel without necessity. Altogether Voltaire's Mahomet is too little for Napoleon, who gives instructions on one occasion to Monsieur de Fontanes saying : " / will reconstruct the plays and you can look after the versification." Legouve was another dramatist who came under Imperial criticism, when his Death of Henri IV. was submitted to the Censor. Talma was com- manded to read the play and the Imperial family, including Josephine, was present for the occasion. A line sonorously declaimed by the great tragedic actor awakens the Imperial ire. It runs : " Je tremble — je ne sais quel noir pressentiment. . . ." This is too much for Napoleon's conception of kingliness ; he interrupts Talma at once, declar- ing that the phrasing must be altered : " A King may tremble," he explains, " since 68 THE IMPERIAL CRITIC he is a man like other men ; but he should never admit it." The words are accordingly changed and Talma goes on to describe how some bloody villain creeps forward and plunges ten inches of dagger into the royal chest. " Le pauvre homme ! L 'excellent homme ! " cries Napoleon, with obvious after-thoughts, while poor Josephine, ires cmue, turns on the opportune tear. A certain Nicolo Buonaparte, a resident of Florence, wrote a comedy in 1568, called La Vedova (The Widow), and Napoleon, with praise- worthy family pride, wished to have the play translated and produced in Paris in his day. It was found, however, that the work was far too indecent even for that age, and accordingly was not acted. Nevertheless, Napoleon made few mistakes in his judgments as to what the public really wanted, and the views of the people, dramatists always admitted, in nearly all cases coincided with those of the Emperor, a fact which may recommend itself to many psychologists of History, who tell us, with considerable cogency, that the great leaders of any epoch are almost invariably men who constitute in themselves a kind of resume of the mentality and tempera- mentality of the age in which they live. Arnault once read his Dom Pedro, or The Prince and the Peasant, to the Emperor, who was far from charmed to hear an agricultural labourer giving counsel to a sovereign. A LITERARY GHOST 69 " Your peasant is a tribune of the Plebs," he told the author, " and I don't care for him." So, too, thought the first-nighters, who hissed the piece rather severely on its presentation. It was the opinion of the Corsican that Corneille alone knew how to make kings act and talk, j^ verse being only the embroidery of the dramatic stuff, as he expressed it in his excellent native mother-wit. To Baour-Lormian, who had written a tragedy called Mahomet II., Napoleon, dislik- ing the piece, declared that love scenes were of no use in tragical pieces, and that the serious dramatist should rely on history rather than on romance for his effects. What the author wanted was large conceptions ; the word-painting and the ringing phrase could wait. We must not overlook the tradition that Napoleon was himself the composer of a tragedy called Hector, the authorship of which was said to have been officially attributed to an alleged literary ghost. Luce de Lancival. This gentle- man, who had already written several plays, was without apparent reason one day given the Legion of Honour and a pension worth £300 a year. Some obscure pamphleteer sought in a publication to show that Lancival's Hector was really the work of Bonaparte himself, who had once wiled away the empty hours of his incar- ceration in the Temple, many years before, in composing this tragedy. On attaining to supreme power he resurrected his lucubration, confiding it to Lancival for alterations and repairs. The 70 THE IMPERIAL CRITIC dramatist did all that was required of him, tenderly edited Hector and submitted it, in his own name, to the Theatre Franyais, where it was swiftly turned down with Homeric honours. A few days afterwards, during a rehearsal, an aide- de-camp arrived at the theatre with the following letter addressed to the director : — " The mummers (histrions) of the Theatre Fran^ais will immediately start rehearsing the tragedy Hector, which they had the audacity and ill-taste to refuse. Signed : Nap." When we have added that the above story appears in a pamphlet entitled, Bonaparte, his Family and his Court, by a Chamberlain malgre lui, we think the credibility of this pamphleteer becomes a little more than suspect. Brother Scots will be interested to hear that a play entitled Edward in Scotland, by Alexander Duval, was enacted in 1802, and the audience much applauded a scene in which the Pretender retorts to an English colonel, who proposes as a toast the death of all who support the Stuarts : " I drink the death of no man," says Charles James, and the public applauded, thinking of the exiled Bourbons, no doubt. Bonaparte went to see the play and Duval affects to think that the First Consul shed a tear over the sufferings of the poor Stuart exile ! Bourbon partisans who were present, like the Due de Choiseul, took every available opportunity of making demonstrations, and Bonaparte had the play withdrawn. Some indication of the political temper of those days VIRGIL EXAMINED 71 is also shown in the extra-theatrical comedy which attended on the representation of a play called U Antichambre, by Dupaty, in which the Consular court comes in for considerable ridicule, Bonaparte himself being mimicked, as well as members of his family. In his first anger the Consul sentenced the author to exile in San Domingo, but pardoned him as he was taking ship at Brest for the West Indies. The Imperial critic on one occasion delivered his opinion of Virgil in the following words : — *' The Second Book of the ^Eneid is held to be the masterpiece of this epic, and it certainly deserves the reputation, considered from the point of style. I cannot, however, rate it very high from other points of view. Thus, the wooden horse may have been a popular tradition, but to introduce it into an epic poem is ridiculous and entirely unworthy of a grandiose theme. You will find nothing like this in the IHad, where everything conforms strictly and truthfully to the real practice of war. How can we imagine the Trojans so stupid as not to have thought of send- ing a fishing-smack to the island of Tenedos, in sight of Troy, in order to assure themselves if the thousand ships of the Greeks had reached there, or if they were on their way to attack the city ? How can we believe that Ulysses and his friends were such fools as to risk putting them- selves into the hands of their enemies by cribbing themselves in that ridiculous wooden machine ? And supposing the^iorse to have contained even 72 THE IMPERIAL CRITIC one hundred armed men — how could such a weight have been moved to the walls of Troy, across the bay and over two rivers which were overlooked by the very towers of the citadel ? " The tragic episode of the sons of Laokoon, however impressive, cannot excuse the absurdity of the narrative, which really shows that the destruction of Troy and the entire action of the Second Book were executed and accomplished within the space of a few hours— an achievement which must in practice have required at least a fortnight. Had Homer described the fall of Troy he would not have treated it simply as one treats the taking of a fort. Homer had seen war, whilst Virgil had simply thought out his ideas of war like a schoolmaster who knows his book. It took Scipio seventeen days to raze Carthage to the ground ; and Moscow was burned out only after eleven had passed. The Third Book is but a copy of the Odyssey, while the Fourth lacks every agreement with the dramatic unities. " The Iliad," said Napoleon, " is like Genesis and the Bible, and is for all time. Homer was at once a poet, an orator, an historian, a legislator, a geographer and a theologian. He is the Encyclopaedist of his epoch. The universal approval which men have given him has been well won and I have always read him with enthusiasm. A contrast which much struck me in Homer was the coarseness of social habits and the ethical grandeur of ideas — heroes hunting THE BARD OF AVON 78 game and dressing their own food, yet moving worlds to vast endeavour with their eloquence." And here finally is what the Emperor had to say of the Bard of Avon, whom he had read, we imagine, only through the medium of translations : " Certain French people fall in love with England at first sight, and are willing to accept one single opinion as sufficing to settle finally the matter of England's literary glory. But Shakespeare was forgotten for two centuries even in England. It pleased Voltaire, then in Geneva and seeing much English society at the time, to praise the English poet in order to flatter his great friends from London. It became the fashion to call Shakespeare the greatest writer of all time. I have read Shakespeare, however, and can say that there is nothing in him which approaches either Corneille or Racine. It is impossible indeed to read his plays seriously. Myself I find them so feeble as to be almost pitiful. As for Milton, there is only his address to the Sun and a few other pieces which count for anything ; the rest is mere rhapsody. And I much prefer Vely to Hume. France has no cause to envy England for anything ; even her own citizens desert her as soon as they can." Napoleon once objected to La Fontaine's famous fable of the Wolf and the Lamb on the ground that it taught might to be greater than right, and was consequently bad for children. It was 74 THE IMPERIAL CRITIC immoral, he further held, because the wolf was not choked when he devoured the lamb ! In History he stood out for Machiavelli, saying : " Tacitus wrote novels. Gibbon is a brawler. ]Machiavelli is the only historian worth reading." CHAPTER IV THE IMPERIAL THEATRE Talma and Bonaparte — The Actor coaches the First Cotisid — The Emperor coaches the Actor — Frie7idly Relations of the Ttvain — Napoleon on Critics and his Love for Cinna — Concerning Mademoiselle Mars a7td her Sister — An Unexpected Scene — Mademoiselle Boiirgoin and Chaptal — An Imperial Rebuke IT is unfortunate that Talma, the Kean of the French stage, should have left us next to nothing in the way of records dealing with his long and uninterrupted intimacy with Napoleon whom he had known in the days which followed on the Toulon episode, when the young Corsican was an un- employed ex-commandant in Paris. There are letters extant — suspect, it must be added — in which the poor officer writes to the affluent and friendly actor, asking him if he has a few dollars (ecus) at his disposal, and it is to Talma, we think, that young Bonaparte confessed that he had once put his watch in pawn for a couple of pieces of gold. Of all the celebrities on the stage of that period. Talma alone enjoyed an intimacy with Napoleon, which came near to that possessed by Duroc, the Earl Marshal of the Empire, and the only individual to whom the Corsican allowed the privilege of free brotherly speech with him- self. The Emperor at St Helena gave the dis- claimer to the many stories which charged him with having been a bad borrower, when he said that he and Talma only became acquainted in 1800. Talma also denied the suggestions. Others assert that they had known each other since 1790. Whatever the facts, and they are not of very great importance, there is no doubt that in 1802 Talma began to pay very frequent visits to the First Consul, in the course of which, it is said, the great actor used to give the chief of the State TAL.MA AS NERO THE SCHOOL FOR KINGS 77 lessons in princely deportment, a course of in- struction the real significance of which could not have escaped the astute Frenchman. Admirers of Bonaparte who attributed all god-like gifts to their hero, denied that the Corsican had ever sought instruction from an actor how to play the monarch, and if the lessons were ever given, it is to be feared that Napoleon was no very apt pupil, since sound tradition has it that he was the least graceful or imposing of princes in respect of presence and courtly bearing. Nor can it be said that Napoleon derived much benefit from Talma's lessons in elocution, for, to the end, the great soldier, whatever he may have been in private, or in the council chamber, was a failure as a public speaker — except on the eve of conflict. That the Corsican really took lessons in deportment and elocution from his great contemporary is, how- ever, our own fixed belief, and we see no reason either for refusing to believe the fact or for holding Napoleon up to ridicule on this account. We have noted that, like the admirably thorough being he ever was, Bonaparte had studied out the essential character and personality of princes ; and it is more than likely that he did not confine his study to learning only the half of his role. On his own side, Napoleon was very free with instructions to the great tragedian. For example, after seeing Talma in the Death of Pompey in 1805, the Emperor — ^^vho had really been an emperor since 1800 and cannot be accused of too much anxiety to show his sense of the new honour 78 THE i:\IPERIAL THEATRE — addressed the actor as to his role in the following terms : — " You ^vork your arms too freely and are too full of gesture. The head of an empire is more economical of his movements ; he is fully aware that a sign is an order, that a look means death, and is therefore sparing of both. There is also in the play a verse the meaning of which escapes you, Talma, who seem to be too convinced, too sincere when you declaim the line : " ' For me, who think a throne to be an infamy . . .' " Caesar, when he speaks these words, does not mean the least of them, and talks in this strain only because he is surrounded by Romans to whom he wishes to convey the idea that he has a horror of kings. He is, however, far from thinking the throne contemptible. On the con- trary, it is the first object of his whole life. You must not make a Caesar talk as a Brutus would talk." Again, after witnessing Britannicus, Napoleon criticises Talma in the following words : — " Your acting of Nero does not quite satisfy me, and in that role I should like to see more of the conflict between a bad character and a good education. You should make fewer gestures ; a nature like Nero's has little external show, being too self-centred. Nevertheless, I like the simple and natural forms which you have restored to tragedy. When men of exalted rank are moved by passion, their language becomes more energetic TALMA AT COURT 79 without being less natural. For example, you and I are now conversing in an ordinary way ; nevertheless we are making history." When the First Consul becomes FiUiperor, Talma fears to present himself at the Imperial Court until the new sovereign, noticing his continued absence, asks if the great actor is angry with him for any reason. After which Talma presents him- self and pleases Napoleon because he dresses in appropriate good taste for his courtly role. So Napoleon takes the opportunity of continuing his instructions to Talma, and we get the following monologue : — " Talma, you often visit me, and you can see things as they are : Princesses deprived of their lovers, Princes who have lost their States, Kings degraded by war from their sovereign rank, Generals who aspire to and beg for thrones. Around me you can see fallen ambitions, never- ceasing intrigues and rivalries, sorrows and afflic- tion — all covered with courtier-like maskery. Here, assuredly, is Tragedy enough for anyone ; my Palace is full of it, and even I am myself the most tragical figure in this big cast of tragedy. Well now ! Do you see any of us strike attitudes, or affect the airs and poses of grandeur, or hear us cry out in our triumphs or in our anguish ? No, indeed ! We are all perfectly natural and speak just as ordinary men speak when moved by interest or by passion. And it was in just the same way that the great makers of history acted in their own day and in the process of their own 80 THE IMPERIAL THEATRE tragedies. There, now, you have something on which to meditate ! " 4 All of which makes the reader rather sorry for f ^ the actor to whom Napoleon thought it necessary .^ to address so crude a sermon of banalities — if he ^ ' ever did ; and we very much doubt it. Talma once pretended to discern in the profile of Alexander the Great, as shown by a rare cameo, some resemblance to Napoleon — a likeness which certainly did not exist, if ancient coins tell the truth. The Emperor professed to be pleased and presented Talma with the cameo. Napoleon many times paid the great actor's debts — to a total amount, according to the Imperial account- books, of half-a-milhon francs, or £20,000. Cer- tainly Talma was never guilty of ingratitude to the Corsican. In view of the number of knight- hoods which have been distributed within later times to the various prominent actors and singers of our own age, by European sovereigns, it is interesting to learn from the Memoirs of Las Cases that Napoleon once declared it had been his intention to decorate Talma with the Legion of Honour, and that only the fear of a public outcry against such an official distinguishing of a mere actor caused him to alter his decision. It was from Talma that Bonaparte on his return from Italy to Paris purchased the hotel in the rue de la Victoire — formerly rue Chantereine — and it was in this house that the actor made up a list of entertainers whom, he suggested the General should take with him to Egypt : Rigel, a pianist of THE R6LE ;0F the critic 81 note ; Grandmaison, a poet ; Villoteau, a baritone — the type of male voice which Napoleon most favoured, we may state — and Arnault, a dramatic poet and author of Les Venetiens, who admitted that the Corsican had collaborated with him in the composition of that play. It was also to Talma, who had just presented his friend the poet Lemercier, that Bonaparte declared that criticism which was not con- structive was of no value whatsoever, since, as he said, a valet-de-chambre can find words for simple or gratuitous criticism. One of the visitors objected that the matter of good taste might possibly be beyond the intelligence of a menial, and Napoleon answered : " That is just another conventional term — good taste ! What can the matter of good ~^ taste mean to a man who works on original lines \ as apart from novelty and the bizarre ? To me it is of the last concern what another person thinks, especially in accidentals. Give me sound '1 argument and sound thought and I am with you. I have tried to read Virgil, but he bored me, and Ossian I read simply because, like the waves of the sea and the winds of the forest, he represented rough Nature to me. French dramatists and authors attach too much importance to what the critics are likely to say of them, and the result is, they are handicapped by the fact that, on starting to write, their own natural expression is already suffocated. A great author must write to please / . himself and without regard to standr.rds which 82 THE IMPERIAL THEATRE are only conventions set up by mediocrities who, possessing no bel essor, cannot get beyond the art-Hmitations by which they seek to fetter loftier spirits. That is why I place Corneille first among all French poetic dramatists ; he had seen nothing of the great world and worked far away from the madding crowd. Yet who can approach him when he excogitates the heart of a prince, or the soul of a leader of men and presents him on the stage ? Truth — the discovery of new truth — is originality, not novelty, not new affec- tations, not the setting-up of standards which come to-day and pass to-morrow. Human nature always remains the same ; there were no conventions in the Garden of Eden." To Constant, the great man's body servant, we owe the recollection that a volume of Corneille was always placed on the Emperor's table when a visit was paid by Talma, and Napoleon would open the tome at Cinna and frequently quote from that masterpiece the lines : "Cesar, tu vas regner. Voici le jour auguste Ou le peuple romain pour toi toujours injuste." On another occasion Lemercier presented him with a copy of his play Agamemnon, which the Corsican criticised with great severity, declaring that it was entirely lacking in courtly sense. " Strophus has no business to reprove Clytem- nestra," he says. " Strophus is only a valet." Lemercier objects : " Strophus is a friend of Agamemnon ; he is a dethroned king." MADEMOISELLE MARS S3 " Psha ! " returns the Imperial upstart ; " at Court only the King counts. The rest are but so much valetry." In Voltaire's Merope, he objects also to the line : "The first of all kings was a victorious soldier," and forbids Chaptal to allow that piece to be produced because, as he declared, the people had not intelligence sufficient to apprehend the real meaning latent in that truism. Said he : " For me the man who raises himself to a throne from nothing, is the first man of his age. It is no question of luck, but only merit, on the one hand and recognition of merit on the other." The relations of Napoleon with the two sisters called Mars are not very well established, though it is accepted as historical that on one occasion while in the company of the younger and more famous sister, Napoleon, at three o'clock in the morning, had his first epileptic stroke, the whole household, including the Imperial consort, being awakened to attend at the Emperor's bedside, where Josephine pretended to go into an hysterical fit at the sight of her hated rival, chasing the latter half-naked down the stairs to the entresol and threatening, according to the record, with much shrill vituperation, to " scratch her face," to "pull her hair," to "slit her nose"— all in the accepted style of the perfect lady who toils beneath the moon and sleeps beneath the sun. Mademoiselle Bourgoin was another who passed under the notice of Napoleon. This damsel 84 THE IMPERIAL THEATRE was the paid mistress of Chaptal, who acted as Minister of the Interior at the time and was an intimate and frequent collaborant of the Emperor. Bourgoin once received — very unexpectedly — her summons to attend on Caesar's pleasure, and on presenting herself near midnight at the Palace was shown direct to Napoleon's bed- room, where, to her consternation, she found Chaptal deep in statistical business with his Imperial master. Poor little Bourgoin, who misjudged the occasion, thought well to attempt a little coquetry on her own account, all the more so since Napoleon had not even turned his head to look at her. As she sought to attract his attention, the Emperor, without raising his head from the table, ordered her to — undress ! The chorus-woman set about divesting and laid her- self on the Imperial couch. Napoleon then made *, some pretence at finishing up for the night and retiring, whereat (says the chronicler) old Chaptal, small wonder, began to sweat at every pore of his body. The Emperor changed his mind, however, and with his Minister started on some new task which lasted a couple of hours. In the meantime the actress lay blinking in bed, much mystified by proceedings in Avhich she was entirely counted out, considerably hurt in her woman's pride, and wondering where on earth she was to come in — and when, and how. At last the girl attempted a remark, but had hardly opened her mouth when Napoleon interrupted her brusquely : MONSIEUR DE CHAPTAL 85 "Get up and go home," he said. "I do not want you." And the seance closed. The authority for this story is Chaptal himself in his Memoirs ; nor does he fail to inform us that he sent in his resignation on the day following this studied and indeed cowardly outrage on the part of the Corsican, since the Minister was not in a position to defend himself. It is of Mademoiselle Bourgoin, by the way, that Napoleon at Erfurt made the remark to the Emperor Alexander : " Visit that woman and to-morrow all Europe will know what your physical proportions are from the ground up. Besides, I am concerned about your health " — an exquisite remark which carries its own commentary with it. When Mademoiselle Chameroi, a well-known dancing-woman at the Opera, passed to her reward, the Vicar of Saint-Roch refused to receive her coffin in his church or to celebrate Mass for the repose of her soul. Napoleon immediately instructed the Archbishop of Paris to suspend the Vicar for three months in order, as he said, to give him time to meditate on the fact that Jesus Christ had taught men to pray for poor sinners, and to cultivate the divine attribute of charity to all. CHAPTER V MADEMOISELLE GEORGE Standards of Beauty — Lessiiig's View — George an Amazonian Type — Her Attraction for Bonaparte — Their First Meeting at Saint-Cloud — Affected Nervous- ness of the Actress — Napoleon as a Lover — Espionage of Talleyrand — Bonaparte criticises the Actress — His Generosity to George — A Visit to the Tuileries — Josephine' s Fit of Jealousy — Napoleon's Coronation — George visits an Emperor — Napoleon and His Bonnes Fortunes — Where George disappointed her Lover — Her Veneration for Napoleon — A Costly Rendezvous IF the author of the Laocoon was right, then we may readily agree that there are certain subjects that do not altogether lend themselves to the painter's art. Wlien Helen raised her veil and thought that act a sufficient answer to the angry Senators who accused her of having brought calamity and de- vastation upon Troy, the lady showed thnt the opinion she entertained about her own beauty was not a poor one. But could the first of painters present the most easily satisfied among us with the picture of a Helen who might be admitted to be worth a ten-year war, or show us a beauty the very absoluteness of which must appeal to all tastes ? Assuredly not ; and we should ourselves prefer the poet to tell us of this miracle of loveliness, leaving it to the reader's imagination to conjure up the ideal of so fair a creature — although Lessing teaches otherwise. Portraiture has of course dealt, though not generously, with Mademoiselle George — correctly so spelled — a favourite mistress of Napoleon, and on contemplating various pictures which represent this actress, we are led to believe either that the Corsican's taste was poor, or else that the por- traitists of that time were weak in reproducing their sitters. As represented by the various artists whom we have seen, George would seem to have resembled one of those handsome but hard-faced Irishwomen of the larger size, and the reader may not require to be told that certain profound experts in the anthropological science 88 MARGUERITE-JOSEPHINE 89 have seriously questioned the absolute femininity of the woman of Ireland, the theory being that she suffers from an excess of m.asculine temperament. Like the majority of women who have attained to lofty rank in the dramatic and singing pro- fession, Mademoiselle George was born of actors and made her first appearance on the stage at five years old — about 1790. At the opening of the Consulate she was in her twenty-second year, and already possessed an important prestige among contemporary actresses — a prestige which was mainly due then, as it is now and ever was, to cleverly organised reclame or press-agency work. Her vogue among the stage-door brother- hood was great — much greater than she admits in her Me7noirs — and it is to be feared, alas ! that Marguerite-Josephine, to name her, had dropped the pitcher very early in life. When Bonaparte first met her she was the mistress-in-chief of a certain Prince Sapieha, and although she emphasises the fact that a maiden aunt used to look very carefully after her morals, there is valid ground for the presumption that this old virgin was herself really no better than she should have been. The First Consul first saw George as Clytemnestra in Iphigenia, and so pleased was he with the personality and perform- ance of the young actress that he sent Constant — his valet ! — to her house, after the play, with instructions to solicit her to call at Saint-Cloud on the following night — a fair sample of the Corsican's diplomacy in delicate matters of the kind, 90 MADEMOISELLE GEORGE George, at this point in her MemoirSy goes into a ridiculous description of her " emotions " on hearing from the body servant that the First Consul wished to meet her. We must respect the intelligence of the actress, however, when she tells us that her curiosity in regard to the young Conqueror overcame all other sentiments ; for the feeble brain of an ordinary stage-woman could not have thought out this little bit of soul- analysis if she had not really felt it. She informs Constant of her willingness to wait on the Consul at the hour indicated. Then, she says, the whole night preceding her visit was one long misery. What could the First Consul want with her, she wondered. And besides, could he not come to her ? Perhaps it would be better, after all, to write and decline, and then she tries to think what she ought to wear — white or pink ; a confection or something muslin and simple ? Oh, these dictators — ^what dreadful men they must be ! And at last she drops off to sleep. About eight o'clock her maid awakes her, and noting Mademoiselle's bad humour, assures her that other rivals on the stage — Volnais, Bourgoin, Mars — would much envy her when they heard of her good fortune. George, somewhat consoled, orders her carriage for the Bois, visits her coiffeur^ her tailor and goes on to the theatre, where she meets Talma — mon hon Talma. The actor and the manager, Fleury, both congratulate her, the latter with some narquoiserie^ assuring her that she wears an air of conquest. THE WAY TO SAINT-CLOUD 91 The actress goes home and arrays herself in what she describes as a white musHn neglige, a lace veil and a cachemire, and on arriving at the theatre, to wile the intervening hours away, meets the actress Volnais, who is also out for a rendezvous. " Do you intend to see the whole play out ? " says the latter, referring to the fashionable piece then being acted. " No — ^will you ? " asks George. " Nor I," replies Volnais, " I have something on about nine o'clock " — meaning presumably that she was to meet General Junot, for the rendezvous was with him. The Consular carriage called for George at eight o'clock, with Constant, the valet, in attend- ance, and the coachman was the famous Cesar, about whom so many obvious jokes used to be made. It is a long journey to Saint-Cloud — four miles ? — and Constant, under no illusions, presumably, as to the quality of this hardened actress's " trepidation," laughed when she told him that she felt very much humiliated — *' which I thought somewhat impertinent on his part," writes the lady. On arrival at the Palace, Roustan shows her into — a large bedroom. As she nurses her nervousness, the First Consul makes his appearance — in white breeches, black socks, green uniform with red facings and the famous hat crushed under his arm. His first act was to tear her veil away and tell her that he had sent her £120 after hearing her in some recent play. c 92 MADEMOISELLE GEORGE " I thought," said he, " that you might have come in person to thank me. But e\'idently you are proud as you are fair." At this point the actress complains that the Hghts are too many for her, and Bonaparte summons Roustan to put most of them out, after which, as is usual A\nth him, he wants to know all about her. George tells the story and does not conceal her relations with Prince Sapieha. The First Consul extracts a promise that she will visit himself occasionally. " He certainly w^as pleased with me," writes George, "if he was not quite in love," adding simply : "I begged off on this occasion, but promised faithfully that I would return. He put on my veil for me and then kissed me on the forehead, at which I began to laugh, telling him he had kissed a present given me by Sapieha, wiiereupon he tore the veil into a thousand shreds and trampled on my shawl, took the ring from my finger, crushing it beneath his heel and even pulling off a little chain I wore. Then he summoned Roustan, ordering him to fetch a new veil and a shawl and telling me I was to wear only what he gave me." This was the first interview with the First Consul, and Constant took the actress home again. In the course of the next day. Talma called on her and, in answer to her hesitations, told the actress that she must be very foolish not to take advantage of her good fortune. Like the good Frenchman he was, moreover, the actor " ELECTRICITY OF L0\^ " 93 advised George, if she feared any embarrassments as a result of her Uaison with Bonaparte, to get married right away. He persuaded her, in any case, to pay her promised visit to Bonaparte, and accordingly George returned to Saint-Cloud that night. On this occasion Bonaparte, according to the actress, took great pains to spare her all shock to her sense of what Avas proper, and indulged in sentimental comedy to the extent of asking the young actress if she was not conscious of the electricity of love ; finally putting the question : " Do you not love me a little ? " George assures the chief of the State that she loves him not a little, but that his role in life is so large that she can only count for a small item in its evolution, and that although he is First Consul, she cannot allow him to trifle with her. She reminds him that they are playing Cinna on the next day, and that consequently she must be home betimes in order to get a full night's rest. Bonaparte reluctantly consents to her departure before (as he says) she has given him a proof of her willing- ness to be his friend, and insists that, Cinna over, his carriage shall take her back to Saint- Cloud, when he will expect her to sacrifice to Venus. " He dried my tears," says Georgina, who promised to keep the appointment for the next day and again returned home. Cinna was duly acted on the succeeding night, and Bonaparte was present. At the rendering of 94 MADEMOISELLE GEORGE the famous line, declaimed by ^Emilia, the part taken by Mademoiselle George : " I have seduced Cinna and can seduce others," the actress came in for some enthusiastic applause, at which, she says, she became purple, fearing that the Consul might accuse her of having been indiscreet. He was, on the contrary, very kind when they met at Saint-Cloud, where Bona- parte kept her till seven in the morning, himself acting as her servant when it was time for the actress to go — even to the extent of helping to rearrange the bed in which they had lain. The lady did not see her lover for some days, and then they met by arrangement in the woods of Saint- Cloud, when Bonaparte complimented her on looking so well by daylight, at the same time con- fessing naively enough that so many women had deceived him by candle-light. For a considerable period, the actress deserted her Prince for the First Consul, and it does not appear that the former became disconsolate, for during the first fortnight of their liaison he made no particular inquiries about his fair Georgina. In the honey- moon of their connection, Bonaparte, the actress tells, showed the greatest delicacy in his dealings with her. He was at once "violent and tender" — to quote the hetaira — never omitted to make their bed in the morning, helping her even with her toilet, putting on her shoes, and "as I wore silver garters which buckled and were "TALLEYRAND, TRIPOTIER " 95 difficult to fix on, he had special garters ordered for me — of the elastic style." About this time, too, the ex-Bishop of Autun, Monsieur de Talleyrand, began to be somewhat troublesome to her, Mademoiselle George tells us, and used to advise her to receive twice a week a la grande mondaine. The actress assured her diplomatic mentor that she was quite satisfied with the society of artists and had no ambition to shine in a circle so much above her own. Monsieur de Talleyrand, according to Georgina, was a meddlesome person {tripotier), and it was very hard to penetrate his motives, which, in this case, probably aimed at nothing higher than espionage upon the First Consul, the diplomatist being willing to allow the actress a small social role in return for inside information. Georgina, who appears to have been sincerely attached to Bonaparte to the very end of her days, soon acquainted her lover with his Minister's advances, and the First Consul was puzzled. " What is that viper Talleyrand up to now ? " he wonders. " He wants everyone to be as crooked as he is himself, and likes to make mischief everywhere. You are quite right to have nothing to do with society." Bonaparte then criticises some role of hers in which she plays her part without passion, and advises her, if she wants to learn what the sentiments of a mother are like, to become one. The actress tells us, too, that Bonaparte once sent her to a sage-femme in the Faubourg in order to ^ 96 MADEMOISELLE GEORGE // learn from that worthy some of the secrets of maternity ! A few days before his departure for the new camp at Boulogne, they spend a night together, playing like two children on the hearth- rug before the fire. Bonaparte tells the actress of his approaching departure, and fearing that she may want for money during his absence, stuffs several handfuls of bank-notes down her corsage^ the amount, says the actress, being for £1600. On his return from Boulogne she visits him at the Tuileries, where the Consul has a private apartment at the top of the Palace, looking out over the great city. On making her way up to this cabinet particulier, Georgina drops an overshoe and sends Constant to fetch it, which he does. The Consul appears and is as kind as ever, nor does he fail, says the actress, to help her to undress and to dress again, acting with his natural sense of order, like a trained femme de chamhre. It was during one of the many visits of this actress to the First Consul that occurred the famous scene in which Madame de Remusat shows how jealous of her great husband Josephine could be at times. On one occasion — well after midnight — Madame Bonaparte, strong with an intuition that the First Consul was not quite alone in his small apartment on the floor above, aroused Madame de Remusat, her lady-of -honour, and with a lighted candle, the two women picked their way up the private staircase, Madame de Remusat thoroughly ashamed, she tells, of the ADVICE FROM MURAT 97 role which she was forced to play. As the pair crept up the stairs, a slight movement was heard, and Josephine, seized with sudden fright, declares that it must be Roustan, the mameluke, a monster, she says, who is capable of killing them both at sight. This warning is quite enough for Madame de Remusat, who turns about without further parley, escaping back to their quarters ; her mistress soon follows, and both women burst out laughing at their own discomfiture. Shortly before the establishment of the Empire, Mademoiselle had to complain of the inattention of her great lover wlio, during one long fortnight, did not summon her to his Palace. Georgina thought that the liaison was drawing to its in- evitable end, and on visiting the theatre on the same occasion as Bonaparte, when she occupied the box opposite his, affected not to be aware of his presence. Murat, acting by instruction, we may imagine, paid her a visit during the last act, and taking advantage of her offer of a seat in her carriage, advised the actress, on the homeward journey, to call upon the First Consul as he liad asked her to do. Georgina visits her patron, accordingly, and learns from his lips that he cannot see her for some time, but that he will always look after her interests. Talma assured her, on the day after this visit, that the Consul was to change his exalted rank for a still loftier one, and that it was reasonable policy on the part of the Emperor-elect to use circumspection ; besides, he added, Bonaparte was not the man to allow 98 MADEMOISELLE GEORGE his love affairs to spoil his real role in the world. A few months afterwards Georgina, with her somewhat commonplace family, was an eye-witness of the Imperial procession to Notre Dame, 2nd December 1804. Cinna was to be staged by Imperial command, within ten days of the Corona- tion ; Georgina played her usual part of Emilia, and with great success. Not till five weeks had passed, however, was the actress to meet the Emperor, who received her with the same unaffected kindli- ness as in the old Consular days. Poor Georgina, unused to courts and with much of the naivete of the bourgeoisie in her conceptions of what was proper form, attempted a courtly role which did not please the master. " Stilted manners do not suit you, Georgina," said the simple soldier. " Be as you used to be — unaffected and frank." For all his studied plainness, the actress found, nevertheless, that the Emperor had displaced the Citoyen Consul, that the new style of drama seemed to her, she says, to be acted on a higher and more imposing plane, and Georgina quickly realised that she could never find happiness in such surroundings. Madame Duchatel, a lady- of-honour, in any case, soon attracted the Emperor's notice and Mademoiselle George only met her old lover at very rare intervals thereafter. Her relations with Napoleon lasted about two years in all, and it is fairly well established that the Corsican divided the favours of the actress NAPOLEON AND WOMEN 99 with a considerable number of flaneurs of note in Paris. In all probability this fact revealed itself to the First Consul only after a lengthy acquaintance with Georgina, and accounted for the sudden enough rupture of the alliance. Frenchmen as a rule are most hypercritical of each other in regard to what they call bonnes fortunes, and Voltaire has told us that they do not easily forgive any man his success among womankind. Accordingly, we may well believe that the young Conqueror of Italy soon became an object of the sarcasms of ordinary men, and more particularly on account of the fact that in the Consular period he was unusually thin and weakly-looking, while his height — actually five feet six and three-quarter inches, in English measurement, or about five feet three inches according to French standards — was poor among the existing race of Frenchmen, who were then of lofty stature, like their Gallic ancestors, and whose subsequent decrease in stature Avas due, in a large part, to the ravages caused by the Imperial wars among the manhood of France. In a capital which in those days — if we are to trust the writers — had raised cuckoldry to the proportions of a social art, we may be certain that the mistress of so great a man could not escape the aggressive attentions of men whose existence depended so largely on new sensations. It was among this peculiar race of beings that Napoleon earned the reputation of being a niais — where women were concerned. 100 MADEMOISELT.E GEORGE The Emperor, it would seem, objected in Made- moiselle George to two characteristics which, he very correctly said, showed that she came of a " race grossiere,^^ or common race — namely, her large hands and feet, and only overlooked these defects in consideration of other first-class quali- fications which she possessed for the role of hetaira. During their association the soldier gave his mistress many thousands of pounds, and even several years after the rupture, sent her a present of £400 on his name-day. The actress admits that he always paid her himself, sparing her the ordeal of calling on his banker, a fact which showed that Bonaparte possessed better taste in such matters than the late Marquis of Steyne. Although, in 1808, Georgina deserted Paris for Moscow, under circumstances which she recounts herself. Napoleon had her reinstated at the Comedie Franc/aise in 1813, and even had her paid the salary she had forfeited over a jDcriod of five years. During the Hundred Days, Georgina wrote to her old lover, offering to hand over to him certain letters which incriminated Fouche, and Napoleon sent a confidential man to fetch them, asking him on his return if the actress had complained about the state of her affairs. Georgina had not men- tioned that she was in poor circumstances. Nevertheless the Emperor sent her an order for £800 on his privy purse. To the very end the actress spoke well of the Corsican, but not as a woman talks of an old and favoured lover ; rather ,-«"• ^ MADHMOISKLLB GEORGE After till ciii