LIBRARY
THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
SANTA BARBARA
FROM THE LIBRARY
OF F. VON BOSCH AN
UCSB LIBKAKY
NAPOLEON
From the Painting by Delaroche in the Collection of the
Duke of Portland
This engraving represents approximately the author's conception of
Napoleon's appearance at the period of the story, i. e., 1809.
It has been criticized as "idealization"; in reality, Delaroche
has treated his subject somewhat as Kresilas treated the por-
trait of Pericles in the famous bust; he has, in Furtwangler's
phrase, not "idealized," but "universalized" it,
Photo Braun.
SGHONBRUNN
A NOVEL
BY
J. A. CRAMB
("J. A. REVERMORT")
AUTHOR OF "GERMANY AND ENGLAND," ETC.
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
Unicfcerbocfcer press
1918
COPYRIGHT, 1918
BY
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
"Cbc Tknfcfectbocfcer press, flew L'erfe
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PACK
I. THE PALAZZO ESTERTHAL i
II. THE NOON PARADE ..... 42
III. NAPOLEON'S RIDE 68
IV. THE ASSASSIN 86
V. THE MIND OF A CITY .... 141
VI. THE MAKING OF A POET .... 164
VII. A VIENNESE SUPPER PARTY . . .192
VIII. NAPOLEON'S DREAM . . . . .217
IX. THE MASKED BALL . . . . .281
X. NAPOLEON'S ADDRESS TO HIS GUARD . .313
XI. ON THE TRACK OF A CRIME . . . 33 1
XII. AN EMPEROR AND HIS SECRETARIES . . 349
XIII. AN IDYLL AT MODLING . . . .371
XIV. A VIENNESE POET AND A VIENNESE
COMPOSER 392
XV. "So STIRBT EIN HELD!" .... 413
XVI. EPILOGUE 432
SCHONBRUNN
CHAPTER I
THE PALAZZO ESTERTHAL
"TV TO, Toe, I cannot go with you to this parade. For
1 N myself, I do not care two straws whether Bonaparte
is a black or a white man. To me, this demi-deity of
aspiring ramrods is simply a hustler; and, therefore, I
suppose, I am a harsh judge of his enthusiasts. All the
same, I protest against you women of Vienna crowding to
stare at the humiliator of Germany this burglar in a
palace of the Caesars! Austria should be an example to
other nations; Vienna to other cities. By God, what will
be said of us in the Tyrol, at Munich, Frankfort, Konigs-
berg, or in Berlin itself?"
Count Johann Markowitz, a man of four and thirty, just
returned from an abortive mission to Petersburg, swung
aside from the Princess Durrenstein and the small group of
men and women whom he had thus been addressing, and,
walking to a window, stood staring moodily past the
heavily fringed curtains at a patch of sunshine on the lawn.
The higher branches of a juniper tree worked on it a fan-
tastic pattern like ebony inlaid on dull gold, and farther
off two gardeners were emptying a barrow full of dead
2 Schonbrunn
leaves upon a fire. Its smoke rose in a pillar through the
windless autumn day.
Toe, Princess Diirrenstein, looking very tall and grace-
ful in a clinging gown of fine silk under her high and
nodding ostrich plumes, came up to her former lover and
said to him almost timidly:
"What are we women to do? You are severe on us,
Johann. "
"Severe! Look yonder! Look at our brave Viennese !
And it is hardly ten o'clock. There is Austrian patriotism ! ' '
He pointed to a strip of road a mile away, white with
heat and sunlight. It was dotted with human figures,
some on foot, some on horseback, some in the lumbering
Austrian caliche harnessed to four or six horses, others in
hackney coaches, in berlines, in landaus, in hired waggons
without springs, but all streaming in one direction south-
ward towards Schonbrunn.
"Well," said Berthold Stahrenberg, coming up behind
them and laying his hand on Johann's shoulder, "what is
there wrong in all this? It is Friday, and our worthy
fellow-townsmen have on their Sunday coats, and their
wives their embroidered stockings. What should they do
but blacken the road to Schonbrunn? Why, it proves
that we Viennese know a great man when we see one and
like to sun ourselves in his neighbourhood that is all. "
The irony was inopportune, and Count Johann shook
off the white, finely-made hand emerging from its delicate
lace cuff.
"It proves that we Germans want heroic hate, and
therefore want heroic energy; it proves, too, why we Aus-
trians are defeated whenever we make war against that
man; and why Wagram repeats Marengo, and Aspern,
Arcola. Very near but never quite a victory, and so from
disaster to disaster we flounder on."
There was an awkward silence the silence which falls
The Palazzo Esterthal 3
upon men and women who are compelled unexpectedly to
look at themselves in an impartial mirror.
The Palazzo Esterthal in which this scene took place on
the morning of Friday, the I3th of October, 1809, had,
during the French occupation, become the rendezvous of
the few great families who still remained in Vienna. Morn-
ing by morning throughout that summer and autumn they
had met and talked amid the sombre magnificence of its
rooms, or sauntered about its gardens, or sat in the im-
penetrable shade of the two cedars which guarded the main
avenue.
Berthold Stahrenberg, who in this society in which every
man and woman had a nickname was known as "Bolli, "
made a gesture of comical despair and went back to a
sofa, beside the Countess Prostkeiya, whose pet name Lan-
Lan suited her rich figure and placidly luxurious features.
"Smell these roses," Lan-Lan said, "and forget all else.
Each blossom has its own texture, its own odour. "
"Like women's hair and women's hands," Bolli mur-
mured abstractedly.
"Indeed? How many women's hair or women's hands
have you tested then? Hein? Tell me."
"One one only!"
She reddened and had no immediate answer.
Bolli, though not yet five and twenty, threatened by his
gallantries to eclipse the fame of Prince Puckler Prasler
himself. Lan-Lan had at first disregarded his assiduities,
but during the past three or four weeks something in his
voice and manner had begun to affect her troublingly.
"But what would you have us women do?" Toe per-
sisted, still standing beside Count Johann. Her soft yet
vibrant Polish accent was very marked against his Austrian
baritone. "You do not wish us to enroll ourselves into a
fighting corps and make Nusschen our captain?"
Nusschen, Bolli's youngest sister, a girl of seventeen,
4 Schonbrunn
with a swinging careless gait, had at that moment come
forward from a group in another part of the hall. She was
a Stahrenberg every inch, one of the race which had given
to Austria not only the hero of the siege of Vienna by the
Turks, but a series of crusaders, warriors, and statesmen.
"I should just love that! Forward! On, ye brave!
O Dona Burida, why have I not your chances!"
To Nusschen's girl's enthusiasm the exploits of the Maid
of Saragossa against Napoleon's marshals, which were now
reaching Vienna, read like those of a nineteenth-century
Joan Dare.
"That is not for the women of Vienna," Count Johann
answered. "Theirs is a nobler part to teach our con-
querors how to waltz. After the parade this morning it is
the masked ball to-night, is it not?"
This was addressed in a veiled but savage sarcasm to Toe.
Nusschen looked from the one to the other in perplexity.
But at this point Bolli's satellite, Rudolf Kessling, grand-
son of that Wilhelm Kessling, the grain merchant of Prague,
whom for his great wealth and public spirit Maria Theresa
had enrolled in the reluctant ranks of the Austrian nobility,
took up the part that Bolli had dropped and attempted
to answer Count Johann. He dressed expensively and
affected to be a wit, but his dress was often in bad taste
and his wit was always German. As Bolli himself ad-
mitted semi-apologetically, "You can never be sure what
Kezy is going to say or what Kezy is going to wear. But
what chance has he?"
"The French are in a manner our guests, " Kessling now
declared with false emphasis. "Why should we not teach
them how to waltz the few at least whom a fellow can
invite to the Mehlmarkt. "
"Our guests!"
Johann's exclamation was as full, of hate as of contempt.
At Petersburg and at Warsaw his manners as an envoy
i he Palazzo Esterthal 5
had been censured as stiff, but never as incorrect or dis-
courteous; yet, as Cobenzl had said of him to Metternich,
he was a man better fitted to meditate under an old pear
tree on the Markowitz estates than to fill subordinate
positions in diplomacy. "In a foremost position," Co-
benzl had added, "you might get much out of him."
Irritated by Johann's bearing, who in making this retort
had not even looked at him, Kessling now took up the
reference to Prussia.
"Vienna should be an example to Berlin, you say? What
has Prussia done since Jena except truckle to Bonaparte?
And you know as well as the rest of us what price at Tilsit
the lovely Louisa was willing to pay for Magdeburg. She
offered the Corsican a rose: the rose was her royal self!"
Johann, again without looking at Kessling, said con-
temptuously :
"It is a calumny, that Magdeburg story Bonaparte's or
another's."
Nevertheless, this was the version of it that was accepted
in Vienna, and Johann knew it. A Habsburg, the Grand-
duchess of Tuscany, Marie Leopolda, had sealed it with
her approval.
"After all," Bolli said, intervening, "this Bonaparte
makes things hum. We were yawning ourselves to death
when here comes this son of a Corsican attorney and squats
himself down on the throne of the oldest dynasty in Europe.
And keeps there! What? Is not that something? He is
barely forty, yet year in, year out, these last fifteen, he
has beaten a Romanoff or a Hohenzollern, a Brunswick,
a Bourbon or a Habsburg, in battle after battle. And if
Germany or Europe will not fight him it must serve him."
"There I am with you!" Johann said with sudden
energy. "If Germany will not fight him she must serve
him; by God, and Europe also! Yes, a world only fit for
Bonaparte should have for its tyrant a Bonaparte. "
6 Schonbrunn
Bolli, Kessling, and an official named Freihoff leaned
forward simultaneously to answer.
But Lan-Lan anticipated all three.
"Come here, Johann, and talk to Toe and me. What is
the matter with you? Amongst Russian bears does one
grow like a bear?" she said, looking up into his darkening
features. "Now listen to me. I am going to this parade,
not to do homage to the French Emperor, but simply
because I am bored indoors, and because I feel well, and
because the morning is fine and the autumn woods glorious.
As for Bonaparte, I go to see him exactly as I would go to
see the automatic chess-player: each is a curiosity. "
She referred to the invention of Metzel, then notorious
a figure in wood dressed like a Turk which sat before a
chess-board and challenged and invariably defeated all who
cared to play.
"Toe feels just the same," Lan-Lan went on, "so does
Amalie, so does Nusschen. And, " she concluded with
feminine illogicalness, "we are going to the masked ball
to-night and therefore cannot shirk the parade this morn-
ing. Why do you look at me like that?"
"To see how one folly breeds another," was the answer
on Count Johann's lips; but he masked it under an ironic
smile and merely bowed ceremoniously.
"The automatic chess-player? Your Serenity has said
the word. You will permit me to withdraw from this
exalted company? I have to see Count Andreossy at
eleven. "
Andreossy, Napoleon's ambassador, first to England,
then to Austria, was now governor of the captured city.
Towards the Viennese public, he affected an overbearing
and harsh manner ; but he was the secret friend and adviser
of many of the great families and took a malicious if dis-
sembled pleasure in their coarsest as well as in their most
pungent and refined caricatures of Napoleon. Sprung
The Palazzo Esterthal 7
from the smaller nobility of Languedoc, Andre'ossy found
in Vienna a life and a society which appealed at once to his
pleasure-loving southern temper and to the snobbism always
latent in men of his rank.
II
Count Johann had indeed an appointment with Andre'-
ossy, but this morning also he wished to get away from the
habitue's of the Palazzo Esterthal. Behind Bolli's argument
he heard, or seemed to hear, thousands, millions of voices in
the hubbub of a staccato discordant chorus proclaiming,
"Great is Napoleon, great, great, great! He has done
something. He has made things hum. " Johann's own
deep moral nature was outraged by this admiration for
success, the success, he believed, of a man essentially
ordinary, secured, not by genius, but by craft, rough
soldiership and bloody violence; for in another sense than
that of the priests and priest-ridden societies, he thought
of Napoleon as "Antichrist" the actual living promulga-
tor of a new ethic, antagonistic in every point to that of
Galilee.
"Marat too did something," he said savagely, "so did
St. Just and Robespierre, and so did Ivan the Terrible and
the Hospidar Vlad Dracul. And they were in their nature
and in their right. If we would not have demi-devils make
things hum, we must make things hum ourselves. But,
being Germans, this we shall never do, never!"
On the other hand Johann reasoned, nearly every man of
Bolli's set, including Kessling, had gone to the front. Two
had fallen at Ratisbon ; at Aspern and at Wagram five had
been wounded. Again, though Bolli's debts were heavy
and though he was reckless at the gaming-table as on the
duelling-ground, had he not out of his own purse helped to
maintain Count Purgstall's regiment, seven hundred strong,
of whom not more than fifty had ever seen their Styrian
8 Schonbrunn
fields again? Finally, unlike his greatest friend, the poet
Heinrich von Rentzdorf, unlike Johann himself, Bolli had
in him a touch of authentic military talent. In February
he had communicated his own plan of campaign to the War
Office. Part of it coincided with the design for a march upon
Paris; but it had in it an important modification of that
design, characterized by a judge in these matters as "une
idee vraiment Napoleonienne. " The Archduke had thrown
the paper on the fire and by that act, it was said amongst
Bolli's following, he had burned the glory of Austria. But
Bolli knew better muttering to himself " Thank God " each
time he thought of the Archduke's action.
As Johann turned to leave the room Toe darted to his
side and taking his arm said in Polish, "You are not going?
You cannot go. Why are you putting this affront on me? "
She spoke in a low guttural voice. Her anger and her
pain added to the resplendence of her eyes.
"What have I done?" she pleaded.
"Nothing, Toe, nothing. I am not myself to-day.
What have you to do this afternoon?"
"I wish to speak to you now now," she whispered.
"I must speak with you."
He wavered, gnawing his underlip.
"It is impossible," he said at length. "This business
with Andr^ossy is imperative. It is about the guard for
this accursed ball amongst other things."
"Ah, here is Meisner, " Toe exclaimed, seizing this
excuse to detain him.
Etienne Meisner, the old Count Esterthal's physician,
approached, bowing to the princess. He was a shortish
square-built man of fifty, with pale hair, light blue eyes,
cleanliness, health, an almost Spartan simplicity in dress
and manners. He was a Swiss, but had been trained in
Paris and before settling in Vienna had fought in the Re-
volution wars.
The Palazzo Esterthal 9
"Good-morning, doctor," Toe said. "How is the pad-
rino? He can go with us to the parade?"
" Padrino " was the pet name of the old count.
Johann, returning the doctor's bow coldly, stood watch-
ing Toe's face, her quick gestures and her smiles. Her
teeth were irregular, as though she had been wilful in her
childhood; but her smile, the velvet smoothness of her
brow, the glow in her dark eyes, made of this defect a
charm.
The princess's familiarity with the doctor grated on
Count Johann ; but it was Toe's way. She seemed to
forget her rank with just those men and women in whose
society Count Johann would most have wished her to
remember her rank.
"Yes, " he muttered, " I love her, but I shall never under-
stand her. "
He never had understood her he argued moodily ; not
when at eighteen, just after her father's death in battle,
she had first come to Vienna, a vision of sorrow, seduc-
tion and romance; not when, in answer to his passionate
adoration, she had affianced herself to him ; not when, at the
end of four months of the strangest happiness, she had
broken her troth and, as the bride of Prince Durrenstein,
had written to him less than a week after her marriage,
"Everything will be the same between us, everything!
Dearest, my dearest, how I love you now! And in five
weeks from Tuesday next I shall see you again! You will
still be in Vienna? You will wait for me?"
He had not waited twenty-four hours. This incredible
perversity, outraging every moral instinct, aggravated the
wound in his heart. The thunderous march of the French
legions from Boulogne had given him distraction, and in
the campaign of 1805, and immediately afterwards as a
volunteer with the Russians, he had sought and found a
temporary oblivion. She had written to him repeatedly;
io Schonbrunn
marriage, she protested, had merely shown her the power
and tenacity of her love for him. "I am wretched, most
wretched. " Then, stung by his silence or furious upbraid -
ings, she had ceased to write.
Suddenly, a year and a half ago, in the spring of 1808,
a new and disturbing problem had confronted him the
death of Prince Durrenstein at Ostrolenka during the
plague that the war had left.
Meanwhile riches had come to Johann himself. An
eccentric uncle, a fanatical Josephinist, attracted by his
character and repelled by the pedantry of Johann's elder
brother, had made him master of a wide tract of mining
country in Styria. But everything had come too late: to
Toe, her knowledge of herself; to him, his riches and his
lands. Yet his infatuation was cureless.
"At her worst," he thought now, surveying her nervous
perverse grace, "she is the best thing on earth to me. The
power to wish for something strongly enough to will death
rather than lose it she wakens in me that power. I
should be worse than a fool to let her go. "
Nevertheless, he had undertaken the mission to Peters-
burg in order to be away from her, to have the leisure to
think freely, untroubled by the hypnotism of her presence.
A quick stir and greetings and exclamations at the foot
of the north staircase made everyone look in that direction.
It was the old Count Esterthal, followed by Patzsch, his
body-servant, carrying plaids and a rug.
Count Esterthal was at this period a man of seventy-
two; he stooped, but his features and bearing had an
alert and vigorous expression. His thin pale hooked nose
emerged between two vivid German steel-blue eyes; his
lips were tightly closed, but in the company of children or
the young a smile played about them willingly.
No man in Austria had felt his country's humiliation
more poignantly. To the Habsburgs he had in his youth
The Palazzo Esterthal 11
devoted something of that chivalrous loyalty which the
Stuarts extorted from the Cavaliers. The triumphs of
the French Revolutionists were to Count Esterthal what
the triumph of a slave-revolt might have been to a Sulla or
an Appius Claudius. He saw in Bonaparte simply the ener-
getic leader of gangs of serfs, the brigand chief of a hideous
brood which had burst from the cellars and ergastula in
whose fetid darkness they were meant by nature to waste
and pine in chains.
The second occupation of Vienna by Napoleon had
found the old Count withdrawn from politics as from the
army, tormented by illness, impatience and life-disgust;
and a prisoner in his room; and though known to be an
intransigeant, he had applied to Andreossy to intercede
with the "brigand" that he might be permitted to remain
in the city, and that the house in which Esterthal had suc-
ceeded Esterthal for two hundred years soldiers, council-
lors, churchmen, ardent supporters of Leopold I. or the
open antagonists of Joseph II. might be free from the
pollution of the murderers of Marie Antoinette as its un-
invited guests.
Andreossy had made the intercession in person; and,
exaggerating the old Count's illness, he had excited Napo-
leon's magnanimity.
"Esterthal? Esterthal?" Bonaparte had cried. "Tiens,
I remember that name. " And a misty morning on the banks
of the Pieve had risen before his memory. "He was at
Rivoli, a general of division, was he not? And at the
Tagliamento? I remember. C'est un brave," he had
concluded sententiously, and, pleased at this reminiscence
of his first dazzling victories, he had, after two or three
pointed questions, granted the petition. A special courier,
however, had overtaken Andreossy on his way back to the
city, bearing the stipulation that Count Ferdinand Ester-
thai, one of the associates of the Archduke Maximilian,
12 Schonbrunn
"the firebrand of Vienna," was to give his parole neither
to remain in Vienna nor visit his father's house until the
peace was signed.
Bonaparte's memory had served him right. In 1797
Count Esterthal, then a "Field-marshal lieutenant," or
major-general commanding a division, had negotiated the
preliminaries of Leoben.
On the old Count's entrance Johann turned at once to
Toe.
"I shall see you this afternoon, then?" he enquired,
taking her hand as in farewell.
"Yes, " she said faintly; "if you must go now. Come at
three. "
He made his way to Count Esterthal, seated in the shadow
of the huge staircase and surrounded by a small crowd of
acquaintances or sycophants. Count Esterthal drew him
at once into the embrasure of the window.
"Well?" he said with a keen glance into the younger
man's face.
"Nothing," the latter answered with a guarded look
around. "Liechtenstein and Bubna have an interview
this morning. I am going to headquarters now. I fear
the worst. "
" What will be, will be. Che sar& sara. "
The two stood silent for some seconds, then the old man
walked with him to the door.
"We can talk better outside."
They had scarcely gone when down the heavily carved
staircase a woman's figure appeared.
Her plain dress amid the brilliant colouring of the guests,
her bare head amid the hats, toques and ostrich plumes,
the nobility and ease of her walk as she came forward, ex-
changing handshakes in the English fashion with the guests,
astonished and charmed the most careless observer.
It was Amalie von Esterthal, wife of the Ferdinand
The Palazzo Esterthal 13
Albrecht whom Bonaparte had so pointedly excluded from
Vienna and from his father's house. She seemed about the
same age as Toe and Lan-Lan. Her walk, the symmetries of
her figure, drew every eye to the face, almost in fear lest
some feature less enchanting than that form should dis-
appoint the sight; and if the usual exclamations, "How
classic! How Greek!" were heard around her, it was
because in a sophisticated society this had become the
stereotyped phrase for great and arresting beauty. Her
figure was certainly Greek in its proportions and her bear-
ing and walk had great freedom in a word, that poise or
balance which sculptors at that period were beginning to
admire from castes and drawings of the Parthenon.
"You enter like some beautiful theme in a symphony,"
Toe murmured, taking her towards the south window where
she had stood with Johann. "Your eyes are full of happy
thoughts. You have heard from Rentzdorf? The sun-
light on your mouth betrays you. It is a rose of paradise. "
Amalie looked at the flushed features and sparkling eyes.
"Dearest Toe, what has excited you? Do I come too
soon or too late? I thought Johann was here?"
She referred to the immediate prospect of a betrothal of
the Princess and Count Johann Markowitz.
"I cannot explain to you here. Where can we talk? I
am wretched."
The young Countess, accustomed as she was to Toe's
varying temper, saw that her emotion was, if extravagant,
sincere.
"Go to my room, " she said after a second's deliberation.
"I will join you immediately. We do not start for quite
an hour." She glanced at a clock that rose beside some
armour and a stand full of antique boar-spears. "Ah,"
she exclaimed, flushing in turn, but with anger, "who has
committed this folly? And to-day of all days!"
The heavy crimson curtain of the northern window,
14 Schonbrunn
which for the past four months had by her express orders
hung half-drawn, had been thrown back, disclosing the
shattered pilasters and carvings of the adjoining balcony.
It was the work of a shell thrown from Vienna itself during
the bombardment in April last. The old Count had
refused to have the balcony repaired, yet whenever he saw
it, he burst into one of those rages which were a misery to
the whole household.
She called the major-domo, glanced in the direction of
the curtain and turned once more to her friend.
" Forgive me, dear Toe. Fritz, who looks after this room,
is still with the Landwehr. "
"What is it?" Toe asked bewildered. "How, your face
looks cruel no, Roman, Lombard, menacing anyhow"-
searching for a word. "You will come quickly? Do not
let Lan-Lan or Nusschen keep you. " She disappeared up
the narrow south stair.
Amalie's intervention in the matter of the curtain was
just in time. A minute later the old Count appeared
in the doorway. He was accompanied by a little neatly
dressed man with a shining bald head, with busy lines about
the mouth, but an agreeable smile. This was the famous
Councillor of Mines, Count Prostkeiya, Lan-Lan's husband.
Bolli, his face a mask, sat down beside Kessling. At the
other end of the room Amalie rejoined padrino, who was
now standing with Baron Freihoff and his two daughters,
twins, both dressed in the soft semi-transparent muslins then
the fashion in Vienna, which alternately revealed and
hid the outlines of their fresh young figures. The two
girls, blushing and smiling at Amalie's kindness, kept
breaking into little spurts of childish talk. One had a
stammer, the other a lisp, and both seemed very inex-
perienced and gawky beside the upright grace of Nusschen,
who was two years younger.
"Our fellows are useless in attack," said a young officer
The Palazzo Esterthal 15
of Jagers, looking now at the Count, now at Freihoff ; "and
on a march a shower of rain dispirits a division. "
' ' I must beg of you to except Liechtenstein's troopers, "
Freihoff said. "They are as good as the French. We
have learnt half Bonaparte's game already. We will
beat him in time!"
And in the official's arid tones the names of Steininger,
Smola and Oldenberg-Orsini began to collide rapidly with
those of Killer, Bellegarde, Kinsky and Schwartzenberg
heroes or quasi-heroes of the campaign. But the old
Count's harsh laugh interrupted this official verbosity.
"Yes, next time! Next time! Irnmer das alte Lied!
Ever the same old song! I have heard it sung in Austria
these fifty years. "
He spoke the truth. It was the word which had been
used to palliate Austria's defeats under Daun and under
Loudon in her wars against Frederick the Great ; it was the
word he had heard used to salve her diplomatic checks
under Joseph II. ; it was the word he had heard used after
Valmy in 1792 and after the world-historic repulse of
Coburg in 1793. He had heard it again in '94, '95 and '96,
and now after Wagram, as nine years ago after Marengo and
four years ago after Ulm and Austerlitz, it was reiterated
as cheerfully and complacently as ever.
The Jager, an enthusiastic young soldier, turned to
Amalie.
"You saw the French armies enter Vienna, did you not,
each man with a hunk of meat or bread on his bayonet
point trim, clean little beggars, with not a superfluous hair
on their heads? When once our fellows ... I beg your
pardon, " he said, interrupting himself, and, imagining that
he had started a topic dangerous to the old Count's temper,
he turned in the direction of her glance.
A little smiling old lady, in the elaborate head-gear of
Maria Theresa's days, had come gliding out of the dusk of
16 Schonbrunn
the great north staircase. She threatened with her fan
Bolli and Kessling, she blew a kiss to Amalie, then to
Nusschen; her faded eyes beamed with intelligent pleasure
and self-satisfaction; but, as everyone in the room knew,
she probably was ascribing to each a name or a personality
that was not his own or not her own. One day she would
mistake Bolli for her eldest son, dead fifteen years ago;
another day she would mistake Amalie for the latter 's
sister, Ulrica, who was in a convent at Prague; or she would
confound the doctor or a chance visitor with the younger
Count Esterthal, Ferdinand Albrecht.
The little old lady was Count Esterthal's elder sister.
She now stopped right in the middle of the room. Her lips
parted in a fixed smile, showing the false yellowish under-
teeth.
"Whom does she take us for to-day?" Kessling asked
with obstreperous gaiety.
Bolli made no answer, but under his lowered eyelids
watched the melancholy scene, afflicting at once to the
sight and to the judgment. The entrance of Lan-Lan's
husband had fronted him suddenly with the ugliness and
the reality of things, and the sight of her figure in all its
exotic grace seated beside the trim, carefully dressed
Councillor of Mines sharpened the bitterness of the im-
pression.
"Mon Dieu," he thought, "la vie humaine! Napoleon
and his marshals out there at Schonbrunn heap up glory
or heap up gold, whilst Time, inexorable Time, turns all to
a derision, just as it has turned this woman's face to a
grinning mask! But the mad world-dance goes on, aimless
as life is, aimless as love is, aimless as God is and all God's
creatures!"
"Whom does she take us for to-day?" Kessling repeated,
for he had the rich parvenu's self-conceit and took umbrage
at Bolli's abstractedness.
The Palazzo Esterthal 17
"As if I knew," Belli answered. "Monkeys from Pots-
dam or Daun and his staff."
But to the astonishment of everyone the old Maid of
Honour walked straight to Lan-Lan and began to talk
merrily to Count Prostkeiya. And in a minute or two she
was speaking to Lan-Lan herself as though she were the
Archduchess Maria Christina, dead these seven years, and
laid to rest in Canova's rococo-classic monument.
"All Her Majesty's daughters are good and kind; oh,
my dear, so carefully trained, as for Holy Church itself."
Her words became low, broken, solemn, disconnected
ejaculations.
Belli thought of the histories of those daughters of Maria
Theresa the hideous cloud of truth or calumny that year
by year thickened round their reputations Marie An-
toinette, Marie Carolina, Marie Josepha.
"What a satire upon Holy Church, and that careful
training! Bah, this is God's planet, not mine, and He
must run His show in His own way."
in
Amalie, on escaping to her rooms on the first floor, did
not at once find Toe. She lingered a minute in her boudoir,
charmed by the sudden stillness, the soft perfumes, and
by the subdued light falling on its costly furnishings, sofas,
cabinets and rare vases, books and sombre hangings.
But the sound of her maid's voice speaking in Italian
and Toe's laughing replies in the same language came to
her from her bedroom.
The spectacle which there met her amused and amazed
her. It was no longer the desperate woman that had
quitted her downstairs. The Princess Durrenstein, in
her bodice and underskirt, her arms and sloping shoulders
bare, stood bending forwards to an oval mirror, carefully
1 8 Schonbrunn
pencilling her eyebrows. Her gown had been flung on a
chair: her plumed hat and veil lay on the bed. On the
dressing-table everything was in confusion; the lids of
rouge and carmine pots, perfume bottles, brushes, the
crystal, porcelain, ivory and silver of the toilet-service
all were mixed pell-mell. Tita, Amalie's maid, a flush on
her face, the curls loosened on her forehead, stood behind
the impetuous visitant, her left arm burdened with vari-
ous articles of clothing Toe's cashmere shawl, a scarf of
Alengon lace; and on her right a cloak, in which Amalie
recognized a fur capote of her own, sent from Mersan's
two days ago.
"En plein vice!" Toe cried. " Caught red-handed."
She wheeled round and, making her petticoats swirl like
a ballerina's, she threw one slender and exquisitely neat
foot in front of the other in rapid alternation.
"But where did you get this capote? You will wear it
to-day? You must, you must! Bonaparte cannot stand
a shawl, even on Josephine, and I want him to see that
Vienna can turn out as elegant figures as Paris and faces
a myriad times more lovely! " And she dabbed her freshly
carmined lips on Amalie's cheek.
"Aliens! Let me try it on once more," she said to the
maid.
Her eyes flashing, her lips fixed in a smile of excited
pleasure, she slipped again into the coat and began to walk
to and fro in front of the mirror, eyeing herself now side-
ways, now in face, now twisting her fine, slender neck to
see her back.
"It is too large for her Highness," Tita said to her
mistress. "I told Madame la Princess, this, but she is so
so irresistible. "
"I cannot make it out," Toe exclaimed, stamping her
foot. "Your things are always newer and more chic than
Lan-Lan's or mine, yet she has ten thousand a year for
The Palazzo Esterthal 19
dress and my own nota three weeks ago came to 6342
exactly. Hein, what do you really spend? Do you bribe
Mersan in secret? Or is it favouritism?"
"Neither the one nor the other, dear Toe. It is simply
thinking a little."
Toe with a shrug turned again to the glass, balancing
herself and thrusting out one after the other her slim but
deliciously modelled hips. The coat would not hang. She
drew it off petulantly.
"There you stand, you superb one, and give never a
thought to your own perfections; whilst I, I would give a
mine in Styria to have shoulders like yours, that waist, and
the rest of you." Tita aided the princess to dress and,
taking the capote with her, left the room.
IV
Left alone, the two women, each sunk in her own thoughts,
walked once or twice to and fro the large room, the scents
from the roses and heliotrope outside mingling with the
definite perfumes that at that date hung about every fash-
ionable woman's bedroom. On a table near the window
stood a Sevres vase and some miniatures. One was
Amalie's mother; another showed the long but handsome
and intellectual features of Prince John of Liechtenstein,
Rentzdorf s commander and the most brilliant cavalry
leader of Austria, and, after Murat and Ziethen, perhaps
the most brilliant of modern times.
"You see how Johann requites my forbearance," Toe
suddenly burst out, releasing her arm and throwing
herself into a low chair. "These three days have been a
continuous torture. I have asked him to explain; but he
says nothing. I have offered every atonement; but still
he says nothing. Yesterday I forced him to go with me to
matins. I gave him the blessed water, but he would not
20 Schonbrunn
give it me in return. He refused to kneel beside me; he
would neither pray with me nor for me. "
"But, dearest Toe," Amalie remonstrated, "why did
you do anything so foolish?"
Toe looked at her.
"What is there foolish in wishing to kneel in the Holy
of Holies beside the man you love and intend to marry?
Oh, yes; I know what his brother says of us: 'Watches
that never show the same hour. ' But he is wrong. Johann
and I we were made for each other. Long, long, long
ago I knew it. True, Johann does not believe in Rome;
he does not believe in Christ. What does that matter? I
believe in both ; and for him I am willing to risk my salva-
tion. I love him. I love him. "
Amalie had a return of her impatient mood, but she
said nothing, silently caressing Toe's hair. At length she
said to Toe gently:
"But this morning what did you and Johann do?"
"This morning?" the Princess answered, lifting her small
tormented features. "It seems so long ago. What was I
wearing? I can always remember in that way. Ah, I
recollect. I was in black. We rode together round the
ramparts. St. Stephen's bells were in full chime. I
demanded straight out why yesterday he had acted in so
cruel a way, and whether he had ceased believing in God. "
"Well, and what did he say to that?" Amalie urged
smiling, though her eyes filmed at Toe's naive almost
childlike earnestness.
"What did he say? Sitting firm on his horse he looked
at me sideways, up and down, then answered, 'Yes, I am
a Christian, Toe, in my own way ; that is, if it be Christian
to love your enemies and do ill to your friends. Even
there, of course, I cannot presume to rival my brother in
devotion, and still less you ladies of Vienna in fervour
where a French officer is concerned.' That was his answer
The Palazzo Esterthal 21
and he struck my horse with his whip and sent me careering
on in front. He wanted to kill me. And I should not
have minded a bit had I been thrown and killed on the
spot. "
"And afterwards what did you do?"
"Nothing wise. When he overtook me, I said to him,
1 You ought to love me, Johann, for you do ill to me enough
to make me think I am your dearest friend.' He was
nicer after that. He said that in Russia he had been study-
ing the Slav nature; that he hoped by and by to comprehend
it, especially as it unfolds itself in the hearts of Polish
women. Then he said in quite an odd voice, 'Well, at
your worst you are better than the best, Toe: by God, yes;
the sweetest, greatest thing on earth to me.' All the same,
a quarter of an hour later, he left me at my door like a dog
that in pity he had taken for a run. " She began to tear
at her lace handkerchief with her small, white, but irregular
teeth.
"I am so wretched, so wretched. I ask myself a thou-
sand times why has this come upon me? But there is
never an answer. My broken engagement, I am told, was
my destruction. But how was I to know? No one
warned me: no one dissuaded me. Johann himself con-
gratulated me. I thought I was doing the best thing for
myself and the best thing for him. He was poor. He
habitually spoke despitefully of women and of marriage.
I thought it would be just the same with Johann afterwards.
I wrote that to him on my honeymoon. How I hate him
and hate myself now when I remember ! I could kill my-
self with mortification or kill him."
It was not the depravity of the confession which startled
Amalie she was too much a Viennese, too little of a hypo-
crite; it was the sadness of life, of all life; it was the pain
that this man and this woman had brought on each other,
the pain they were yet to bring on each other.
22 Schonbrunn
"It is Vienna," Toe went on. "In Warsaw I was not
like this. But I will make him suffer. When it is too
late he will regret me. The dead are always valued. "
Shiverings like those of a fever traversed her body.
Then with an abrupt change of mood
"No ; I will not weep. I have humiliated myself enough.
The villain! I have but to drop my glove and ten of the
best men in Austria spring to pick it up. 'The Princess
Durrenstein's glove ! ' I could have them tear each other
for that glove or for the stalks of the grapes I have eaten. "
And with hectic cheeks and hot eyes she made a pirouette,
advancing with mincing steps, then retreating, holding up
her skirts to show her charming ankles and shapely calves.
"Ja, ich bin es, bin es, bin es,
Bin Prinzessin Durrenstein ! "
It was her own parody of the refrain sung by the hawkers
of Tyrolese wood-carving and used with dubious success
long afterwards by Grillparzer in one of the most tragic
scenes of his most famous drama.
Then, kissing her hands, she made as it were a triumph-
ant exit.
"Do you think me crazy? Dearest, dearest, speak to
me. Advise me. To you I will listen. One thing only:
I cannot give him up again. Never, never! I will be
anything to him, mistress or wife or sister, but I must have
him. The Blessed Sacrament is less to me."
She knelt, pressing herself against Amalie like a younger
against an elder sister.
"Marriage is the lesser evil, Toe."
"The lesser evil!" came the passionate cry. "Oh, is
there then nothing that is good in life? Is it all evil?
How terribly you speak. Yet you are right. I did not
think thus formerly. It is Vienna. It is Daruka. I can-
not, cannot stand both his cruelty and his inconstancy."
The Palazzo Esterthal 23
"Be reasonable, Toe. You know Johann's character."
Daruka was the Princess Ternitchsky, a Circassian
married to the scion of a great Viennese family. Amalie
pointed out that Johann's assiduities synchronized with
Toe's own flightiness and her flirtation with Montesquiou,
one of Napoleon's aides.
" It is Vienna, " Toe muttered in a kind of wanton despair.
"Life itself is holy, good and pure. It is this city that is
evil."
"Dear Toe, " Amalie said with a shrug, "you will find a
Vienna everywhere. Besides," she went on in a gentler
voice, "of what use is it to be jealous of Daruka? The
man was never born who could look on Daruka and not
desire her. The terrestrial Venus the Venus of the
streets Daruka is that thing. You might as well be
jealous of the woman who kisses your lover in his sleep."
"You do you think like that about Rentzdorf?"
Amalie answered steadily though with averted eyes
"Yes, I think like that about Heinrich. "
There was so strange, so sweet a music in her voice that
Toe started back ashamed as before some shrine which she
had approached.
"And that is woman's life? That is all life now and
in the past? It is frightful; it is frightful. It is Vienna,
its rivalries, its balls, its ostentation, its extravagance, its
art, its music everything that made me marry Prince
Durrenstein! Oh, I know it now, my perdition! At
Warsaw I dreamed of a lover who, though miles and miles
away, yes, and in the company of the most seductive
women, would see my image only. "
Amalie got up, worn out, leaving the Princess crouched
together by the sofa. But, constraining herself, she an-
swered :
"Dearest Toe, Count Johann loves you if man ever
loved woman. He certainly is not like your ideal; for this
24 Schonbrunn
that you name your ideal is not only a mere phantasy, but
a stupid phantasy. You might as well say, 'I will not
have fingernails, because they hint at claws ; or I will not
have a single hair on the back of my hand, because it hints
the beast, ' as to wish for a lover like this block of wood,
your ideal. "
"Amalie! How horrible you are!"
"You force me to be horrible."
"I force you? How?"
"By your Warsaw view of life; by your cult of the Slav
temperament; by all that superficial ideality of yours,
confusing the thing you desire with the thing that is and
ought to be! Instead of looking steadily at the thing which
is until it is penetrated and transfigured by the thing you
desire it to be, you say excitedly, 'The thing I see is the
thing I wish.' Then comes the awakening. Dear Toe,
it is the history of Poland, and you know it. If you marry
Johann to-morrow," she continued, "he will meet women
like Daruka; you will meet men like M. de Montesquieu.
Purity, passion, the body, the soul, the senses it is all more
mysterious than we think, Toe. There are thoughts we
keep back from those we love most dearly. Hourly we lie
to ourselves; hourly we dissemble. And this is everlast-
ingly right. C'est la vie. It is right that we should be
compelled to obliterate thoughts just as we are compelled
to obliterate old bad hidden things in our ancestral past.
Our life is as our thoughts are; yet neither our thoughts nor
their consequences are within our power. To that per-
petual cry of yours, ' To whom can I show myself exactly
as I am; tell everything, everything?' I answer, Cer-
tainly not to Johann; nor to any man. Not even to me;
not even to yourself."
Amalie stopped.
"To God," she heard Toe whispering; "oh, I tell all to
my God."
The Palazzo Esterthal 25
"You mean in the confessional?".
Toe nodded.
"You never do," Amalie answered in a moved voice.
"You never do. You forget I too was once a Catholic,
and know. Never, I say, never! No woman ever yet
confessed all to a man. Our confessions, " she said with a
singular laugh, "are like our coiffures, arranged by the
invisible lady's maid of the soul."
Toe shivered. She felt miserable, weak, suffering.
"Dear Toe," Amalie went on, speaking now in a low
friendly voice, "I say all this to you because you are
confronted by two roads, one leading to disaster. You say,
this is Vienna well, I say again, the suburbs of the actual
Vienna are spacious, but of this Vienna of yours, the suburbs
are wide as the world."
Toe in an instant was on her knees beside her.
"You great, beautiful, high-souled, dear, dear Amalie!
I was a demon when I came into this room; and now an
angel I am not, nor ever will be; but you, I think, are near
the angels, and I, I am near you. I must be alone to think,
to think! Where can I go? Round the garden under
the cedars? No; I will drive home and back."
Downstairs, Toe found the company, still more aug-
mented, hotly engaged in attacking or defending the authen-
ticity of an anecdote told by Lan-Lan on the authority
of Madame Raspogli. Napoleon's sister Pauline, Princess
Borghese, Madame Raspogli had averred, was addicted to
the vice or the extravagance of milk baths which cost a
guinea each; and to heighten the bizarrerie of this taste
she was, the same authority had affirmed, carried to the
bath by a favourite negro named Delmar.
"The mameluk! The mameluk!" Kessling cried ex-
citedly almost as Toe entered the throng. "Why have I
not thought of it before?"
26 Schonbrunn
"Thought of what?" Lan-Lan asked.
"Rustum Bonaparte's mameluk, who commits his
murders for him, like the private assassin of the Borgias.
The murders are an intelligible service; but why does he
keep him as his valet ? Not till this moment have I known."
"Well, what is the reason?"
"Why, to carry him to his bath a family taste, a Bona-
partist idiosyncrasy! It is glorious."
There was a shout of laughter.
The younger twin blushed, the elder said, "Disgrace-
ful!" and looked death at her sister.
The steady tolling of a bell outside got on Toe's nerves
even more jarringly than Vienna's risky stories. It
sounded like a deathbell.
"The Church of the Capuchins," she thought suddenly.
"Let me go there. I can reflect and pray. God will
illumine me."
Unlike the Princess Durrenstein, who was a pure Slav,
Amalie von Esterthal was, by the mixture of her blood and
the discordant traditions in her descent, a typical Viennese.
On her mother's side she was Italian, tracing her origin
to the Ranieri, a fanatical Guelf house, which, banished
from Arezzo in the fourteenth century, had settled in
Lombardy and by enterprise or war had gradually become
possessors of wide tracts of grudging or fertile land in the
neighbourhood of Monza. Her father, on the other hand,
was of a South German stock and drew his name and de-
scent from the Counts of Hildenfeldt in Suabia. Dis-
possessed during the Thirty Years' War, the branch to
which he belonged had been restored to comparative
affluence by Leopold I.; and, thrust again into the back-
ground under Charles VI., had re-emerged under Maria
Theresa and her successors. Two of Amalie's great-aunts
The Palazzo Esterthal 27
had been maids of honour to the empress-queen ; her father
in his youth had entered the famous Harrach Guard; of
her brothers, two were in the Austrian service; a third was
equerry to the Queen of Naples, Maria Carolina, Amalie's
godmother; a fourth was a priest. Her only sister, Ulrica,
five years her senior, had at nineteen adopted the religious
life and was now in the convent of the Ursulines at Prague.
Amalie herself was now in her twenty-eighth year. Of
these years the first fifteen had been passed in an almost
conventual seclusion at Monza; the next seven partly in
Austria and partly in Naples and Palermo at the court of
Maria Carolina; the last six in Vienna.
A patrician in the widest as in the narrowest sense of that
term, she seemed by her birth, vigorous health and con-
spicuous beauty preappointed to a life of outward brilliance
or luxurious calm. Her marriage with Ferdinand von
Esterthal had been a "love" marriage. It stimulated her
senses and satisfied her pride. He was good-looking; he
was young, and apparently her slave; he was by his friend-
ship with the Archduke Maximilian one of the most envied
officers of the Guard.
Suddenly this fabric of peace and illusionary joys dis-
solved.
In the same week and almost on the same day she
received the news of her mother's death, and discovered
that her husband had for an indefinite time been false to
her, that he had now as mistresses two of her closest
friends, one, her brother's wife, Lucille von Hildenfeldt,
the other, his own cousin, Marie von Esterthal.
It was as if a thunder-bolt had struck her to"the ground.
In the days and weeks of suffering and perplexity of
heart which ensued, of sorrow for her mother's death, of
perplexity before her own fierce humiliation, she had to
face alone the problems assailing her spirit the central
problem above all, long shunned and now thus suddenly
28 Schonbrunn
and terribly unmasked "What art thou that with brute
power hast fashioned the worlds in agony and now hurlest
on me this anguish?"
Untutored by suffering, hate and the lust for retaliation
had for a time engrossed her thoughts ; nor was it until the
opportunity of a fearful vengeance offered itself that she
recoiled in horror from the mad craving to make her in-
sulters suffer. It was against herself that her hate now
gathered. It was against herself that the murderous in-
stinct was directed.
But again when, she watched the frail, spiritual grace
of her sister-in-law, Lucille von Hildenfeldt, she had put
the question "Can treachery and murder have lodg-
ment in that form? Can it be evil, the desire which one so
fair can feel? Wrong and sin? Oh, this world is but one
great wrong, and sin is the only reality; good, the dream.
Woman's innocence? Was there ever a time when I
myself have been innocent?"
And she saw now that it was not their guilt; it was their
imagined bliss that was the arrow quivering in her side.
A reconciliation patched up by the intervention of the
Queen had left her rancour unappeased. "Win back your
husband's love," her confessor had pleaded. "You have
the traditions of your mother's house to guard."
"Yes," she had reflected to herself in scornful irony,
"let me be a good wife, since a mother I cannot be. And
yet why? Why should I win back this man's love whom
I despise and loathe? Amalie von Hildenfeldt, the girl
who loved Ferdinand von Esterthal, is dead. Would I,
the woman, indeed remarry with this well-born jockey and
dog-trainer? Is this indeed God's high command?"
All around her was lampless darkness ; the law of conduct
had sunk with the faith from which it was derived. How
was a false religion to beget in human conduct anything
save hypocrisy or a false law? Living in conjugal "peace,"
The Palazzo Esterthal 29
consenting to her own degradation amid her friends' ap-
proval, she was, she told herself, striving to find a place
with the Egyptian in that obscene Malebolge of Dante.
In 1804 she returned to Vienna in a state of mind border-
ing upon madness. Her married life had become a daily
contamination, but from this she was now determined at
any cost to liberate herself.
The intercession of "padrino, " her father-in-law, pre-
vented a scandal. He had been her mother's friend and
Amalie had formed a strong attachment to the lonely old
man. Her own father lived in seclusion dedicated to her
mother's memory, passing the days and nights, it was said,
in abstruse studies of alchemy and astrology. Divorce,
despite the laws of Joseph II., was in Austria confined as
yet to the middle classes. A suite of rooms in the left
wing of the Palazzo was allotted to herself; the right wing
to Ferdinand; the public apartments and those of the old
Count occupied the remainder of the house.
VI
"My life is ended, " she wrote in her diary, "and my life
is not begun. I have not known an hour of happiness
which I have not proved to be an illusion or founded on a
lie. The vain successes at the Court, dress, jewels, the
Opera, the theatre, balls, court fetes, admiration, envy,
pride, my marriage, religion, the 'peace of the soul' at
Monza and at Naples what have these been except the
creations of a lie or a dream ? I was born into a false re-
ligion, trained to worship a false God. I made for myself
a false world and in it found false friends, false joys, false
thoughts, false everything. "
She was a woman to whom religion was necessary if she
were to live ; but her intellect, at once exalted and darkened
by her suffering, had as yet led her only to denial. Never-
30 Schonbrunn
theless, she had unawares taken the first step towards that
vision of things which she afterwards found in Rentzdorf's
dramas.
"Life is meaningless," she wrote, "yet live on! Life is
suffering, and beyond this earth there is nothing; yet live
on!" Why? Pressing that question she was pressing
towards the light.
Unpretentious, and, considering her education and her
environment, singularly free from affectation and class
prejudices, exquisitely sensitive to beauty, she was yet de-
nied alike the ambitions of art and of social rivalries which
made life a sort of noisy self-complacent phantasmagoria
to several of her contemporaries to Bettina, for instance,
to Rahel, to Caroline Schlegel and to Mariamne vom Stein.
Rejecting the religion of Christ which as a kind of
Austrian Jansenism she found in Vienna, in the Markowitz
circle above all she nevertheless adopted its ethics.
"Let me live for others. "
She gave her days to the philanthropies and to the
"causes" that were fashionable in the first decade of the
nineteenth century, quickly discovering, with a humour not
wholly bitter, their organized imposture and innate con-
tradiction. "You say the rich pursue phantoms and
shadows," she said to Count Markowitz, "but is not the
struggle of the poor for bread as phantasmal as the struggle
of the rich for pleasure?"
Round her, the falling of thrones, the tramp of Bona-
parte's legions and the monotonous thunder of his cannon
seemed a not unfitting accompaniment to her moody days.
VII
It was in this state of mind and in the Markowitz circle
that for the first time she heard the name and became
acquainted with the poetry of Heinrich von Rentzdorf .
The Palazzo Esterthal 31
At Monza, with her mother or alone, she had read much
in Italian ; but at Naples and in Palermo after her marriage
she had read nothing. Now, in Vienna, as German grad-
ually became as easy to her as Italian, she turned in avid
curiosity or enthusiasm towards that blossoming-time of
poetry and thought known as the Aufkldrung. Herder,
Lessing, Jacobi, Schiller, Zacharias Werner their works
became stars in a wider newer firmament of the soul.
Heinrich von Rentzdorf, who was still quite young, had
at first escaped her observation; but when his dramas were
once in her hands, she divined in him a genius more akin to
Goethe's than to that of any of his contemporaries. His
ideas, like those of Goethe, came, as it were, from a dis-
tance; and his verses, like Goethe's were impregnated with
a magic or a mystery borrowed from remoter twilights than
ours. He had Goethe's passion for the German language.
He handled each word as if it were itself a poem, the
achievement of some unknown but perfect artist. "The
quarries at Carrara used to tremble when they heard the
footstep of Buonarroti, " the young critic and litterateur,
Axel Petersen, had written in the Mercure de Vienne, "so,
I imagine, does a German dictionary when Heinrich von
Rentzdorf comes near. Austria has at last a poet, a true
magister verborum, a master of words, and I am glad to be
his Annunciator, if that be not too presumptuous a name."
Rentzdorf's first work, the drama Caius Marius, pub-
lished in 1803, had been acted on nearly every stage in
Germany. "It had even paid," the wits said, satirizing
the remuneration which at that era even the most suc-
cessful book or play brought the writer "a night of the
author's losses at the gaming-table."
Caius Marius was a drama of metaphysical accusation
and revolt. But Marius's dreams of world-unity and a
world-wide empire, symbolized in the silver eagle that he
gave to the Roman legions, had been instantly applied by
32 Schonbrunn
"Young Germany" to the rising spirit of nationality. In
the Roman oligarchs, in Sulla above all, the same enthu-
siasts saw their own antagonists the feudal princes, ra-
pacious or cruel, and, in their narrow ambitions, the
strong allies of Napoleon.
Goethe, who snubbed Kleist and disregarded Werner,
had, in 1803, praised Rentzdorf. Marius was reviewed in
the " Museenalmanach " ; and the young author was invited
by Karl August to Weimar.
But Rentzdorf, instead of "following up" in the same
style, as Axel Petersen advised, had published, first a
volume of verse in classic metres and then two volumes of
prose. The former had a timid success; the latter were
failures; but in the beginning of 1806 the publication of a
second drama, The Death of a Soul, had provoked in Vienna
an outburst of surprise, anger, and at last a storm of oblo-
quy. The over-praised poet of Caius Marius was now
pilloried as a Jacobin, an enemy of religion and of the
monarchy. His private life was held up to reprobation.
He was at that date not yet six and twenty, but, it was
insinuated, he had accumulated within that narrow com-
pass of years the disorders and the crimes of a Borgia
or a Catiline. Abroad, his life had been as flagitious as in
Vienna. He had, it was alleged, travelled in Greece only
to live there in pagan freedom with a beautiful Greek whom,
before the very altar, he had torn from her bridegroom.
His poems, it was pointed out, exalted the marbles of
the Parthenon; but the battlefields of Marathon and
Leuctra had by him been left unsung. True, he had been
one of the band who cut their way from Ulm, and he had
fought at Austerlitz ; but could the writer of The Death of a
Soul be a patriotic Austrian?
Literary and theatrical Vienna at that epoch was gov-
erned by two old men the poet Alzinger and the dramatist
Ayrenhof, both reactionaries, both enemies of France and
The Palazzo Esterthal 33
of Goethe. In their attack upon Rentzdorf they were
joined by a third septuagenarian, Lorenz Leopold Haschka,
the author of the Austrian national hymn.
It was Haschka 's incoherent tirades which first drew
Amalie's attention to Rentzdorf. She bought his books.
Cains Marius left her puzzled and unsatisfied, but the poems
and prose-studies, and above all, this new drama, The Death
of a Soul, enchained her brooding spirit. Schiller's ethical
rhodomontades and Goethe's later anxious compromisings
had depressed or irritated her; but here was a writer who
had gazed steadily upon the abyss, here were words and
cries torn from a heart that had been goaded by a suffer-
ing fierce as her own, here was a mind that in its unrest-
ing strife towards the highest and ultimate things had
tolerated no compromise; here was no arid scepticism,
impotent to affirm; here there was affirmation, a lofty and
persisting energy, and to life's problem, an answer, terrible
indeed, but fascinating and inexhaustibly profound.
The drama, The Death of a Soul, had, Alzinger informed
her, been written for the profligate actress, Madame X;
and Haschka had selected as the prototypes of its charac-
ters several well-known personages in Viennese society.
"Dug out of a woman's breast," Axel Petersen, on the
other hand, had written of it the morning after the first
representation, "revealing a power truly and superbly
tragic vraiment et fierement tragique. "
"I delivered my soul from hell," the chief character,
Teresa Malavista, declares when her lover proposes her
return to the convent, "when with you I escaped those
walls. And you you would cast my soul back into hell?
Ah, it is you who are possessed, Corrado; it is you into
whom the tempter has entered. "
Conquering her anger she pleads with him, remonstrates
and he denounces God's vengeance on her sin and on his
own.
34 Schonbrunn
"Sin?" she answers. "What is sin? Who will tell us?
Oh, in each sin that with you I sinned, I was reborn in
earth's first holiness. My purity till then was incest, my
prayers, blasphemy. In my dead body my dead soul
worshipped a dead God. Rebellion was in me a cleansing
fire. I renounced my vows, but took greater vows. I fled
with you. Ah, in the heaven and on the earth, what glory!
What a light on the mountains ; in the forest what celestial
voices! You remember, Corrado, you remember? We hid
in the summer woods; the summer lightnings kindled the
leaves to a roof of fretted gold above us; the stars of night
were our bride-candles. "
Again the lover denounces God's heavy wrath on her
and again she answers deliberately :
And again "In my dead soul God's dreaming soul was
reawakened ; the wonder of His vision was on me and in me.
To save my soul? If my body is not my soul, my soul is
nothing. Last night you saw God there; you kissed me,
and on my lips tasted God's wine. . . . "
Seeing in her beauty Satan only, Corrado turns from her
in horror, crossing and re-crossing himself; and to all her
reasoning and to all her entreaties he opposes this last word,
"Repent, as I repent; pray for yourself as I will pray
for you. Turn to the Crucified; cling to the Cross. The
Cross, the Cross. ..."
"Pray for me? Murderer of God, you, you will pray
and for me?"
But the strain is at the breaking point; she is a woman in
a man's part. She falls, uttering wild inarticulate cries.
He leaves her, not knowing whether the sorceress, as he
now imagines her, be dead or alive, and, obdurate in his
resolve, enters a monastery three days later; and the
woman hearing of the irreparable act, destroys herself.
In the last scene of the fourth act the hero, in the garb
of a black friar, is discovered at midnight praying in his
The Palazzo Esterthal 35
cell, but tortured even in this sacred retreat by the singular
doubt Does he not by praying for the soul of a dead but
unforgotten mistress imperil his own salvation and hers?
Has not all been in vain the murder of her love and of
life?
His cry "A lost soul!" is left ringing in the spectators'
ears as the curtain falls.
This book had affected Amalie with a shattering power.
It put into precise, painful distinctness ideas which had
long worked obscurely in herself, here in Vienna or even at
Monza long ago. It seemed to her the voice of another
age but of what age? Not the era which Schiller had
outlined, rising like a palm on the horizon's verge; not the
era of a terrestrial paradise of comfort and well-being, such
as the Girondins had visualized; nor yet the era of culture
which Count Johann had accepted from Goethe's teaching
and spoken of to her in words which silenced but never
convinced.
In the spring of 1806 she quitted Vienna, going first to
Prague, then to Karlsbad. It was a characteristic of
Amalie that she never let a day pass without some hours
under the open sky, walking or riding. In Vienna the
ramparts and the rolling meadowland west of the city had
been her recreation-ground; at Karlsbad the woods and
heaths. That year in her health a sudden buoyancy, a
mental and physical harmony had declared itself. In the
leisured weeks at Karlsbad, she read and re-read all Rentz-
dorf's writings, steeping her soul on her solitary rides or
walks, in the haunting music of his verse, discovering mean-
while everything possible of his life, appearance, and charac-
ter, forming her own impression, sifting the true from thefalse.
It was easy for her to understand the power which his
personality exercised over men like Count Johann, Belli, or
Lan-Lan's brother; it was not less easy to understand the
36 Schonbrunn
epileptic rages or senile virulence of the septuagenarian
poets, Ayrenhof and Haschka.
Reading The Death of a Soul in bed one morning she
suddenly recollected an incident in Vienna when Haschka
and Ayrenhof had come together to call on her and she had
introduced the subject of Rentzdorf's drama the impo-
tent rage, the skinny, trembling, uplifted forefinger, and
Haschka's quavering scream, "Rentzdorf? Heinrich von
Rentzdorf? Countess, he is Antichrist; a blacker atheist
than Bonaparte or Robespierre!"
Recalling that incident now in the glorious morning
sunlight, she thrust aside the book, lay on her back and
laughed like a pagan goddess to whom_Hermes has been
narrating a freakish story.
Meanwhile the days went past : summer's heat had be-
come autumn's languors but still she avoided the return
to the capital, as if that reading and that scenery had
reared around her a palace of the soul in which she could
dream of a peace mightier than the peace that seemed to
have shipwrecked in her life for ever.
Amazed at the suddenness and tenacity of her own pre-
possession, "Can I be in error?" she asked herself. "Is
this thing of God, and in this old world can a newer vision
and a newer faith have indeed arisen?"
To her at least it had arisen. Earth was reinvested in
meaning: its bitterness and sorrow remained, but the
bitterness and sorrow were God's.
That summer, at one of the fetes in the Hofburg devised
by the Empress Ludovica, she had met Rentzdorf.
VIII
Three years had passed since that meeting.
In the surprise of the passion which had seized her it
had seemed that it must burn itself out, self-destroyed by
The Palazzo Esterthal 37
its own excess; and in the fierceness of the love-thirst, the
desert-thirst of the soul, she had let herself go, with sealed
eyes, on, on, on.
Yet the days had grown to weeks, the weeks to months.
Yesterday's bliss had been still the soul of to-morrow's ec-
stasy. The anticipation of each meeting was transport ; in
the realization the actual still left the imagined transport
behind. Gradually the order of their days was regulated
by the facilities it offered or the obstacles it opposed to their
meetings. Society and the drift of everyday concerns be-
came an increasing impatience. For their life-vision like
their passion was isolating. Except in the ideal forms of
music and of Greek drama they rarely found true com-
panionship.
During a visit to Florence in the days of her revolt, her
loneliness and her misery, she had stood long in front of
the Dawn of Michael Angelo. The energy, the divine
beauty and the diviner suffering in the naked figure had
then daunted and appalled her, like some dream in stone
of an ecstasy and an anguish that she had never known and
never would know. Now she saw in it the image of her
own virgin passion, her own awakening, her own rebirth in
unexperienced wonder and delight. With just this might
in her limbs, her clasping hands, she strove towards her
lover now.
IX
The rising war feeling throughout Europe in the winter
of 1808-9, the hopes rekindled by the Spanish insurrection,
the wild surmises and wilder rumours, Austria's heroic
rashness, Stadion's recall, the opposing policies of the court
and the Archduke, and at last the certainty of war, brought
on Amalie the first ordeal, compelling her to face the worn
question of public and private duty.
Rentzdorf's decision was immediate.
38 Schonbrunn
"Here is no debate," he had said, "only an assertion.
It is not for Austria, but for ourselves as Austrians that
we resume this war. Germany's shame would make this a
shame, this that we are, you and I. "
Facing death apart or life apart, there was for these
two passionate beings only silence, and in the woman's
heart the conviction, heavy and chill but solemn as evening
bells, that the sinking of the life-light in his eyes would
leave her own eyes unseeing also.
Three days later Rentzdorf was with his regiment on the
road to Ratisbon.
And the woman's part? The part of the mistress left
behind?
That r61e Amalie von Esterthal conceived not less
greatly than her lover conceived his role as a fighter.
"To see in that hour the whole; he in me and I in him,
and God in both, working to His own great end across
thousands of dead men as across thousands of dead worlds,
dying in them to live the mightier dream that beyond
Time is yet to arise this is the command laid on me. "
And at another time she told herself, "Before a battle the
one thing forbidden me is the prayer, ' God shield my lover!'
My prayer must be, ' God for Germany !' And after a bat-
tle the one thing forbidden me is, ' Thank God my lover is
safe!' My word must be, 'Is it defeat? Is it victory?" 1
Thus she had lived through April and the campaign of
Ratisbon; thus she had lived through May, and the horri-
ble carnage at Eckmuhl, Aspern and Essling. Then had
followed the palpitating awful pause of Lobau, when, like
a caged beast, Bonaparte's army was shut up in a small
island girt by the Danube, whilst its enemy raged around
upon the eastern shore, yet was unable to give the death-
thrust to the entangled brute until at Wagram, tearing and
gnawing its way through the net, out on them the monster
sprang !
The Palazzo Esterthal 39
Worn by the anxiety and fever of the preceding weeks,
it had seemed to Amalie that she could endure no further
strain, that with another battle to face her brain or her
life would make shipwreck; yet when on the 5th of July,
the battle actually came, a kind of mad hostility to the in-
sulter of Germany and the torturer of her lover and herself
gave her the fierce strength which hate supplies.
_ A thunderstorm during the night had raged with so
terrifying an influence that it turned her fears for her lover
into a momentary vague personal fear, and a kind of
gladness had filled her, till in contempt she turned on
herself.
"What is this storm, which in all Austria will not destroy
five lives, beside to-morrow's rage to-morrow's?"
The day of the battle of Wagram rose sultry and oppres-
sive even after the storm. Dazed, she had walked from
one room to another, then to the garden and the streets,
then back to her rooms again, dry-throated, dry-eyed,
frantic at each moaning thud, thud of the cannon not ten
miles away. That sound had begun at six in the morning;
hour after hour it had lasted; it seemed as if it would last
for ever, as if in Vienna here it were the beating seconds'
accompaniment for ever.
It was now noon. In the garden was the hum of bees
and the ghastly mimicry of summer peace. Her brain was
parched; it felt like dust, a handful of dust shaking about
in her skull.
"The symphony of battle," someone had once repeated
in her presence someone who had never been in a battle.
Most harrowing to her had always seemed that fearful
pause for prayer, for officers and men to receive the
sacrament.
"The symphony of battle!"
To-day she could see in it neither grandeur nor heroism.
She heard, she saw only the repulsive, hideous reality
40 Schonbrunn
the roaring of one kind of shell, the deadly moans of another,
the terrific crash and crackle of a third ; then in the sicken-
ing stench and smoke the gasps, the horrible cries, the
yells, the silences, the curses, the laughter, the neighing of
mangled horses, the crash and volleying of musketry like
gigantic whips of steel cracking incessantly, interminably.
' ' The symphony of battle ? What mockery ! ' '
She watched the creeping hands of the time-piece. That
frightful thunder northward still rolled on, carnage and
blood. Once an awful hurly-burly followed by a dreadful
silence made her spring to her feet, then throw herself on
her knees, her handkerchief pressed to her mouth to stifle
her own cries. The silence was the more terrific, for she
knew what was happening in that silence the terrible
charge of horse or foot, the battle's essential agony.
The cannonade was resumed, fitful but persistent.
"My God, will this battle never end? How long then
does it take two hundred thousand men to kill or mangle
each other into powerlessness ? "
Mistress of her actions no longer, she went out, past the
garden, through the suburbs, into the inner city, going she
knew not whither, seeking she knew well what she was
seeking.
Men and women thronged the windows, roofs, towers,
balconies, watching the two "squads" of gladiators, each
a hundred thousand strong, mangling and massacring each
other on the Marchfeld.
Long lines of wounded began to straggle into Vienna
an unending host. The infinite sorrow of the world!
Earth seemed a charnel-house; its graves stood open, and
she saw corruption nations and men and empires. In
every street the wild rumour "Defeat!"; in every street
another wild rumour "Victory!"; till rumour killed
rumour and all was chaos.
She walked on; past the Prater, across the river, past
The Palazzo Esterthal 41
Austrian villages tranced in the afternoon quiet, still seek-
ing she knew well what she was seeking.
The July evening descended.
"He is dead."
Fate with inexorable accent spoke the words.
"It is now! It is now! God's dream in us is ended,
God's anguish stilled. ..."
A giant hand split the pulsating, hot, azure cope stretched
like a blue black cauldron lid above her, split it and flung
the halves into the abyss, and in the firmamented void
the torture enginery of a universe, throbbing and panting,
was stilled. The worlds fell sundering, little heaps of dust
falling upon little heaps of dust.
" It is finished. Being's drama is ended. Self -destroyed,
the world-soul passes to its peace. "
That had been in July. Now it was October.
"And to-day this day or to-morrow at latest I shall see
him again."
She took out his letter and for the twentieth time read
the open words and the cypher they concealed.
Since the surrender of Vienna in April every letter that
entered or left the city was read by Bonaparte's secret
police. The lovers had accordingly invented a method of
communication by inserting a real letter within the words
of a sham letter. The difficulty of writing such a letter
was extreme; but they had leisure enough, and the difficulty
was diminished by the ease with which both wrote Italian
and German.
" I will be in Vienna in four days from the writing of this,
or at most in six."
She studied the cypher again, testing it in every way.
The meaning was unmistakable.
"To-night!" she whispered to herself with madly beating
heart. "Let me not die of the joy of it! To-night!"
CHAPTER II
THE NOON PARADE
AT half-past eleven the old Count, wrapped in rugs and
shawls, seated himself angrily in front of Toe and
Amalie in the back seat of the Esterthal carriage.
The condition of the harness and of the horses was a re-
minder of his own and Vienna's humiliation, and at the last
moment he was about to give up this drive. Yet he owed
Andre"ossy and the French Emperor this courtesy; he was
conscious too of an unadmitted curiosity the wish to look
face to face on this man whom he had not seen since 1802,
when as world-dictator at Amiens and at LuneVille he gave
peace to Europe.
"ToSchonbrunn."
Ten minutes later, from a rise of ground they saw, less
than a mile away, a low green hill crested with a white
pillared temple or basilica. Nearer, the gleam of the noon-
day sun flashed on a triple row of windows and a long grey
frontage of stone.
It was the palace of Maria Theresa. The green hill be-
hind it was the Gloriette. There it lay like a living thing,
in the wide sultry stillness of this autumn day.
"How desolate!" Toe exclaimed. How desolate! "It
crouches like a beautiful slave. ... If stones could
have sense, those walls would weep. "
The old Count lifted his heavy lids. He looked at the
42
The Noon Parade 43
long grey pile. Even at this distance he could, with his
soldier's sight, make out the massive ornamentation, the
colonnade, the outer staircases, the two huge obelisks, each
surmounted by the Austrian eagle's outspread wings.
To-day above that eagle floated everywhere the French
tricolour, emblem, to his eyes, of all that was most unspeak-
able and hideous in modern times the Paris mob's maniac
cruelty, the prison massacres, the murdered queen, the
humiliation year by year of Austria's war-chiefs; Coburg,
Klerfayt, Beaulieu, Wurmser, Cray, Alvintsky, Mack, and
now, greatest of all, the Archduke Charles.
"Yes; yes," he muttered with a touch of weary fatal-
ism. "It is so; it is so."
This Bonaparte seemed to beggar admiration. Already
he had outdistanced every human competitor, past or pre-
sent, in the race for glory.
He looked again at the palace. What another Austria
and what another France it had been when as a boy sixty
years ago, he had seen that structure rise, piece by piece,
the rival of Versailles ! Those broad green walks, those deep-
embowered walls of yew, those cool green niches enclosing
the white limbs of statues, a royal pleasaunce indeed,
fit for an empress's devotion to her gallant strong-thewed
husband-lover, Francis of Lorraine!
"And now instead of Daun and Loudon, it is Bonaparte
and his Septembriseurs. "
He lowered his lids again and sank in somnolent sullen
brooding. His face, Toe thought, the grey moustaches and
closed eyes, looked like one of the old Teutonic knights
carved in stone in the cathedral of Kracow.
They were now within three hundred yards of the narrow
stream of the Wien which flows close past the main entrance
to the palace. Around the gilt-spiked railings the crowd
stood three or four deep, but as yet it was a listless, silent
crowd.
44 Schonbrunn
A post-chaise full of women, drawn by four spirited horses,
jolted past the Esterthal carriage and with laughter and
greetings swept into the huge quadrangle.
"Who is she in the white hat and heron's plume?" the
Count enquired.
"Madame Bellegarde, " Amalie answered; "Bausset, the
maitre du palais, has given her a window. "
"Go round by the Bruhl road," he said harshly to the
coachman. "We need not go in yet. "
Before this spectacle of the wife of an Austrian field-
marshal rushing to stare at Bonaparte, the Austrian in him
was once more thoroughly awakened. He had again to
choke down the command to return to Vienna.
The horses were backed, and the detour began.
This road led through the rugged and picturesque scenery
south of the capital. The air was sweet; the stillness be-
came momentarily more profound, affecting Amalie with an
intensity almost morbid. It was one of those serene au-
tumn days which appear the very emblem of all that the
world-spirit strives throughout eternity to attain.
Like most cultured women of her era Amalie had been
drawn into the torrent of " sentimentalism " associated with
the names of Holderlin, Volney, Ossian and Chateaubriand;
but in Rentzdorf she had found a thinker and a poet who
gave a deeper interpretation of nature as to art.
This emotion, this spiritual yet enervating melancholy
was now upon her, evoking as its harmony the memories
of days with her lover now an assignation in old Vienna,
or here amid this very scenery, or an " Ausflucht " during
the first year of their intimacy, when they had spent eleven
days in a solitary inn mid the Carinthian forests.
"Those autumn days!" she said under her breath.
" Their tranced silence and those songless woods! "
The scent of the Carinthian pines was wafted to her down
the years. The yearning which seized her was fierce as
The Noon Parade 45
pain. She half closed her eyes lest any outward sight or
sound should mar the dream.
Until those eleven days life's actualities had ever fallen
short of her ardent imagination. Therein life differed from
Nature and from Music. For till then Nature's glories, a
wide landscape under a setting moon, twilight by a lake, the
midday stillness falling between a mountain gorge had,
like Music, exceeded the heart's imaginings and held it in a
rapture of adoration. But those days in the Carinthian
inn had ushered in a mystic golden chain of linked hours in
which life's actualities left behind even Music's and Nature's
transcendencies.
"You are mad, and you infect me with your madness,"
Toe had once said to her in one of her flashes of Slav in-
tuition, "but I would rather know this madness of yours
than all the world's wisdom. Maria Magdalene what
she might have been to Christ, that you are to Rentzdorf . "
"Thanks, I prefer Amalie von Esterthal, " she had
answered.
The recollection roused her, and, smiling, she looked at
Toe's pensive face.
The old Count, his thin shoulders and figure emerging
from the rugs like the head and neck of a tortoise from its
shell, was teasing her about Poland.
"Who is the greatest fool amongst your kings, Princess? "
"Sobieski, " Toe retorted, guessing his intention. "And
why? Because he aided Austria and delivered Vienna for
you when he might have let the Turks sack it. "
"Right," he answered. "And I, an Austrian, praise
your wit. And now I put to you, a Pole of the Poles, a
second conundrum who is the next greatest fool after John
Sobieski?"
Toe blinked her eyes as though the sun were in them; but
the device did not give her inspiration.
"I will tell you, Princess. It is Poniatowski; it is your
46 Schonbrunn
precious prince Poniatowski, the betrayer of Germany, the
abettor of Bonaparte. "
"Poniatowski is a hero, not a traitor," Toe flamed out
indignantly. "He may be false to Germany, but he is true
to Poland; none truer, none."
"Well, we shall see," the old Count said sententiously,
touching the tip of one of Toe's delicate ears. "A knavish
speech remains steadfast in a knavish ear. Time will bring
my words to light. "
And satisfied with the vaticination, he pointed to a dell
thick with gorse and brambles and remarked that, like the
ground on which Schonbrunn stood, it had once belonged to
the Knights Templars.
A bugle call rang out clear and sweet in the stillness. It
came, not from Schonbrunn, but from their right from the
south-west from some cantonment.
"You have Prince Berthier's passes? " he said suspiciously
to Amalie. "It is certain that he will be present at this
parade?"
"Quite certain, padrino. He told me so in the Graben
yesterday. "
ii
The two fountains in front of Schonbrunn, the one rep-
resenting the Danube and its tributaries, the other the
recently annexed Polish provinces, were being stared at con-
temptuously or negligently by the French troops now filling
the spacious quadrangle. A group of carriages, occupied
almost exclusively by Viennese nobility, was stationed close
to the eastern wing of the palace.
"Well, monsieur le baron, what are the ladies of Vienna
saying of us now?" asked a French aide-de-camp, stopping
his fine black horse close to the carriage in which Freihoff,
the official, sat with the twins.
The Noon Parade 47
Disconcerted by the apostrophe, which seemed to demand
a witty reply, Freihoff put on a look of sulky dignity and
said nothing.
"Why, what the devil should they say of you?" a Jager
answered. "The women of Vienna have memories. Have
you not robbed them of sixty thousand men, their cousins,
brothers, lovers, husbands of friends?"
Montesquiou, the aide-de-camp, a stranger to the speaker,
affected not to hear. Though he had a tinge of the brutish
manners of the Napoleonic staff, he was a gentleman and
felt that he had brought the retort upon himself.
Two other French officers sitting their horses a few yards
away, overheard Montesquieu's question and the Jager's
answer.
"What is that the Austrian says?" one of them muttered
to his companion. "Bigre, have we not given Vienna
thirty thousand French stallions that neigh as joyously to
those Austrian jennets as any Pandour or Croat of them all?
Hein?"
" Taisez-vous, Legros ! Are you drunk by twelve o'clock?
Have you no eyes?"
The officer who spoke thus angrily was Colonel Favrol,
a man of good family like Montesquiou, and though an
enthusiast for Bonaparte, yet possessing the mind of an
artist and a dreamer. Count Esterthal's carriage had at
that moment drawn up immediately beside that of Bolli
and Freihoff, and he himself and Legros were the two officers
quartered, not indeed upon the Palazzo Esterthal, but upon
the old Count's Opera box.
"Ah, your Viennese flame! She too is here, is she?"
Legros answered, thrusting out his thick red underlip.
Amalie, after a friendly answer to Favrol's salute, glanced
quickly at the terrace and double flight of stairs above the
colonnade on her left, and then at the waiting crowd outside
the railings shop-keepers, artisans, loafers, beggars, thou-
48 Schonbrunn
sands of German or Czech faces, round, honest, frank, sar-
castic or supercilious.
A quick roll of drums announced the arrival of a division
of the Guard. The regiments of foot began to move to
their places. The huge oblong was now packed with troops,
horse and foot cuirassiers and Polish lancers, hussars,
chasseurs and grenadiers. Aides were riding about in all
directions. The commands of superior officers were re-
peated by their subordinates and passed from rank to rank.
The joyous peal of a bugle was followed by the swift, in-
credibly graceful evolution of some squadrons of cavalry.
"Those hats must be very uncomfortable on a hot day, "
naively observed the younger twin, gazing at the shakos of
the grenadiers.
No one answered the remark. All eyes were on the evolu-
tion of the horsemen or on the sombre lines of the infantry,
those world-conquering legions, enhaloed as by an aureole
with the light of victory which, kindled at Valmy, had
burned with a brighter and ever brighter lustre through years
of war, from Arcola and Marengo to Austerlitz, Jena and
Wagram seventeen years of war, battles of the republic,
battles of the directory, battles of the consulate, battles of
the empire.
An adjutant with a pale and angry face galloped up to
Favrol, who, stopping by Amalie's carriage, had begun to
name the regiments to her.
"What is the matter?" Favrol asked, impatient at the
interruption.
"The 3 ist again, mon colonel! They will be late at
God's judgment day if they can these dogs 1 ."
Favrol by a word accorded him the permission to leave
his post, and he dashed through the main gates between the
two great obelisks and the gilt eagles glittering in the au-
tumn noon.
Toe's eyes followed the hussar.
The Noon Parade 49
"He is going to Nussdorf, " she thought, trying to recol-
lect the name of the division quartered in that suburb.
"Who is in command of Nussdorf?"
"General Vandamme, madame la princesse, " Favrol
answered.
Toe averted her head. Vandamme's savagery seemed to
taint the air.
Turning once more to Amalie, Favrol resumed his talk.
Would she be at the opera to-night? It was to be Mozart's
Cosifan tutti; the Emperor had given the order.
But a murmur and a stir ran right round the crowd sta-
tioned outside the iron railings tipped with gilt spear-points.
A deep and presaging silence followed, a silence like that in
a cathedral when the bell announces the uncovering of the
Host.
Napoleon was about to appear.
A riderless white horse had been led forward and stood
surrounded by equerries at the foot of the stair in front of
the palace door.
Seconds ticked past; a minute; two minutes; four; still
he did not come.
The murmurs rose again. What had happened?
Innumerable eyes were fastened on the white horse,
studying each detail of its green and gold trappings. Was
this the famous charger Solyman, one citizen immediately
behind the group of carriages asked, or was it JEsop?
It was the Arab, another asserted, which Maximilian I.
of Bavaria had presented to the French Emperor. The
frontlet and jewelled bit made that indisputable. And in
complacent slow South German he narrated an anecdote to
his neighbour, who had that morning arrived from Prague.
Napoleon, returning one summer evening from Vienna to
Schonbrunn and putting his horse to the gallop, had been
thrown violently just outside the suburbs. It was the first
time he had ridden the Bavarian's gift.
5O Schonbrunn
"Is that true?" one of the twins asked in a low voice
speaking in French.
"Most certainly," Kessling answered dictatorially. "It
was a Thursday, the i8th May, three days before Aspern,
a moonlight night. The French Emperor was returning
from a visit to the Alleegasse, Prince Berthier's lodging. "
Outside the railings the conversation continued.
"Why is the horse named Solyman?" the Prague citizen
asked.
"To affront the Viennese," came the answer. "Thus
Napoleon is as much greater than Solyman II. as the rider is
greater than the horse. D'ye see? As how? We Vien-
nese brag of our victory over Solyman; Napoleon sends him
out to grass or rides him into battle."
There was a laugh. Toe's eyes were dancing. She al-
ways had a pleasure in the wit of the streets.
"Ah, what is that?"
A figure in a blazing uniform all gold and scarlet had
appeared on the balcony. An order was shouted at the
same instant. Two adjutants galloped across the courtyard
in the direction of the western gate.
But the troops still stood grim and silent as bastions
gleaming with brass, iron and steel.
Once more there was the hush of awed expectancy. Still
Napoleon did not come.
Meanwhile the white horse made himself comfortable
and, pawing the ground, swished the flies from his quarters
with his short-cut tail, tranquil as though he were waiting
for a Viennese mercer returning to his shop in the Graben,
instead of for an Emperor about to review the most famous
legions in the annals of war.
To Amalie the air seemed suddenly to have grown sultry
and oppressive. Her heart was beating unsteadily. The
sensation which she experienced was exactly like that which
in a theatre she experienced when the curtain was about to
The Noon Parade 51
rise on a scene too harrowing. It was against these men and
above all against the man who was about to appear that her
lover had fought ; it was to these men that she owed the sick
horror of the days before Wagram.
Involuntarily she glanced around. Over the old Count's
features was passing a mask of grey and rigid stone.
Bolli's look retained its habitual light cynicism, but there
was a tightness about the mouth. Kessling was trying to
imitate Bolli's indifference, but his mouth hung slightly
open ; his eyes stared. The elder twin sat demure and stiff.
The younger had ceased to gaze at her own red-heeled shoes
and embroidered stockings, and lolled with her slim legs
crossed.
The crowd began to fret and curse. Why did he not
come? Being German, it was now too excited to gossip.
It could only wait stupidly sullen or stolidly good-natured.
And here within this quadrangle and yonder outside the
railings, in the brains that ticked behind those thousands of
eyes, something of the opinions expressed in the Palazzo
Esterthal, something also of the opinions of later genera-
tions, were passing and re-passing in a more or less synco-
pated form. To some Napoleon was a mere criminal,
harsh, egoistic, brutal, the assassin of d'Enghien, the assas-
sin of Palm; to others, he was already the hero of romance,
simply "the greatest man" depicted forty years later in
Thiers' fatuous and famous volumes; to others, a giant
mediocrity, destitute of supreme genius even in war, yet
coveting and obtaining all that the ordinary man covets
and seeks to obtain; to a few, something supernatural, por-
tentous and evil.]
Toe became restless, and repeatedly turned to look at
Amalie. The latter sat silent, feeling rather than seeing the
quick, nervous motion of Toe's long lashes. She felt the
heat of the sun, now right overhead, but she did not raise
her sunshade.
52 Schonbrunn
Infected by the emotion pulsating on every side, her
imagination reverted to Napoleon, less as a man than as some
prodigious event daily affecting or appearing to affect tens
of thousands of lives in every nation of Europe and, so to
speak, throughout the world; never alone; always moving
amid armies, thronged theatres, political revolutions. But
effacing this impression of vague masses of force she saw
him as in the enthusiasm of her girlhood she had seen
him enter Milan, his Hamlet-like countenance very pale,
mounted on a black charger. She contrasted him with
Austrian generals or with Austrian statesmen, whose char-
acter and private idiosyncracies were known to her from
gossip or observation Cobenzl, Kaunitz, Stadion, Metter-
nich, Wittgenstein, Ziethen, Hiller, Bellegarde, even Liech-
tenstein and the Archduke.
"No, he is of another clay. He is not like other men at
all. Or is it my stupidity?"
Fragments of Rentzdorf's talk recurred to her. Like
Beethoven, Schiller, Goethe and other German artists or men
of letters, Rentzdorf had been profoundly troubled by Na-
poleon's personality. Unlike Wordsworth in England and
Beethoven in Germany he had not burst into denunciation
when the consul became emperor.
"Bonaparte has brought back to the world the secret of
heroism that was lost to the world, " he had written to her
from Ratisbon, and he had quoted Sarpedon's reply to Glau-
cus as at once the most heroic verse in all poetry, and the
fittest to express his own conception of Napoleon's career.
Right or wrong, it is not in modern times, but with the heroes
of the Iliad that we must set this man; the essential, imper-
ishable part of him."
A deep breath, almost like a sob, startled her. Then a
single voice, a woman's in the crowd, rang out.
"Yonder! Yonder he is! Mother of God, how beauti-
ful!"
The Noon Parade 53
It was Napoleon.
Toe, with a convulsive gesture, grasped Amalie's hand.
An immense shout at the same moment rent the air
sweeping into its contagious enthusiasm even the Austrians
' ' Vive 1'Empereur ! Vive 1'Empereur. "
Neither Toe nor Amalie heard it. Both sat as though
walled in by silence, their eyes fixed on the stairs.
A short man in a cocked hat, a white vest, a dark green
coat on which a solitary star glittered, had suddenly ap-
peared on the terrace. He did not pause more than ten
seconds, then began hastily to descend the flight of eighteen
steps on his right, the flight nearest to the eastern wing of
the palace.
Toe turned her shining eyes first on Amalie then on the
old Count.
Napoleon ? That man who was like an earthquake, could
he actually be, there in the broad sunlight, not more than
fifty yards from where she sat?
"He should have his head bare always, like the busts of
the Caesars," she heard Bolli say in a voice that, though
scarcely above a whisper, sounded distinct as a bell.
" Neither hat nor helmet will ever become that brow. "
Toe studied avidly the figure at the foot of the stairs, the
ungainly hat, the creases on his waistcoat, the spurs which
seemed too large for his height ; rivetted her glance on the
greyish pallor of the countenance, the wide, preoccupied
forehead, the vitreous brooding gaze that appeared to take
in everything yet rested nowhere.
But his foot was now in the stirrup, and awkwardly,
though rapidly, he shuffled into the saddle.
The transformation was instantaneous.
He sat motionless for several seconds, ten, twenty, or
thirty, as though he waited for someone who did not come.
An expression of singular melancholy filled the eyes, which
now appeared blue a pale but definite blue.
54 Schonbrunn
"He is thinking of Lannes. "
The words seemed to have been spoken in Bolli's neigh-
bourhood rather than by Belli himself so fast shut were his
lips, so intent, so unmoving, so inexpressive his features
when Toe flashed round on him.
"Ah," she thought to herself in Polish, "what phantoms
must everywhere attend him ! Everywhere ! Everywhere !
Phantoms of vanished armies, dead friends, dead compan-
ions-in-arms, marshals, generals, captains, colonels, the
rank and file! The Man of Destiny? It is Destiny itself
on horseback over there."
Napoleon's brow in 1809 had still its impressive quiet, his
glance had lost none of its authoritativeness ; but to an
impartial scrutiny he carried his forty-one years badly; his
cheeks were puffy and dirty-grey in hue; there were folds
of loose flesh in his neck above the collar of his coat; the
thickening of the back of the leg against the saddle was
evident.
Amalie felt Toe's hand jerk her own. She turned to meet
a curious look in the eyes of the volatile Slav.
"C'est bte, tout cela, n'est-ce pas? I can understand
why Madame Walewska wept so much when she gave
herself to him. With that face and figure, he is not the
lover to make a woman forget her sins ! Certainly he is not
like the man you spoke to me of in your room hein? "
With a joyous, airy laugh she leaned her elbow on the
side of the carriage, and lifting her head high sat half angrily,
half contemptuously surveying the conqueror and his suite,
every man of whom to her eyes looked a "roturier," a
"ranker."
Was it to see this that she had that morning annoyed
and perhaps estranged Count Johann forever?
Napoleon, surrounded by his glittering suite, had ad-
vanced to the first line of troops.
His head, Toe said critically, was too large for so diminu-
The Noon Parade 55
tive a body, and that broad, powerful chest suggested a
dwarf's malignant strength. He had long arms; and he
sat his horse as though with those long arms he had seized
it from an ambush and, springing on its back, now crushed
the superb brute to the earth by his super-human weight
or cunning.
"Comme c'est vilain!"
On Amalie, meanwhile, Napoleon made an impression of
a different sort. The tragic, mysterious forces behind this
man affected her.
"Yes even in the saddle he looks no hero, " she admitted,
her gaze following the white horse and his rider. "He
looks even vulgarly aggressive; and when he walks he digs
his heels into the ground to give himself height or assertive-
ness. He does not walk; he struts. "
Yet was not Hildebrand, she asked in a flash of recollec-
tion, in the single authentic description which has come
down to us just such an insignificant, short, thick-set
fellow, with nothing notable except the blue, piercing eyes?
"Yet at Canossa. ..."
At Monza she had breathed in, as her natural air, the
history of the Middle Age. She knew the great pontiffs
Hildebrand, Innocent, Boniface, Sixtus, almost as friends;
the not less titanic Ghibellines their antagonists ; the saints
and the poets, the artists and the scholars ; beside Napoleon
they all seemed lesser men, less mysterious, less intricately
and variously distinguished and set apart.
And a new train of ideas arose to confirm this impression.
As her glance passed from figure to figure of the suite, she had
seen them at first only in the mass the sinewy grace of the
horses, the brilliant uniforms, the plumes, the helmets, the
gilt spurs, the white and scarlet, the orange, blue and gold
of the embroideries. Now she took in personal details.
These were the faces, these were the figures of remarkable
men, men whose names were spoken with admiration in
56 Schonbrunn
every capital of Europe. Yet merely in feature, how com-
monplace they one and all appeared beside Napoleon!
And she summoned up the faces of the absent marshals
Masse"na, Soult, Ney, Augereau, Davout, Murat. Yes,
remarkable they were; great they might be, those marshals
and generals, absent or present; but again, Bonaparte's
greatness was of another order than theirs. It baffled her;
but it was undeniable.
"Ugh! How he smells of eau de Cologne!" Albertina
said in her clear-cut but affected tones, pressing her lace
handkerchief to her nostrils. " Did you notice it as he rode
past?"
"Yet he is said to hate violent perfumes," Bolli said
reflectively.
"He does," Kessling interposed in his heavy emphatic
way. And to the delight of the twins, who had been strictly
brought up in the Maria Theresa tradition, he narrated one
of the riskiest and most recent of anecdotes, yet very much
to the present point how Bonaparte last November had
turned a Spanish dancer out of the Escurial at midnight,
because, having given her an assignation, she had, the better
to captivate her imperial admirer, saturated not only her
wearing apparel but her skin with the heady perfumes whose
secret the Spanish women had acquired from the Saracens.
in
Bolli, with lowered eyelids, sat examining intently a small
group of Viennese citizens who on foot were pressing close
about the Emperor. These men and women were, he saw at
once, citizens of the middle or lower class, the bearers of pe-
titions. One of Napoleon's staff was receiving, the petitions,
handing some to the Emperor, others to an official of the
household. Amongst the petitioners Bolli noticed a young
man, apparently a student, who, when Napoleon appeared,
The Noon Parade 57
had been waiting at the western of the two flights of outer
stairs, and, on Napoleon descending the eastern flight, had
run round rapidly as though to meet him; but before he
could reach the Emperor, Napoleon had mounted, and sat
on horseback surrounded by his staff.
Belli was interested by the boy's appearance, by his youth
and fine features, and by the suppressed ardour or excite-
ment in his bearing. His gestures seemed to indicate that
he was expostulating with the guards and that he was refus-
ing to present his petition in the usual manner, but was
insisting upon handing it to the Emperor himself.
At that moment Napoleon and his entire suite, amongst
whom Belli recognized Prince Berthier, the due de Rovigo,
General Rapp, Mouton, and the fearless but effeminate
grace of Saint-Croix, moved towards the troops stationed
in the remotest part of the quadrangle. A detachment of
cavalry swinging forward at the same time made a screen
which momentarily hid from sight the Emperor and those
about him.
Bolli saw the youthful petitioner no longer, for his atten-
tion was engrossed by the dispute which had arisen amongst
his Viennese friends whether they should get out of their
carriages and follow Napoleon on foot, or go forward in their
carriages as far as the guards would permit them, or simply
remain where they were.
"How Austrian! " Bolli reflected. " My God, how Aus-
trian! O my country!"
A trivial incident determined the action of all. Madame
de Bellegarde and her party, who had been the guests of
de Bausset, the Emperor's prefect of the palace, and had
been standing at one of the windows of Schonbrunn,
now came forward in their bright-coloured costumes, turned
up feathered hats and floating veils. A cloud of perfume
came with them.
"Ah, Princess, ah, Countess!" cried one of them, stop-
58 Schonbrunn
ping beside the carriage in which Toe and Amalie were
seated. "Did you have a good view? He looks in a vile
temper, does he not?"
"Varinsky declares that he has been abominably rude to
Prince John of Liechtenstein and has sent a most insulting
note to our dear Emperor's peace proposals. We shall have
war. "
Amalie knew this woman's character, but sne heard the
last words with a sudden sickening terror, and as through a
thick mist she heard voices and fragments of the ensuing
dialogue.
"Ugh! the Corsican peasant!"
"The noble Archduke and our dear Emperor. ..."
"If the fool English had not sat down to rot in Wal-
cheren. ..."
"Have you heard M. de Metternich's latest mot?"
said another voice: "'I was born to be the enemy of
the French Revolution. And Napoleon is the Revolution
They were the clear ringing tones of Madame de Belle-
garde. She was very much the Field Marshal's wife,
domineering and condescendingly affable by turns, and to
Freihoff's irritated confusion she now addressed to him a
voluble harangue on the triumphs of Metternich, the miracu-
lous young diplomat at Stockholm, and above all at Paris;
his dignified retort to the Corsican when, a few months
ago, the latter, seizing him by the collar of his coat, had
demanded, "What then does your master, Francis II.,
wish?" "My master wishes that his ambassador should
be respected," the brilliant plans he had formed by
which Austria should become the temporary ally of France;
long enough, that is to say, for this atheistical, gimcrack
parody of an empire to die of spontaneous combustion,
when, Austria, by the mere pressure of events, would be
the solitary first power left standing, and, dominating
The Noon Parade 59
Europe, for Europe's benefit, would bring back again the
great days of Charles V. and Maximilian.
"Austria? The future of Austria? "
It was an inexhaustible theme, absorbing enough to make
these men and women forget Napoleon himself and discuss
the flimsiest or most serious theories. Instantly the buzz
of conversation became louder. Many in their excitement
came down from their carriages. The Viennese power of
confusing what is with what is desired, the Slav power of
mistaking memories for hopes, gave ardour to their words
and gestures.
If the eye of an observer could have excluded the serried
ranks of Napoleon's legions, and taken in only the out-
line of the sombre distant woods, and felt only the stillness
of the autumn day, he might have imagined that this bril-
liantly attired throng were no more the natives of a captive
city crowding to do homage to a victor's greatness or a vic-
tor's pride, but members of a free society, a hunting party,
say, such as one sees in Watteau's paintings, halting for
the noon-day heat to pass.
But an immense shout rent the air, making even these
dust-clogged hearts to tremble by its violence.
"Vive 1'Empereur! Vive 1'Empereur!"
"What is the matter now?"
They looked into each other's faces. Was Napoleon ha-
ranguing the troops ? Was he making some proclamation ?
Again the shout was repeated, more prolonged, zigzag-
ging along the lines.
In those voices Bolli, at least, and the old Count, read a
heroism or a fanaticism against which Germany was still
powerless.
Then, at a considerable distance, a trumpet rang out, a
sound that seemed the very spirit of war.
"It is the chasseurs of the Guard," Bolli said to the old
Count. ' ' Yonder they come ! How they ride, these fellows ! "
60 Schonbrunn
Bolli, tormented by his own thoughts, had not looked at
the riders attentively; but, anticipating the question, had
answered, as he imagined, accurately enough to satisfy an
old man's curiosity.
The Count watched the horsemen. A light rose in his
dim eyes. War was once more the only game fit for a man,
the only art worthy the consecration of a life-time, and for
him that game was over, and the season of that consecration
gone.
"They are not the chasseurs," he said harshly, scanning
the squadron nearest to him. "Who are they? Ask him,
I beg of you, ask him," he said, turning to Amalie, and
pointing his trembling arm in the direction of an orderly
who was riding leisurely past with an off-duty air. Favrol
and Montesquiou and the other French officers had fol-
lowed the Emperor some minutes before.
"Nansouty's cuirassiers, madame," the orderly an-
swered. -
"And those others?"
"Durosnel and the gth Hussars, escort of the wounded
returning to Znaim and Molk. "
The officer, who was very young, spoke with emphasis
and naive surprise, unable to comprehend that any man or
woman of any nation could be ignorant of such names as
Nansouty and Durosnel.
"Who the devil cares about Nansouty's cuirassiers or
Durosnel's hussars? " an Austrian muttered. " Meerveldt's
Uhlans or Siegenthal's Light Horse are worth a dozen of
them."
"Ah, tiens! See yonder," Madame de Bellegarde ex-
claimed, not liking the reference to Siegenthal, her husband's
rival ' ' the dog ! What an ugly mongrel ! ' '
A mangy cur, with his ears down, was trotting stealthily
along the front of the palace ; but once under the colonnade
he stopped, as if considering, and then bolted at right angles
The Noon Parade 61
straight towards the entrance. The guards stationed by the
obelisks opened the gilt-spiked iron gates at once.
Albertina clapped her hands and laughed joyously at their
deference to the unhappy-looking cur.
"What does it mean?" she asked eagerly. "Whose is
the dog?"
"Bonaparte's familiar," Kessling answered with his
boisterous laugh, "the black fiend to whom he has sold his
soul."
"It is Malbrouck, madame, " the orderly explained to
Toe's silent question. Attracted at once by Toe's vivacity
and the sunlight on Amalie's hair, he had loitered by the
carriage and with a half -boyish awkwardness, for under the
fierce-looking shako it was a boy's face that smiled out on
the two charming women, he began to sketch the history of
the most famous of all regimental dogs.
At the battle of Marengo, nine years ago, Malbrouck
had been a pup; but he had seen every later campaign ex-
cept that of Jena. He had had his first bayonet thrust at
Marengo itself. The paw of his right foreleg had been
smashed by a bullet at Austerlitz, and this, for a time, had
sickened him of war. At Eylau, however, he had re-
appeared, and throughout that dreary campaign he had
passed from regiment to regiment, accepting a kick or a
blow from the flat of a sabre as a hint that his time of service
with the cuirassiers or the hussars had expired. His low-
ered ears merely proved that he had recognised in the
orderly an officer of a regiment which he had quitted; for
during the past ten days he did not belong to the cuirassiers
but to the dragoons stationed in the city. Malbrouck had,
therefore, no right to be at Schonbrunn that morning, and
knew it.
Bolli sat listening to the narrative. A crowd of ideas and
emotions was struggling in him anger, defeated ambition,
this morbid, ill-starred passion for Lan-Lan, a vague hope for
62 Schonbrunn
the future of Germany and contempt for that hope and for
all hope, the German's resentment against the greatness of
France, the individual's resentment against the greatness
of Bonaparte. Yet where in Austria could he ever have
found the road to that dazzling summit? Luck it was
Bonaparte's luck !
Bolli had talent enough and brain enough to make his
envy of Bonaparte not ridiculous.
"But Austria is rotten, rotten through and through.
Chemnitz is right. She must sink as Venice has sunk if
Germany is ever to arise. Yes, by God, we are degener-
ates; to us there is no meaning anywhere; but at least we
are nearer the height of things than these demi-devil barrack-
room swaggerers of Bonaparte!"
IV
Napoleon, meanwhile, had reviewed his grenadiers and
addressed a brief congratulation to a detachment of sap-
pers for their completion of the tete du pont at Krems.
His anger, which ought to have been terrible, had, to the
surprise of his staff, not fallen on the laggard 3ist.
As he now rode slowly towards the western gate his cloudy
mien was very noticeable.
A detachment of the wounded, all belonging to the old
guard and still fit for service, had been drawn up four deep
in the shadow of the houses and some fine trees. They
stood, this mournful band, silent, resigned or morose. The
faces of many of them had been tanned by the suns of many
climes, Italy, Egypt, Germany, Spain, Poland, Austria; the
faces of others were fresh and still youthful, grave or lighted
up by a reckless and ruthless gaiety, exempt from joy.
No calumny, scarcely disaster itself, had power to darken
the exultancy, the plenitude of life, which possessed them
looking once more on him.
These were Bonaparte's "wolves" attached to him by
The Noon Parade 63
one of the most complex and singular sympathies known in
the annals of war.
Historians of Napoleon drag in Attila or compare the
allegiance of these desperate yet disciplined bands to the
attachment which bound his veterans to Hannibal, or his
mercenaries to Wallenstein. M. Taine has even carica-
tured the real character of the French armies by comparing
them with the "Free Companies" of the Middle Age, and
by comparing Bonaparte himself with a Francesco Sforza
or a Castruccio Castracani. There was, indeed, a touch of
the Hun in the armies of the Empire; and in Bonaparte
himself there was a touch of Attila. But like the ruins of a
sunset the ruins of a great ideal coloured all the actions of
those armies. Even their violence and their lawlessness were
a challenge to the inert nations "Endure our arrogance
or find within yourselves the motives to a higher arrogance
or a greater heroism. Liberty? Yes, we idolized it once.
But whilst we fought for your liberty, our harvests rotted in
the fields. Our enemies reaped their harvests and ours, and
you did nothing. Liberty, we know now, is an empty name;
but the greatness of man that is not yet a dream? Glory
and plunder, a forced kiss or a forced till, then a soul
panted out on the sod these are life's ultimate essence?"
These were the questions that the "wolves" glared at
their Emperor, once in heroic confidence, to-day in Vienna
searchingly, doubtingly.
And in silence also Bonaparte answered "There is in
life no other greatness ! The path to glory to him who can
tread it ! That is my word to you. "
"Vivel'Empereur !"
It was to the new Mohammed the response of his faithful ;
not with the droning accent of congregations in mosque or
cathedral, but shouted out clear in laughter and joy like the
ringing of swords.
Greatened by his purpose and his presence they mut-
64 Schonbrunn
tered the creed to themselves and to each other march
ing, marching; knowing in life four things only, the march
the bloody hailstorm of bullets, the bivouac, the red dawn
the day after.
Bonaparte's own contempt for " ideologues " was in har-
mony with the sentiment of his armies. He was a sensu-
alist and a materialist; so were his officers; so were the
men. He was in his heart of hearts an "atheist "; but it
was challengingly. He refused his reverence to the stupid
gods created by stupid men. And who shall condemn
him? He denied Jesus and the Jahve of Isaiah. Was he
to kneel before the demi-deity of Hegel or La ReVellire-
Le*peaux? What vapid futilities, what verbal juggleries in
those men whom he despised! Hegel, Kant, Schleier-
macher, Schelling did not such names justify his con-
tempt for ideologues and professors ?
To the eyes of an English observer in this very year,
1809, Bonaparte's Guard looked, he tells us, as though
every man of it either had been or ought to be at the gal-
leys. "An army of convicts!" Yet, when in 1816 this
same observer attempted to throw upon a huge canvas
the last charge of that Guard at Waterloo, he could find
no better inspiration to aid him in conjuring up those war-
worn countenances than just to stand for several minutes
or for several hours in front of the portraits of Horatio,
Lord Nelson! Sentimentality; naivete'; intrepidity; ex-
haustless bravourel
"You have seventeen wounds and have not got the
cross?" Napoleon said in an indefinable accent to one of
these "braves."
"Yes, sire, I have the cross."
' ' Comment ? Where is it ? "
The Noon Parade 65
The grenadier, puzzled, looked at his breast.
The cross was hidden by the lapel of his coat.
Napoleon passed on, addressing here a question, there a
jest, till he reached the last man on the left. Then he cast
his eyes back over the ranks, oddly reluctant that morning
to leave his "faithful."
Other things were shams ; here at least amongst his gren-
adiers was reality.
"We shall meet again, mes enfants. "
" Vi ve 1 ' Empereur ! ' '
It was the assignation for a battlefield bloodier than
Aspern-Essling or Wagram.
He was about to remount his horse. He had even given
a command to the colonel on duty to change the direction
of the line so that the grenadiers might once more defile
before him, when a stir, an altercation and a rapid inter-
change of question and answer on his right made him check
his impatient horse in order to discover the cause of the
bustle. He saw, not fifteen feet away, Berthier dashing up
to a knot of officers composed of Rapp, Savary, and three
or four of his own or Berthier's suite. He noticed at the
same moment, in the midst of this group, a slim figure
which, though dressed in the ordinary blue coat and high
white neck-band of the period, seemed that of a boy of six-
teen or seventeen. He had a rapt, uplifted look, and held
in his hand stretched high above his head a sheet of paper.
He was gesticulating violently, and crying out in a language
which Bonaparte took to be German.
The student if he were a student had evidently, Na-
poleon thought, wished to present his petition whilst he
was on foot. But why?
"One more importunate petitioner," he reflected with
a shrug. "Oh these Germans!" And he turned aside
indifferently.
But there was a sudden gleam of steel. He had not the
5
66 Schonbrunn
opportunity to distinguish whether the gleam came from
Rapp's sword or from some other cause; for at that moment,
an abrupt and mournful roll of the drum announced a har-
rowing and piteous spectacle on his left.
It was a strange band that, slowly debouching from be-
hind Schonbrunn, entered by the western gate and drew up
before their Cassar. It was the wounded of the Young and
of the Old Guard, incurably wounded or unfit any longer for
war. Three days ago they had been released from hospital or
from prison. There they now stood, riveting his sight, a mel-
ancholy apparition. They were of all arms ; some fearfully
maimed, yet erect and resolute-looking; some dejected;
some sullen and defiant ; some reckless or laughing. Some
shouted " Vive 1'Empereur " ; others in silence looked their
rage on the man who had brought them to this. There were
faces still bandaged; faces which showed sabre-slashes or
bayonet-thrusts that had partially gangrened; bodies am-
putated hideously. Some came from the great abbey at
Molk; some had marched from Znaim or from Krems to
be present at this day's parade.
There they now stood, waiting, prepared for their fare-
well to war and to him.
" Mes enfants . . . " he answered to another feeble shout
"Vivel'Empereur!" "Mes enfants. ..."
Dismounting, he went up to the men thus maimed or
afflicted for him or for the idea which he incarnated. He did
not now content himself with a survey ; he was seeing them
for the last time on earth; he was the brother or the father
taking an eternal farewell of his children.
"Mes enfants. ..."
His glittering spangled escort stood and watched.
This was a moment in which Bonaparte was supreme.
To see him thus was to see the living refutation of the calum-
nies of Jaffa.
He went in and out amongst the ranks. He spoke to this
The Noon Parade 67
man; spoke to that. His eyes now darkened with pain, now
kindled with approval or encouragement; and his strident
voice, with its Corsican accent, softening strangely, he
looked at their scars, touched the amputated stump of an
arm or of a hand ; he permitted a carabineer, three of whose
fingers had been blown off as he wrenched aside the muzzle
of a rifle, to place his own fingers in his mouth where the
under jaw had been removed; and long he stood silent beside
a chasseur, nothing of whose blackened face seemed living
except the fierce sadness in the eyes. He had been one of
the most powerful men in Marmont's corps, over six feet in
height, full of the joy of life and vigorous youth. From
others Napoleon seemed to give and to receive the most
intimate or tender confidences, long confidences though they
lasted but a second, words and looks that made it a light
thing for these men to march to the ends of Europe, and,
under his eye or far from it. fight for him, suffer for him,
hunger, thirst, fatigue, heat, snow, and die for him.
CHAPTER III
NAPOLEON'S RIDE
NAPOLEON heard the last "Vive 1'Empereur," the last
bugles and buoyant rat-a-tat-tat of the drums as the
troops marched back to their cantonments in the city itself
or on the slopes above Nussdorf, or to the gardens, or at
Hetzing and Ebersdorf .
The angry anxiety and disquieting premonitions of the
morning, banished by the sight of his grenadiers, had re-
turned. But Corsican and superstitious as he was, he could
find no cause for these presentiments.
"Bah, I shall go for a ride. The open sky will clear my
brain. That stuffy palace is full of stoves, haunted by bats
and foul deeds."
He wheeled his horse, which curveted with expectancy.
At that moment Berthier approached as though to com-
municate to the Emperor a matter of importance. Napo-
leon looked at him dubiously. Never had Berthier's face
the gosling whom he had made an eagle seemed more
vapid, his short thick-set figure more wooden. His cheeks
were powdered, but that did not disguise his age. His
eyes had the vitreous unpleasant lustre which eyes that
move in a powdered face always have.
"Not now!"
Napoleon spoke curtly, and gave way to the strain of the
Arab towards the obelisks and the huge bronze gates.
68
Napoleon's Ride 69
What could Berthier have to say? His couriers had not
arrived from Spain. No message from Altenburg or Totis,
where the Emperor Francis now resided, was possible.
All else could wait.
Signing to his escort, Napoleon, crossing the dirty stream
that gives Vienna its name, took the northerly road. Once
in the open country he struck a little to the left towards
the heights of the Wiener Wald.
Above him and around him was the autumn stillness.
Nature in the woods and on the hills and the far outstretched
plains was accomplishing the vast processional changes of
her year, and beside that process even the history of this
region, receding beyond the Middle Age and the Roman
times into a dim and half-fabulous past, appeared to his
brooding eye brief as the glory of the leaves.
"Un songe leger qui se dissipe, " he said, repeating one of
his commonplaces. A dream that passes life and man's
annals.
His thoughts turned to that morning's work. He con-
templated it now with satisfaction, now with anxiety and
discontent. He had made a concession to Austria. He had
reduced her indemnity from a hundred millions to eighty
millions; but except in this point he had not abated by a jot
his original demands. Bavaria, his ally, would henceforth
dominate the eastern slopes of the Hansruck. The left
bank of the Traun was compromised. The ulcer in the
Tyrol would at length be scarified. Every acre he de-
manded in Carinthia, Carniola, Fiume, and Trieste was to
be surrendered. Illyria would start from the tomb in
which she had lain for centuries. What might not that new
nation effect? The pennons of six thousand ships already
floated in the harbours of Trieste. Trieste was the pre-
destined rival of Venice. Across Illyria he would drive a
high-road to the very heart of the Ottoman empire. It was
the subjugation of Europe.
70 Schonbrunn
"And it is time."
Every additional day at Schonbrunn lowered his prestige,
and gave colour to the damning rumours circulated by the
English press.
He felt the edge of his hat tight on his forehead. He
shifted it a little, and rode on.
Well, if it did mean war, he resumed, it would be a zest
to inflict upon Austria a more crushing defeat than Wagram.
"And afterwards?"
He would certainly dethrone Francis II. That perjured
despot was no longer fit to reign. Indemnifying the Czar
in Poland or in the Danubian principalities, he would place
on the throne of the Habsburgs a subject-king, Davout
perhaps, or the Archduke Charles, or ...
"But they will accept this morning's offer. I read it on
Liechtenstein's face."
"Your Emperor must accept this or sacrifice the lives of a
hundred thousand men, " he had said to the plenipotentia-
ries as the clock struck eleven, and getting up he had stood
with folded arms under the portrait of Charles V. "You
are soldiers, not diplomats, both of you. I too am a sol-
dier. We understand each other. We know what war
means, you and I. It is the scourge of the human race."
He had not uttered the words in a voice of menace, but
in a voice of camaraderie, dejected a little yet perfectly
quiet and resolute. He had conducted each interview in
that manner, as a soldier conferring with soldiers, men who
act, disdaining the fatuities of men who talk, diplomatists
and "avocats. " Earlier in the morning, taking Count
Bubna aside, he had expostulated with him on his fidelity
to Austria. He had enlarged upon the history of Bo-
hemia, the Count's native country. He had compas-
sionated her wrongs from Ottocar to Podiebrad, and from
Podiebrad to the Winter King. And who had inflicted
those wrongs? Who, after the White Mountain, had stabbed
Napoleon's Ride 71
Bohemia in the back, leaving her a corpse among the
nations, a people without a language, without a religion,
trod upon, spat upon, refused even the memory of her
greatness? Who but a Habsburg, the Styrian Ferdinand?
"And is it you, you, a Bohemian, who now come to me as
the envoy of a Habsburg, you who plead for Francis II., you
who, if you chose, might see in me your deliverer, the re-
storer of Bohemia's honour and the regenerator of her an-
cient glories? I can give your country a place amongst the
nations. Austria never will. "
To Prince John of Liechtenstein, on the other hand, he
had appealed as one great strategist speaking to another
the emperor of battles addressing a neglected great soldier.
"If I had had you at Eckmuhl," he had said, "I should
not have left you in the lurch. Was the Archduke jealous
of your horsemen? On the day of battle a true general
treasures each talent, even that of a rival. I created three
marshals after Wagram. What honour have you received?
Come, tell me, " he had said taking him by the ear. "I do
not see the Grand Cross of Maria Theresa on your breast.
Have you left it at Totis?"
And now he had said his last word, made his last conces-
sion. The rest he would leave to fate and Champagny!
He laughed at the sudden sarcasm and touched Solyman
with the spur. For Champagny was a nonentity.
In the decision itself, a decision which would affect the
destiny of nations and the lives of tens of thousands of men,
he felt a kind of exhilaration. His sense of power became
intoxicatingly vivid.
Rapid motion in the open air always quickened Bona-
parte's ideas. Since giving up the game of barres as unsuit-
able for a man of forty and an emperor, riding had become
72 Schonbrunn
his only form of exercise. Fencing he had never loved, and
he was no sportsman. Whether at Fontainebleau or Mal-
maison the chase had never afforded him an hour's heart-
felt pleasure unless perhaps the malicious pleasure of
disconcerting by his erratic course the seriousness of Berthier
as "Grand Veneur. " But his joy in the open air, riding
or driving, had increased, not diminished, with the years.
The firmament had always been the roof of his real study.
His brain became desiccated in a room ; but under the azure
canopy thoughts crowded in on him in swarms, nebulous
sketches became vast and precise designs. What a fool
Debret was, he abruptly reflected, to paint him in a gilded
salon seated by a table loaded with books and maps.
"As if I were a Regent de College like that cuistre
Necker!"
He rode on.
Over a tuft of pines crowning the heather-clad knoll on
his left the rooks were flying. The crowing of a cock shrilled
up into the afternoon stillness, but the farm was lost in the
mist-veiled distances. In a neglected field, rushes and a
patch of flea-bane rose beside the rank grass. Half a mile
further on a swine-herd crossed his path, slouching past with
his right elbow resting on his horn which was slung from his
shoulder by a dirty cord. Napoleon looked at the peasant.
His face was seamed and so battered by weather, hard life
and cares, that it had almost lost its human expression, and
he made no sign of recognition either of the Emperor or of
his glittering suite.
Why should he? The bodies of his two sons, killed, one
at Aspern in May, the other at Enzersdorf in July, lay
under the heath of the Marchfeld, and the husband of his
only daughter, pressed for the army of the Archduke John,
had never returned from Poland. No man knew whether
he were dead or wounded or a prisoner of war in some
Russian shamble.
Napoleon's Ride 73
"There goes a villain I would rather meet here than in
the forest by night," Napoleon heard one of his cortege
remark. He recognised the accent of Montesquieu. It
was the true Versailles accent which contrasted with that of
Lannes, Augereau, Ney, as well as with his own. Davout
had a touch of it; so had Berthier.
Napoleon rode on with a slack rein, his horse's head
drooping.
Memory and imagination alike were now awake, and he
ranged the past, the present the campaign against the
English in Belgium, the campaign in Spain, the suspicious
pourparlers between Berlin and Vienna, Vienna and Peters-
burg darting thence into the future where in the East he
felt looming the gigantic war, the climax of all his wars.
It was his life-purpose, grandiose or great, outlined long
ago, abandoned but never forgotten, luring him still.
"The East there is the battle-ground of the future. A
greater Pharsalia a greater conflict than that of Caesar
and of Pompey must be fought out there!"
But there too was England; and there too was Russia.
Already the Czar, his smooth ally, was intriguing with
Persia against France ; his Cossacks might at this hour be
marching on Stamboul.
"What profit have I derived from Selim's murder? Fate
has played the Czar's game."
At the name of Persia, Bonaparte's imagination, enmeshed
in the romance of the world's past, Cyrus and Alexander,
the romance of the world's future, which had disappeared
at Acre only to rise again at Austerlitz, now lured him
in thought upon thought. Egypt, Persia, India, the oldest
civilisations of the world, must, with France, be made the
four centres, the four great lamps of culture, of religion
Christ, Osiris, Zoroaster, Brahma. What a vision yes,
but what a plan also and what a goal! What a goal clean
and hard to strive towards! Philosophy was sterile.
74 Schonbrunn
Whoever was right, the ideologues were always wrong,
Kant, Fichte and the Jena coteries of whom he had heard so
much at Erfurt. Religion, on the contrary, was life itself,
and its perennial lamp kept alive by his genius and his army
of priests, who could tell what new thing might not in the
future decades or the future centuries arise! Paris, Mem-
phis, Delhi and Ispahan. . . .
A loud laugh interrupted his climbing phantasies. He
looked behind him. Absorbed in musing, his slackened
pace had brought him close to his escort. Some of the
horses, despite their riders' efforts, were even struggling to
get in front of the Arab.
Napoleon touched the grey and put a wider gap than
before between himself and his escort. He had in those
minutes experienced one of his best and highest moods
the consciousness of solitary power, and with this the per-
ception of a theatre for its exercise, spectral but limitlessly
vast. A harmony had been set up in all his being, evanes-
cent but most poignant. Now by that laugh it was shat-
tered. The proximity even of his guard that afternoon,
their voices and their faces, infected the air, dragging back
to earth his thought as it soared.
"What makes men laugh?" . . .
' ' If Lannes had but lived ! In him I had a man who could
answer when I spoke to him, a mind that could understand.
But these others they are traitors or egoists, imbeciles or
valets. Lannes eh bien, to each man his fated hour."
His mind went back to Aspern and the evening on which
Lannes had received his fatal wound. He saw in imagina-
tion the swollen Danube, brown and swift, the plunging
trees, and, under a storm-racked sky, the ditch on the edge
of which Lannes, tired with the long day's battle, was rest-
ing, his legs crossed, his head on his hand, grieving himself
for the death of a comrade, General Pouzet, whom, mortally
wounded, he had seen carried past wrapped in a cloak.
Napoleon's Ride 75
When lo! humming through the evening air, comes a spent
bullet, shattering both his knees.
"The hazard in things, " Napoleon reflected, "the hazard
in things ! He escaped the sharp-shooters of Saragossa and
the storming of Ratisbon, and a spent bullet finds him at
Aspern!"
And with a touch of the fatalism and the fight against
fatalism so strong in the Napoleonic ethics, he pressed still
further his scrutiny of the inscrutable. In the consultation
of physicians, if Larrey's decision to amputate had not been
carried out, would Lannes have recovered? Was that de-
cision wise? Was it even sincerely given, or, like his mar-
shals, were his surgeons too the slaves of jealousy, and was
Larrey's judgment warped by the wish to differ from Yvan?
"Bah, all is chance and all is purpose, all is accident and
all is intention!"
in
Napoleon's grief for Lannes had been sincere, as sincere
as any emotion that he had felt since Desaix or Muiron
fell. He had thought him irreplaceable; but in an hour his
place was filled and not a day had passed in which he had
not felt some moment of gratification because Lannes was
not there.
"Yes; he was too frank, too sudden and violent in opposi-
tion. He was vain, very touchy; at Ratisbon he had drawn
his sword on Bessieres, Massena had to part them. . . .
Did Charlemagne's wit detect some profit even in the death
of Roland? But this is the curse which clings to power.
In the death of the best-loved friend we welcome the death
of a rival, and I have known many such deaths. "
Their names and faces rose, shadows in the clouds
Muiron at Arcola, the best remembered, the most regretted
of all; Desaix at Marengo just when victory would have
made him most troublesome; Kleber in Egypt just when his
76 Schonbrunn
return would have been most embarrassing ; and now Lannes
just when his frankness was becoming too frank.
"But Bernadotte will live on, and Fouche; no spent bullet
or friendly shell will rid me of these. War? The evils oi
war? I have seen as much hate in David's studio or in
Tronchet's library as in my court or cabinet. "
Napoleon from a very early period, from a date much
anterior to his Letter to Buttafuoco, had read and pondered
what might be named the pathology of the human mind.
He had not read the De I' Esprit of Helvetius; but he had
rediscovered for himself and made his own several of that
thinker's positions. Already at eight and twenty he had
come to Hamlet's maxim that "There's nothing either good
or bad but thinking makes it so." Everywhere, in death
as in life, one dark purpose works to its end.
A swerve of his horse, which had set its foot on a snapping
branch, startled Bonaparte from his reverie. He looked
around, and as he gazed the beauty of the scene insensibly
mastered him. He drew up on a gentle eminence.
"C'est beau!" he said to Rustum after some minutes
of contemplation. The handsome young Mameluke, who
alone of his escort had ventured to approach, rolled his jet
eyes listlessly round the horizon, but said nothing.
The scene which Napoleon surveyed was indeed one of the
fairest and most surprising in Austria. On his left, rising
like an immense and noble amphitheatre, the wood-clad
heights known as the Wiener Wald, robed in the melan-
choly glories of October. On his right, a mile and a half
away, draped in a golden haze, the myriad roofs and gables,
spires and domes of the city clustering around the great
cathedral of St. Stephen's, whose spire in reckless slender-
ness rose over all as though it would scale the heavens.
Northward, full in front, in a gentle depression, lay the
village of Heiligenstadt, its white walls and red-tiled roofs
like islets in the rolling sea of orchards and vineyards,
Napoleon's Ride 77
meadows and tufts of trees, through which a brook flow d
languidly in sparkling or shadowed windings.
But Napoleon in mid-life had little real love for the beauty
or poetry of Nature. To him a landscape was now the
theatre for the evolution of armies. The pastoral scene in
front, amid whose thickets and streams, the haunt in sum-
mer of nightingales, Beethoven in those very years had
passed some of his most tragic and visionary hours, speedily
bored him, and he turned to his right, studying the outlines
of the city, the narrow circle of the Old City scarcely a
mile in diameter and its wide skirt of suburbs encased in
greenery. Yonder through the luminous haze some miles
to the northward, that steady wreath of smoke should be
Wagram ; and sweeping southward his eye rested longer on
the ruined spot where had stood the villages of Aspern and
Essling and Enzersdorf, a field of graves, conquerors and
conquered silent together.
A harsh reflection shattered the reverie.
" Five months ago and I am still at Schonbrunn. Why ? "
His features hardened; in his figure the strained con-
tracted expression like that of a beast of prey alert and
vigilant.
"But that city is mine. Twice in five years it has been
my booty, twice I might have sacked it as Genghis did
Samarcand. They may compel me to do it still!"
Everything exasperated him against Vienna its defi-
ance in May ; the satire upon his strategy, seizing a capital
before he had defeated the army ; the insolence of the in-
habitants; the sarcasms on his fte-day, the notorious
"Zwang" acrostic, carefully interpreted to him by Savary
and Sulmetter; these protracted negotiations; the secret
press. Peace or war, he must inflict on that city some
deadly and unforgettable insult, some unforgettable mark of
his anger and of his power.
But his eye, passing from bastion to bastion, from the
78 Schonbrunn
spire of St. Stephen's to the hexagonal tower of the Minor-
ites, rested upon a spot in the southern portion of the city
close to the royal palace.
It was the Church of the Capuchins. Only three days
ago he had stood for a long space of time in the crypt of the
vault where the dust of the Habsburgs mouldered, emperor
and queen, archdukes and princes, the elder and the younger
line, Habsburg and Habsburg-Lorraine Matthias and
Rudolf, Charles, Leopold and Maria Theresa. And sud-
denly, here under the wide sky as that morning in the
damp odours of corruption, the same order of ideas gripped
him the nothingness, the supreme nothingness of all that
exists. Even his battles, the solidest and most enduring, the
masterstroke at Ulm, the trick on Dolgorouki at Austerlitz,
Jena, Eylau, Friedland and, but yesterday, the thunder of his
hundred-gun battery over there at Wagram and, screened
by its smoke and terror, Macdonald's charge sweeping
through the Austrian centre, endangering victory by vic-
tory's very excess ....
"A smoke that vanishes, un songe le"ger qui se dis-
sipe. ..."
"What is it? Of what am I afraid? If I died to-morrow
I should still be, not with Conde" and Turenne, Gustavus
or Frederick, but with Caesar and Alexander. What can
tarnish their splendour? What total reverse, what disaster
touch me now?"
He turned his horse's head slowly and took the road back
towards Schonbrunn.
He was impatient to be at work. There were letters to
his ministers in Paris, letters to his generals in Spain, to be
dictated.
But the curious depression of the morning increased as he
once more turned towards the palace. It seemed as if
from Schonbrunn itself something deadly, something hostile
crept towards him stealthily yet resistlessly.
Napoleon's Ride 79
' ' Am I used up at forty ? Is my imagination indeed mori-
bund? Is this the beginning of the end? "
Yet at no period of his life had his contempt for other men
been so overweening, his demand for an instantaneous
homage to his genius so imperious. His arrogance had
increased; he had become intolerant of contradiction or
criticism of any kind upon any subject. A caricature which
had appeared in Munich a Corsican monkey snatching
chestnuts from the fire, which England and Russia ate,
"tasting all the sweeter because they're salted with French
blood," had exasperated him for days. He resented even
the laughter in Paris, where all, even God Himself, was
laughed at. During the past campaign every bulletin of
the Grand Army, each of the twenty-five written since April,
had been travestied by the wit of the two street-corner ras-
cals, Becoche and Galliafre. Excited by Fouche's insinua-
tions he had seen during the same months in the prodigious
success of Chateaubriand's Les Martyrs an insult to the
conqueror of Ratisbon and Wagram, a voluntary tribute
to the personal ascendancy of the exiled poet.
But his own genius? Yes; it had lost its lan, its cer-
tainty, its copious variety. He had attempted to hide this
from himself, but he had known it in himself at Aspern,
which was a defeat, as at Wagram, which was a victory.
At Eckmuhl he had for an instant felt the blinding splendour
once more about him; but it vanished. He had felt the
same failing power in his diplomacy; he was too nervous, he
was too irritable. He had felt it even in dictating his bulle-
tins which were stuffed with all the old phrases and all the
old lies, but absolutely devoid of the old fire. His harangue
to the troops on the eve of Wagram had remained a blotch
and a botch. His metaphors were tasteless, his apostrophes
vapid, his denunciations of his enemies' perfidy, of Austria's
treachery, rang hollow to his own ears.
Napoleon never openly admitted an error; but he had too
8o Schonbrunn
much common sense, too strong a love of reality not to
acknowledge in his own breast that he committed many.
And this morning they rankled furiously. Every great line
of policy during the past two years seemed a blunder a
blunder the guet-apens of Bayonne; a blunder the invasion
of Spain; a blunder the blockade of England.
"England!" he suddenly flashed out. "Always Eng-
land!"
From the very start of his career she had been the fixed
irreconcilable enemy, pursuing him like a huge ironic smile
the real source of his defeats, the genius of his miscalcula-
tions and his errors. How had he ever ventured into that
quagmire of physiocratism, le blocus? Quesnay's idea,
Quesnay's and the physiocrats.
"Starve England? What madness! Starve the octopus,
if you can, but how is it to be done? Stab her to the heart,
England, the strangler of the globe? You cannot, for she
has no heart, only a maw and her ubiquitous deadly tenta-
cles ships, fleets and yet more fleets, and everywhere
gold."
Yes, she might retreat from Antwerp and from Flushing
as from Burgos and Corunna. Like the sea, her element,
she would return in hate and in irony. His very name
"Napoleon" became ridiculous when pitted against that
name "England" a gaudy foam-bubble flung upon the
gaunt face of an ancient cliff. How could he have dreamed
of conquering England with such a nation as France behind
him noisy, fickle, blustering, vapouring France!
From his English policy his tormented fancy turned to the
military errors which he had committed in the present cam-
paign. Despite those mistakes he had quelled the Arch-
duke Charles ; but behind the Archduke he now definitely
surmised a something which he could not quell, a force
inexhaustible as life, mysterious, intangible. He had sur-
mised it at Erfurt in peace; he had felt it behind the furious
Napoleon's Ride 81
assaults at Aspern, and in the sullen retreat from Wagram
he had known its unconquerable stubbornness.
It was the nation. It was the people.
"Bah, Francis and Metternich dread this force more than
I dread it. Yet Paris? Paris is the fever-centre of this
force. For Paris is the Revolution." He sank in deeper,
more sombre brooding.
Here again the recollection, the incredible recollection of
error confronted him. And as its climax he evoked the
violence, the frantic violence of his interview which ended
in the dismissal of Talleyrand.
There too was error. Traitor as he was, the club-foot
priest was invaluable ; his opposition was sometimes bought,
his approval never. Champagny was a nigaud. His
acceptance and resistance meant nothing, and even his
honesty was suspect. Had not his ineptitudes in the ne-
gotiations at Altenburg seemed intentional? Talleyrand
would have concluded peace two months ago.
"Talleyrand is gone! The rats are quitting the sinking
ship. Bonaparte is lost. "
The taunting royalist witticism, reported or invented by
Fouche", he had at the time disdained; but to his purged
eyesight to-day it seemed laden with meaning. To Talley-
rand's defection he could distinctly trace the greatest, subtl-
est error of all the imprisonment of the Pope. To seize
Pacca the cardinal and leave him safely tied up and gagged
at Fenestrella was policy; but why had he given Miollis the
order to seize the Pope also? Madness or blindness, it was
the capital, the irretrievable mistake. Pius VII. was old.
His gentleness and distinction had won the affection of most
men and of all women. And in his conflict with himself the
Pope had so blended dignity, resolution, and humility as to
extort the admiration of Europe.
Yes; it was a blunder, a blunder so incredible that he
could not believe that it was he who had committed it.
6
82 Schonbrunn
"And yet," he said, spurring his horse which at that mo-
ment needed no spur, "I should act in the same manner to-
morrow. I am no stirrup-holder like Frederick Barbarossa !
Gratitude is a name Pius VII. crowned me, and out of
Monsieur Bonaparte made me Napoleon I. ; but out of
Signer Chiaramonti, who made him Pius VII.? Eh? Eh?
It is the time that is at fault. I should at once have created
an Anti-Pope, Maury or Fesch or another. So the Freder-
icks acted, so the Saxon emperors, the Ottos and the Hein-
richs ; but the time is at fault. Heroism is no longer possible
in Europe. And even against England my policy is realis-
ing itself deadly if slow. After this chaos. I must go
on and on. We are tied to our fates. Rest? Stop?
Ask the avalanche to rest. ..."
IV
"Whom have we here?"
Napoleon suddenly saw two figures in black standing
motionless side by side near a dark patch of trees. Sur-
prised, he looked at them. It was two priests in the Greek
dress. Recognizing Napoleon, they removed their hats,
shaped like the inverted heel of a boot, and bowed deeply.
Despising philosophy, but interested in every form of re-
ligion, Napoleon signed to them to approach. He knew
that by the Treaty of Passarowitz every Greek resident in
Vienna was exempt from the imposts levied upon foreigners.
He knew also the evil character of the Greek, pilloried in the
Viennese proverb, "One Greek equal to two Jews." But
these were both fine-looking men, bearded, with broad open
foreheads.
"You are happy in Vienna?" he enquired. "Yours is a
great religion. It is the oldest form of Christianity. I
esteem your Patriarch. "
The priests again bowed deeply.
Napoleon's Ride 83
Then he put various other questions, enquiring their names,
their ages, whether they were married, how many children
they had all this not from the wish to show his superiority,
but simply because his mind struck naturally for the con-
crete. Driven on by the same impulses he put questions to
them regarding their parishes and the villages around, the
vineyards and the rotation of crops.
"You have many bad methods in Austria. England robs
you. Why, for instance, do you not grow turnips ? These
red potatoes suit the sandy soil around Berlin but in
the loamy soil by the Danube they are absurd. And
why do you not plant tobacco? You are Greeks and
should teach the Germans as well as the Magyars. The
plantations in England have begun again. Yorkshire, its
broadest county, is one tobacco-field."
The younger priest, who was the son of a farmer at Ico-
nium, was about to answer, but uncertain whether he had
understood the Emperor's rapid French, he refrained.
A few of Bonaparte's suite were impressed, the majority
bored by the interview.
Then for some seconds Napoleon sat looking at the two
men in silence, perhaps contrasting their sequestered un-
eventful lives with his own.
"Pray that your God may this day illumine your sover-
eign's heart, and that he may give to his people peace
peace which is the greatest of all blessings, as war is the
greatest of all scourges to mankind. "
And with a grave but negligent salute he rode on, once
more absorbed in vexatious brooding. Schonbrunn was in
sight. Behind its long frontage and the two obelisks of
Paccazzi crested by the Austrian eagles with outspread
wings, he saw rise from its wooded hill La Gloriette, and
far behind it, the eye of his mind always taking in vast
spaces, he divined the headwaters of the Drave and the
glittering rampart of the Austrian Alps.
84 Schonbrunn
But nothing could shake off his uneasiness, for now at that
very interview with the priests his mind began to forge for
itself exasperating fancies.
To his overwrought nerves every incident seemed a
warning sent by Destiny. "Ah," he said suddenly, "it is
the thirteenth of the month; it is Friday; the word to-day
is 'Timoleon' and the countersign 'Persepolis.' What an
accumulation of omens! Conspiracy, death, treason and
fratricidal rage. And those two priests, starting from the
ground by that dark wood?"
The very priests were now an omen, heralds of ill in their
black and outlandish garb. Every superstition, always on
the alert in his Italian temperament, now awoke, like hounds
on the track baying behind him Corsican superstitions,
memories from his youth, his own most mysterious career,
always a perplexity to him. Other omens recurred to him.
His faithful valet Pfeister had gone raving mad on the field
of Wagram, distracted by the heat and the unparalleled
cannon firing; a month later the explosion on his birthday
had killed twelve men, wounding seventeen.
He wheeled his horse and glanced rapidly back, his eye
ranging over the rolling landscape, doubting whether the
priests were real priests and not spectres risen from the
ground to daunt him.
Nothing was in sight.
" Where is Berthier ? Why is he not here? " he demanded,
discovering for the first time the absence of the Prince de
Neuchatel. "Stop those two priests and bring them back, "
he said in the same breath to Lebrun and Montesquieu,
the two swiftest horsemen of his body-guard. "No; you
stay here," he commanded Rustum, who, something of a
spoiled child and vain of his horsemanship, was about to
dart after them.
" Me go quicker, " the Mameluke muttered sulkily, check-
ing the black charger he rode that morning.
Napoleon's Ride 85
But, ashamed of his fancies, Bonaparte almost instantly
dispatched two other riders to stop the first, instructing
them to ascertain merely what road the priests had taken.
"If they are phantoms," he argued, "it is to my sight
only that they are visible. "
And heedless of the confusion and astonishment of his
escort, lost in black dreams, his right knee twitching against
the saddle as always in his moments of passion or unusual
excitement, Napoleon waited.
Seconds passed and grew to minutes, one, two, three;
then Lebrun, though the older man, heading Montesquiou
by a length, was seen returning.
"Ehbien?"
"They came from Penzing and are on their way to Konig-
stettin, thence by cross-roads to Staasdorf. "
Napoleon sat for some seconds in silence, still looking in
the direction from which his riders had returned.
"They are lovers of the picturesque always, ces gaillards-
la, in nature or in a wench. "
He gave an impatient tug at the right rein, for during the
wait his grey had sidled up to Rustum's black. He rode
now at a walking pace. Schonbrunn was scarcely a mile
and a half away. At intervals he could see the gleam of the
outspread immovable wings of the Habsburg eagles above
the obelisks, surmounted by the fluttering tricolour.
Bonaparte sat heavily forward in the saddle, his head sunk
on his prodigious chest, his shoulders high. His counte-
nance had lost its expressiveness; his eyes had again the
tarnished unsearchable look, like greyish glass in which we
can see nothing. His face alternately riveted and repelled
scrutiny, seeming now full of profound significances, now
an empty mask.
CHAPTER IV
THE ASSASSIN
MEANWHILE, in Schonbrunn and around it and in
Vienna itself, a rumour had spread that, at the
noon parade, an attempt had been made on Napoleon's
life. The fact was reported at several places simultan-
eously. In a solitary farm, eleven miles from Vienna, a
swineherd who had fought against Bonaparte at Rivoli
came running to his master shortly after twelve o'clock.
"The Emperor of the French is dead. "
"Then God be praised, " was the simple and pious answer.
It was known before one o'clock at Modling, a village
ten miles to the south of Vienna ; and at Ertzen and Dorn-
bach, hamlets lying twelve miles to the west of Schonbrunn,
it was reported about the same hour.
Indeed, the rapidity with which, in days before elec-
tricity, rumour travelled recalls that paragraph of a Greek
historian describing pou? the spirit of Rumour, the myste-
rious influence which seems to move from place to place with-
out crossing the intervening space, so incredible its speed.
The details were variously stated. In all well-informed
circles, it was asserted that by the prompt intervention
of General Rapp and two other officers of the suite the
Emperor himself had been unaware of the danger, that the
assassin had been instantly and silently hurried to the guard-
86
The Assassin 87
room of the palace, that the review of the wounded had
not even been interrupted.
All admired this example of French decision, and it was
contrasted with the dilatory methods and fuss of the Aus-
trian gendarmerie; for the assassin, urged by religious or
political fanaticism, had approached within a few feet of
his unsuspicious and unarmed victim.
In Schonbrunn itself the excitement was extreme. The
thousand rooms, staircases, corridors, and even the garden
walks, were like a buzzing hive; but instead of with bees
they swarmed with officials, servants, aides-de-camp, mar-
shals, princes, generals, pages, valets, uniforms of every
hue and arm, chasseurs, grenadiers, dragoons, voltigeurs.
About two o'clock, Duroc, the Grand Chamberlain, and
Prince Berthier, who had been closeted together for twenty
minutes, entered the main reception-room. The former's
face had a look of haggard concern, if not grief. His at-
tachment to the Emperor was of long standing and sincere.
He had fought at Rivoli ; he had stood by the First Consul
on the third Nivose when the infernal machine exploded in
the Rue St. Nicaise.
To many the attack, real or imaginary, was an excite-
ment, a curiosity; Duroc it made physically sick and ill. To
the others Napoleon was an institution, a man superior to
suffering; but Duroc saw him in daily life. He saw him
affected like others by what he ate or drank, by the weather,
the sunshine or the damp. He was the hourly witness of
his weaknesses, his diseases. Others had heard in July last
the rumours of epilepsy, or again in August, of insanity.
Duroc knew the reality. They speculated upon his death
now above all that he could have no heir by illness, or
on the battlefield, or by poison, or as to-day by a dagger-
thrust. Duroc could share none of these speculations.
The Court of the Tuileries resembled, Favrol had said in
disgust, Rome under Pius VI., when a black-frocked popu-
88 Schonbrunn
lace speculated on the death of a pope as upon a gigantic
lottery, crying out "Non videbis annos Petri. " To Duroc
Napoleon was still as at Arcola.
"My dear Duroc," Berthier said in answer to an ex-
postulation wrung from the Grand Chamberlain, "what
is one to do? Risks he must run. Mon Dieu! do not I
try to keep him within bounds? as you have tried, Duroc,
as you have tried. But what is the result?"
If Berthier's grief was less sincere his face made amends.
That was grief -stricken enough. It was the ruin of a face.
For in the heat and excitement the perspiration had formed
little runlets everywhere amongst the powder on his
cheeks.
"This may be a warning to him," Duroc said quietly.
"Who is to inform His Majesty?"
"You had better do that," Berthier answered cordially.
"You certainly."
Berthier, whose jealousy had steadily repressed the
advance of Davout, had no jealousy of Duroc. Besides,
he still smarted under Napoleon's snub, and knew that the
Emperor would at once conjecture why he had attempted
to speak to him after the parade.
About the large, uncouth iron stove which disfigured this
charming rococo apartment, stood four general officers and
two aides-de-camp, not that day on duty, but now called
out by the Emperor's danger, Colonel Favrol and General
Mouton, "the lion named a sheep." Mouton was fast
rising in Napoleon's favour. He had slept in the Emperor's
tent on the night of the conflagration which, after Cla-
parede's bloody engagement, had burst out in Ebersdorf,
burning wounded and dead alike in one hideous holocaust,
and filling the air for three miles around with the smell of
roasting human flesh. Mouton had the face of an Irish-
man, a "ranker, " dirty-looking and sullen. Favrol, on the
other hand, was, like Montesquieu, a man of good family,
The Assassin 89
and found himself daily outraged by the barrack brutalities
of Napoleon's "rankers."
These two now stood side by side, but talking in the
guarded, quiet way of men who esteem but do not trust
each other ; members of a profession in which intrigue was
the path to advancement.
Before Favrol's eyes still floated the image of the open
carriage, the profiles of the two women the Princess
Durrenstein's wayward grace, and the sadness and energy
of the Countess Ama 1 ie von Esterthal. Had she too a
lover? And that lover?
II
"Mad or sane, I hope the Emperor will make short work
of him, " a heavy, red-faced general of cuirassiers observed
to Mouton. "This attack on His Majesty may be a
preliminary to an attack on the army itself. Germany is
a nation of fanatics. "
"That will be all right. What happened to Eschen-
bacher and Thell?" Mouton spoke carelessly, but his
voice had so brazen a ring that it penetrated the room,
echoing.
Eschenbacher and Thell were two honest bourgeois of
Vienna who in May had been shot for some trivial offence
against military law.
The other officers turned at Mouton's voice; some
remained where they stood, others came nearer to the
group about the stove.
The movement left isolated a big, lean, sunburnt general
of grenadiers, heavily marked by smallpox. This was
Hulin, "the stormer of the Bastille. " Though a "ranker"
he had neither Mouton's voice nor his aggressive geni-
ality.
Favrol moved away. Mouton's manners grated on him
90 Schonbrunn
worse than Mouton's accent. But he was immediately
joined by Bertrand. Bertrand was clean-shaven, fair-
complexioned, and, at two and thirty, a general of division.
"What's on at the opera to-night?" he said to Favrol.
"And the Austrian charmer how's that, eh? I saw you
in her rear at the parade. Any signs of a thaw or is she
still polar? Both she and her Polish friend look as if they
might become tropical enough. Eh? Lucky at cards,
unlucky in love. "
Favrol, wheeling round, said abruptly:
"What do you think will be the effect of this morning's
affair? Did you see the attempt? Or the assassin himself ?"
"Not the actual blow. But I am convinced I saw the
fellow himself loafing at the foot of the stairs slim and
blonde as a girl. It may set us on the march from here to-
morrow. It may keep us here for another six months."
Bertrand and Favrol knew very well that at this moment
the secret pre-occupation of every heart in the room and
in every room of this crowded palace, and in every barrack,
camp or cantonment in which the attack was surmised or
known, was just this question: "What will be the effect
of this on the prospects of peace?"
A second later both men had a proof of it; for a cavalry
officer, bright-eyed, smiling, high-complexioned, redolent
of good health, showing his white teeth, came jingling his
gilt spurs towards them. "Well, mon g6neral, " he said,
addressing Bertrand. "What do you think? Is it war or
peace? To me it doesn't matter a damn Je m'en fiche.
I've been in the saddle ten hours to-day, and last night I
had not three hours' sleep. Serving Napoleon is like serv-
ing a devil. "
"Blagueur!" said Bertrand. "A jay like you! What
lively young woman kept you awake?"
"No girl at all," the younger man said seriously; "but
our Lady of Spades. A beggarly queen a very raven of a
The Assassin 91
card not another all night! I'm now done brown! Done
brown!" he repeated, as though the word summed up some
aspect of his philosophy of life.
"He that would live next year must live to-day,"
chanted an aide-de-camp, quoting a saying of Napoleon's
which at this period the latter iterated in his letters to his
brother Joseph. "And he who would live to-day must
have cash. "
"Why," said a dragoon, "if we stay much longer the
Viennese will have to eat their own rats. My servant
bayonets seventy of a morning squeak, squeak!" he said,
imitating the scream of a wounded rat.
He was quartered in the city and had this instant brought
a message from his own general to Nansouty. "Hot in
this oven, is it not?" he muttered, taking off his helmet and
wiping his forehead. His hair smelt of pomade.
And the newcomer excitedly told once more, with varia-
tions and details, the story of the attack. According to
this latest version the assassin had been seen three days
ago lounging at the foot of the stairs, waiting then to per-
petrate the dastardly act.
"Longer, longer! Seven days ago ..." interrupted
Mouton. "No, but let me speak. It was last Friday at
this very hour. I was on duty and I saw the fellow as
plainly as I see Dafour yonder; but that morning the
Emperor, instead of descending by the right as he usually
does, went down by the left. That choice saved his life.
But this morning, I ask, what saved him? Who can tell
me that?"
"Mon Dieu who is that?" muttered the dragoon in a
stage aside.
From an inner room a man in a cuirassier's uniform ad-
vanced a step, then stood motionless. He was of uncertain
age, yet, like nearly every man in the room, under forty.
His strangely furtive yet arrogant and penetrating glance
92 Schonbrunn
seemed to take in the conversation in every quarter of the
room.
Duroc lifted his head and looked at the sinister visitor
quietly. Berthier took no notice of him. After a few
seconds, but still without a word of greeting or courtesy
to any man, he disappeared.
Bertrand approached Hulin.
"Savary becomes unbearable. He can be civil only to
the Emperor. "
Hulin shrugged his right shoulder curiously. It was the
action of the old linesman hitching up his knapsack.
"Yes; he looks an ill-omened bird, does he not? But he
loves this day's work, and its sequel. We hate it, we
others, yet we consent. "
in
A clatter of hoofs outside, the champing of bits and the
voices and laughter of a gay cavalcade came through the
open windows. The stove had been lighted; the two iron
statues used for heating the hall were also glowing, and
the soldiers, accustomed to the bivouac, had flung the
windows wide.
"It is the Emperor."
The change was instantaneous and, though usual, still
magical. Every figure took a different attitude, many
making a desperate effort to assume the poses, to recollect
the gestures studied by Napoleon's orders under M. Gardel,
director of the Opera ballet in Paris, the right foot drawn
back, the head and shoulders respectfully bowed. Voices
were lowered, but at the same time the excitement on every
face was augmented. One minute passed, a second and
then a third. Outside the riders had not dismounted, but
silence had crept over them; even the horses appeared to
have caught the infection, for the jingling of a rein or the
The Assassin 93
champing of the bits occurred at rarer and rarer intervals.
Within the room the malaise, the impatience became
intolerable.
Had something happened to Napoleon, after all? Mon
Dieu, was it his dead body that the cortege was bringing
home?
Someone went to the window and peeped.
It was Berthier.
He was heard to exchange a rapid sentence or two with
Duroc, and arm in arm they were about to proceed down-
stairs, when the double door was flung violently open and,
white as death, but with his greyish eyes almost black in
their burning intensity, Napoleon appeared.
His glance, which passed from face to face each man
felt it, like the cold touch of a lance probing his inmost
thought.
The silence became profounder. Then rushing straight
upon Berthier, who stood with his arms folded in ridiculous
imitation of his master, Napoleon exclaimed, his voice
thick and shrill with passion:
4 ' What is this I hear ? Speak ! ' '
But before Berthier could answer two other figures, both
in the uniform of the chasseurs of the Guard, appeared in
the doorway behind the Emperor. It was Savary, due de
Rovigo, and General Rapp.
"Ah, mon brave Rapp you here too?" Napoleon cried,
abandoning Berthier. "Savary tells me that I owe my
life to you. What is the meaning of it? Recount, re-
count!"
But for the grey pallor of Napoleon's face it might have
been thought that he spoke the words in sarcasm or in
insult, so like a sneer was the tone in which he jerked out
the rapid interpellation.
Rapp, disconcerted by this brusque reception, narrated
the incident, but slowly and confusedly. He was evidently
94 Schonbrunn
labouring under strong feeling, and, as always on such
occasions, his Rhenish accent betrayed itself and his
words became entangled.
"Come, come!" Napoleon said more kindly, "debar-
bouillez-vous, clear the mud from your mind and speak
distinctly! At what hour precisely was this, and where
exactly was I standing? How did the assassin's intention
escape me?"
"Your Majesty was engaged with the Guard," Berthier
broke in.
"Let Rapp speak," Napoleon said coldly.
Rapp began again. His resentment had vanished; his
attachment to his master and that master's danger alone
were in his heart. His face became animated. His fine
soldierly figure held erect, he expressed in a few words his
indignation, his concern, his devotion to the Emperor and
his gratitude to God.
Rapp was not yet forty, though three years older than
Savary. Like the latter he was devoured by a fever of
ambition, but unlike the latter he was scrupulous in his
means of realizing that ambition. Constantly disappointed,
constantly seeing men inferior to himself pass him in the
race for titles, riches, rank, he had the reputation of being
unlucky or evil-starred. Whilst men like Duroc, Murat
and Berthier passed through a hundred battles without a
scratch, Rapp never entered a battle and seldom a combat
without a misfortune of some kind, a bullet wound, a
sword-thrust or a fall from a horse. His open and in-
dependent character interfered with his advance, and
thus at nine and thirty he was only a general and for the
last weeks only, a count, an honour won by his gallantry
at Aspern and by arduous exertions in Lobau. The great
moment of Rapp's life had been the moment at the battle
of Austerlitz in which with seven hundred men he had
charged the Imperial Guard of the Czar himself, had cut a
The Assassin 95
gap into that famous body of horsemen, veterans of Su-
varow, and, wheeling round when he was about to be
enclosed, had forced a desperate path through the envelop-
ing grey-coats and covered with wounds and blood had
returned leisurely to his position, and later on in the
December evening had taken part in the grand pursuit.
The frost had congealed his wounds. But before he
bivouacked he had been sent for by Napoleon in person
and, covered with frozen blood as with a glittering mail
of glory, he had presented himself before the Emperor in
his tent. Napoleon's words still at times rang in his ears.
After Jena, however, a change had come over Rapp. He
was nicknamed "the German"; the heavy moustache
which he obstinately wore in an army whose officers were
mostly, like the Emperor, clean-shaven, or, like Davout
and Savary, clean-shaven on the lip and chin but whisk-
ered barely to the lobe of the ear, seemed to justify the
nickname. He could not explain it himself, but he was an
Alsatian, and it might have been that the humiliation of
Germany stirred some lingering or inherited reminiscences
of his race in his blood. He had been at Eylau and at
Friedland, but he had never again found quite the rap-
ture of that moment at Austerlitz, and disappointment or
jealousy or a secret rancour or an ill-quenched German
patriotism or a republicanism only half dead had aggra-
vated his naturally sardonic temperament.
IV
"And where now is the assassin?" Napoleon at length
said, interrupting Rapp in the midst of his narrative; for
as if embarrassed by the Emperor's approval, nods and
encouraging words, Rapp, instead of answering briefly,
had plunged into irrelevancies, digressions and repetitions
what Savary had said, what Berthier had thought, what
96 Schonbrunn
Mouton had proposed, what Bertrand had answered.
"Answer each question as I ask it, and that question only.
Where is the prisoner?"
"In the guard-house of the west wing. "
"But how came you to suspect that he meant to assassin-
ate me?"
The tone and the look which accompanied these words
startled every hearer.
If there were a snare or treachery in the question, or if
the "Corsican touch" made itself felt, Rapp ignored it.
His honest limited countenance was undisturbed.
"Something in his persistence," he said deliberately,
"his earnest and exalted mien "
But like the swift vicious glimmer of unexpected light-
nings came the interruption:
"Since when has an earnest look or an exalted mien
become the mark of a criminal?"
"Your Majesty! In Germany "
Rapp appeared about to begin a digression. Napoleon
stopped him again.
"Answer my question."
The false calm of Napoleon's accent was well known.
Every man shifted uneasily and every heart that had a
secret felt as if the covering were lifted and those glaucous
eyes were gazing in upon it.
Berthier's left arm dropped by his side; his right re-
mained helplessly across his chest as if held in an invisible
sling. Duroc glanced pleadingly but furtively at his mas-
ter. Savary's mean-looking, close-set eyes became atten-
tive, and straining his head slightly forward to listen, the
line of his long nose seemed to reach his upper lip and his
resemblance to Leonardo's Judas became more apparent.
Impassive, Napoleon awaited the reply.
Rapp did not at once proceed. This was not the Em-
peror whom he knew, this was not the master who habit-
The Assassin 97
ually addressed him as "mon brave Rapp." Before this
accusing judge it was not the murderer who was impanelled,
it was he, Rapp, or it was Savary or it was one of his fellow-
officers, the aides-de-camp, generals and marshals standing
around in bewildered or self-condemned apprehension.
What had seized Napoleon?
It was characteristic of the impression made by Napoleon
even on his most faithful ones that whilst there was no
sublimity to which they did not imagine his genius capable
of mounting, there was also no meanness and no crime to
which they could not imagine it stooping.
Rapp struggled to realize the situation; but he could
only image, incongruously, the Emperor's reception of the
two couriers bringing the news of Talavera. The first
Napoleon had accused of being in league with the English
and of forging the report of Wellington's victory. The
second he had rewarded for an unusually rapid ride from
Bayonne by throwing him into a dungeon in Vienna. And
there, for anything Rapp knew, the unfortunate messenger
still lay. Was Napoleon for this morning's devotion about
to reward him in the same manner? Or was he doubting
his word, or was he doubting Savary's, or had Savary given
a distorted account? for Savary was known to be under-
mining Fouche's power and suspected of undermining
everybody's. Was he, Rapp himself, perhaps the victim of
a got-up job of Savary's? Was the attempt at assassina-
tion part of a faked conspiracy? Or, if the conspiracy were
real, did Napoleon suspect that someone in this room was
in league with the assassin, and would his answer lead to
that traitor's conviction?
That answer, cost what it would, he now determined to
give. He spoke.
"I observed that whilst the assassin held out the petition
in his left hand he carried his right thrust in the breast of his
coat and seemed to clutch a weapon there. "
7
98 Schonbrunn
"You have searched him?"
"Yes, sire."
"And the result?"
"We found on him a purse with three florins, a miniature,
some papers, and this, your Majesty."
Every face was changed and suppressed exclamations of
horror burst from one after another of the witnesses of this
extraordinary scene.
The weapon which Rapp stood holding out towards the
Emperor was certainly formidable enough, fit even in an
unsteady or faltering hand to inflict a deadly injury. It
had been a table-knife; it was now a dagger. Both edges
had been ground to a long, fine point, a blade of about nine
inches set strongly in a coarse haft of unpolished ash.
Napoleon alone did not blench. His manner became if
possible quieter. It was the look almost of gaiety which St.
Hilaire had seen on his face at Ostrolenka and which
Davout had described in a letter to his wife from Auerstadt
as his "battle look."
The Emperor took the dagger from Rapp's hand, glanced
along the blade, then placed the point first against the white
full flesh of his wrist, then against the deep green of the
sleeve of his coat, continuing his scrutiny of the steel.
Apparently he did not detect the marks that he sought,
for he flung the weapon clattering on the table laden with
vases and precious ornaments beside him, with the remark :
"The daggers of England find me even here. Take it to
Geraudin; ask him to test whether the point is poisoned,
whether the Cabinet of St. James's is imitating that of the
Borgias. En veYite", Canning goes further than Pitt."
Then, one suspicion hunting another out of his brain, he
turned harshly to Rapp.
"How comes it that the criminal spoke only to you?"
Napoleon in putting this question looked at Berthier,
then at Savary, and then again at Rapp, and waited.
The Assassin 99
Duroc intervened, placatingly as always.
"The Prince de Neuchatel does not know German and
the due de Rovigo speaks it imperfectly. "
The storm suppressed till then flamed out.
"Have my armies thrice conquered Germany and only
one man in all my staff knows the language of the countries
we have overrun?"
Duroc was heard to say something of the Count Daru.
The latter had been with the Emperor at Erfurt and had
intervened tactfully, though late a little, when Napoleon,
that patron of the arts, had addressed to the author of
Faust, Egmont, Goetz and Iphigenie the naive questions
"Have you written any tragedies? Are you married?
How many children have you ? How old are you ? If you
come to Paris I will suggest subjects to you better than any
you can find at Weimar the death of Caesar, for instance."
But the Emperor's outburst against his officers' ignorance
of German was only a preliminary. He now resumed his
inquisitory and turned once more to Rapp.
"And to you, monsieur the professor of German, what
did the assassin say ? " he enquired with an adder-like smile.
"What harm have I done him that he wishes to kill me?
And who is he? Is he English?"
"He speaks German," Rapp answered, "and says he
comes from Erfurt, but to every other question I asked him
he had but one answer, 'Das kann ich dem Napoleon
selbst nur sagen' 'That I will tell to Napoleon himself
only." 1
The Emperor did not immediately continue. He seemed
at once inquisitive and troubled by this evidence of
resolution.
"He wishes to see me then?" he said at last.
"Sire, he is unshakable and will speak to no one but to
you."
Napoleon glanced at Berthier and then at Duroc, but it
ioo Schonbrunn
was not a look which either of them could fathom or
attempt to answer.
"Bring him here, " he said briefly after a pause.
Savary, accompanied by two aides-de-camp, left the
room. For a second or two there was a buzz of conversa-
tion, but the tension of nerves which every man felt had
scarcely diminished, and again silence fell.
Napoleon began to walk up and down with his hands
behind his back, his head bent, his brow unmarked by
anxiety, but wearing an expression of intense thought.
His mind had gone back to the incidents of his ride, to the
cloud which had weighed on him when he wakened that
morning, to the hesitancy which had marked his interview
with Liechtenstein, to the omens or presages which had
pursued him throughout the day his reflections on look-
ing across to the field of Wagram, and his meeting with
the two priests. Within him, he reasoned, death had
closed mysteriously in a conflict with life, and these pre-
monitions had marked the phases of that conflict. But
since his twenty-fifth year he had lived cheek by jowl with
death, sleeping night by night, so to speak, on the edge of a
grave. Recently his mind had taken habitually to think-
ing of his own death and the manner of it, and, obscurely
foreboding that with his supernatural luck he should not
die on the battlefield, he had turned to the thought of
assassination and spoke much of Caesar's death, picturing
himself dying in that manner. Who could tell that Murat,
Fouchd, Talleyrand and Junot had not included some such
act in their conspiracy of the preceding November?
"No, this is not in my destiny," he decided suddenly,
his lips moving though not a sound escaped them. "Others
may be assassinated like Kl^ber or Paul I. I shall die
The Assassin 101
only on the battlefield. Destiny, the nature of things, all
is in that what we are or shall be. "
At a stir that to his strung nerves sounded like a crash,
he turned. In the doorway stood Savary, and, between
two gendarmes, his hands tied behind his back, Napoleon
saw a tall, slim boy, well-made, with blonde hair, blue eyes
and a general expression at once in face and figure that
suggested a girl masquerading in boy's clothing. Nothing
in him was English, and his voice when he answered
Savary, who, after examining the cords which tied his
hands behind his back, commanded him to advance, dis-
pelled the illusion that the prisoner was a girl. His stock
was torn, and under the sunburnt face and chin the neck
was very white. The rest of his dress also showed traces
of a struggle; for he had fought furiously even after his
arrest and had indignantly resisted being searched.
Napoleon, whose purpose appeared now to be to cast
over the whole affair a semblance of unimportance or
comedy, looked at the prisoner with an air of incredulity,
even smilingly. "What is your name?" he said briefly
but not unkindly.
The boy did not answer. Napoleon frowned.
"He does not understand your Majesty," Duroc said,
intervening. "He speaks only German."
"Ah! Who then? Tou jours le brave Rapp!"
Rapp stepped forward, and addressing the boy began:
"His Majesty the Emperor of the French desires to ask "
Napoleon stopped him.
"Address him in my person as if I were actually speaking
to him, and quit that galimatias. "
The interview then proceeded, Napoleon putting the
questions straight to the prisoner, Rapp translating them
straight into German, very harsh and Alsatian in its accent
against the boy's soft, Suabian, lapsing patois.
Napoleon repeated his question, "What is your name?"
102 Schonbrimn
"Friedrich Staps."
' ' Stabs ? How do you spell it ? "
Rapp transliterated the boy's answer.
"How old are you?" Napoleon proceeded.
"Seventeen." And then after a second's reflection he
added, "I was seventeen in March last, " as though wishing
to claim for himself the utmost age possible.
Napoleon looked at him searchingly. He did not seem
of peasant birth; he might have been, rather, a student, or
a page in the house of one of the Austrian nobility, whose
servants at that period were often selected from the bour-
geois families. On the other hand, his accent was not that
of Vienna.
"And your home? And what is your father's occu-
pation?"
"I live at Erfurt. My father is a pastor at Naumburg."
"You are a Thuringian then?" As though struck by a
thought Napoleon said quickly, "You saw me at Erfurt
in November nearly a year ago?"
"I did."
There was a pause. That question and that answer
hovered above an abyss of tragedy from which the accuser
not the accused wished to avert his eyes. Abruptly
Napoleon resumed the original course of his questions.
"Of what religion is your father Romanist or Re-
formed?"
"He is a Lutheran."
"And your mother?"
" My mother is dead. "
"And the miniature which was found in your possession?"
"Meine Geliebte my sweetheart's."
"Ah, you young hot-head," Napoleon suddenly burst
out, "what disaster you have brought upon her and upon
your father and upon all your family ! Why have you done
this thing? What injury have I done you? Answer me,
The Assassin 103
and remember that upon your answer depends not only
your own life or death but the shame or fortune of her you
love of all you love. "
"They will not be ashamed of me. They will only
regret that I have not succeeded."
The words were assured; but the manner was hesitating.
At Erfurt he had seen Napoleon surrounded by Germans,
his satellites. He had seen even Goethe walk along the
linden avenue arm in arm with Marshal Lannes and appar-
ently proud of his companion the Roland of this new
Charlemagne.
Napoleon, as though divining his prisoner's inmost
thought, said suddenly, but so softly that it was like the
rebuke of a friend:
"And yet you wished to assassinate me?"
"I did, because you are the enemy of Germany."
"The enemy of Germany? Yet you saw me at Erfurt, at-
tended by your princes, your kings, your nobles, your poets,
your men of science, your priests, your pastors? Why then
do you call me the enemy of Germany? No; but answer. "
"They hated you even whilst they flattered you or made
peace with you. I wished to deliver them and to deliver
my country." Then in a voice of sombre and exalted
determination the young Thuringian continued: "I have
failed. But there are ten thousand behind me. One will
arise and do what I have failed to do. "
"Ah? Enverite?"
The boy's last words had an exaggerated if not a false
air. Yet they did not resemble words learned by rote.
Napoleon considered him attentively and again he
changed his tactics; for he had now begun to regard this
extraordinary youth as an adversary whom he wished to
defeat on his own ground. This he could only achieve by
convincing him that he was in error.
"What books do you read?"
104 Schonbrunn
"History."
"Whose history?"
"Schiller's."
' ' Skiller's ? I do not know him. ' '
He looked around. Dam, who had made himself fa-
miliar with German literature, could have easily solved the
Emperor's perplexity; but to-day he was at Znaim super-
vising some orders relative to the accoutrement of the Fifth
Corps, Massena's.
"You are young," Napoleon said, trying another tack;
"and the young read poetry. Whose poetry do you read? "
"Schiller's."
"Skiller? Comment? Again Skiller! Who is this
Skiller? Is it a pen-name? Was he at Erfurt?"
He looked interrogatively and angrily at Rapp; but
Rapp, if he had heard of the author of Die Rduber and
Wilhelm Tell, knew no more of the author of the Revolt of the
Netherlands and The Thirty Years' War than did Berthier
or Duroc. No one could tell Napoleon who "Skiller" was.
Was he perhaps a political incendiary one of the scores
whose pamphlets had been seized by his police and, under
Fouche"'s orders, translated and abbreviated for his private
study?
Quick as light Napoleon's mind fastened on this hypo-
thesis, and thinking to confuse the prisoner and extort the
truth, his suspicion leapt out in the next question:
"You are one of the Illuminati? You wish to imitate
Brutus? A German Brutus! What madness!"
But the boy denied that he even knew what an Illumi-
nat was.
"But Germany! You believe in the destiny of Germany
and are prepared to die for that belief? You are very
singular!"
He laughed his mirthless, shrill Corsican laugh. Staps
made no answer.
The Assassin 105
Hulin, who now stood with Berthier in the inner circle
about the Emperor, had become morbidly interested in the
interrogatory. For in this boy's face, bearing and action
he saw something that unaccountably reminded him of
Camille Desmoulins and that amazing day, the I2th July,
when from the Boulevard in front of the Cafe de Foy he
gave to the citizens of Paris and to Europe the insignia of
Liberty the green cocarde. Hulin was himself young
again; there was electricity in the air and Freedom's war-
thunder in his blood and his arteries ; battle-cries of triumph
were splitting the heavens, the shouting of an emancipated
people storming the Bastille, the citadel and the symbol of
the despotism crushing the world.
Yet he had been one of the foremost to hail in Bonaparte
a greater than Danton or Desmoulins, a greater than Mira-
beau or Hoche, than Marceau or Barnave.
But now, this instant, here in the palace of the Habsburg
tyrants, another and a ghastly memory assailed him a
secret shame, an enduring remorse, over which his perplexed
mind for the past five years had brooded and brooded.
It was the part that under the Consul Bonaparte's orders
he himself had played in the murder of the due d'Enghien.
And as the picture of the Bastille faded another pic-
ture took its place the March night at Valenciennes, the
open grave, the firing-party and the fosse, the trial, the
murder and the torchlight burial the last of the Condes
thrust into that ignoble sepulchre.
A fearful presentiment seized him. He turned aside
and with an immense weight upon his brow and shoulders
he stood leaning by a window.
VI
Meanwhile, Napoleon had perceived the error he had
made in conducting this enquiry before so many witnesses.
io6 Schonbrunn
He could not now doubt the reality of the danger which he
had run. This was no faked-up plot, nor was it the hys-
teria of the beautiful but depraved Countess Ortski, Lord
Paget's mistress, who had bought a dagger from a jeweller
in the Ludwiggasse and, pretending an assignation with
the French Emperor, had declared to everyone in the shop
willing to listen, "This night Austria shall be avenged."
Upon being informed of the occurrence Bonaparte had
contented himself with remarking, "The noble Countess
confounds the parts of Rahab and Judith," and all Vienna
had laughed and for a day the French Emperor had been
popular. But this he had neither the wish nor the power
to treat lightly. The assassin had come as a petitioner,
and, at Schonbrunn, he had always been willing to consider
petitions; that morning, too, he had been unarmed, and
though the secret coat-of-mail he habitually wore might
have defended his breast, his throat and face were exposed
to an assailant who had had the craft to get within a few
feet of him. Napoleon now distinctly remembered the
vicious glitter of steel from which the sudden entry of the
wounded from Molk had diverted his attention.
Yes, the wing of Azrael had brushed past him, and nearer
than at Ratisbon, though that was near.
And, always various in his emotions as in his projects,
Napoleon felt a new impulse rise within him. It was the de-
sire to turn to profit the mistake which he had made in thus
examining Staps in public. It was the desire to convince
once more the assassin and his own officers of the greatness
and supernatural character of his destiny, in which he
himself at this period, with a mixture of calculation and
mysticism, most deeply believed. For might not the
fanatic's words have awakened some slumbering doubts of
that destiny in the minds of his listeners in Republicans
like Hulin, for instance, in half-convinced Royalists like
Favrol and Montesquieu, in the advocates of a peace policy
The Assassin 107
like Berthier and Rapp, Massena and Davout, anxious
only to enjoy in security the riches and honours they owed
to him? He felt too all the injured man's desire to
refute unjust calumny. He felt also the tyrant's implac-
able, primitive impulse to strike to earth his accuser.
These thoughts had not occupied Napoleon's brain two
seconds of time when, to his astonishment, the young
Thuringian burst into a torrent of unintelligible words.
Napoleon forgot his part and turning to Rapp he asked
angrily: "What is the sce'lerat saying?"
"You have broken every condition of Pressburg. You
lied: you perjured yourself: you extorted 20,000,000
gulden beyond the stipulated sum: you did not withdraw
your troops though you swore to withdraw them: you
retained the fortresses in Friuli and forced an open passage
into Dalmatia. What right had you to threaten my
Emperor when he attempted to make every man a soldier?
Is not every man in France a soldier? You, you only are
the cause of this bloodshed and this fury of war!"
These accusations were not spoken consecutively, but
collected by Rapp from the young Thuringian's indignant
utterances.
In an instant Napoleon was in the whirl of self-defence.
A political crowd Napoleon could never dominate nor
even address, as Brumaire had proved; but a single in-
dividual with a crowd looking on there was the field of his
oratory, as his brothers and his own ministers and the am-
bassadors of foreign nations Metternich, for instance, in
the memorable scene in February last, and Lord Whit-
worth at the rupture of the Peace of Amiens had expe-
rienced. The stage was now set for a similar scene.
"I am the executeur testamentaire de la Revolution. I
wish nothing but the good of humanity. How then could
I be the enemy of your country? Are not the Germans
men? You have studied history, you know the causes of
io8 Schonbrunn
wars; for history is the only philosophy; it is the invisible
axis upon which eternity revolves. Why did Austria
raise half a million men as soon as I was beyond the Pyr-
enees? English gold and the criminal folly of your Stadions
and Maximilians led your Emperor astray. These are the
true disturbers of the peace of nations. I alone can give
tranquillity to Europe and the world. Why then do you
wish to assassinate me?"
The young Thuringian gazed at him in amazement.
He was alternately fascinated and repelled by the changes
in Napoleon's expression, the rapidity of his utterance, the
raucous Corsican accent thridding along the syllables,
the trembling of his left leg, the convulsive movement of
the lower part of the face, the gleam of small white teeth
above all, by the thrust forward of the tremendous chin,
which gave a wild-beast appearance to the countenance.
He forgot himself and did not understand a syllable of
Rapp's interpretation.
But the waiting silence, the fiery impatience in Bona-
parte's eyes, showed him that he was meant to answer.
He therefore repeated his former statement.
"You are the enemy of the world. Had I destroyed you
I should have won undying glory and set German}'- free."
"Comment? After what I have said? You must be
mad, or ill."]
And again going out of his r61e he addressed himself to
Rapp.
"Repeat to him that I wish to give peace and unity to
Europe and happiness to all men, that the princes and rulers
of his country are my friends, and as he is a reader of poetry
and a student, tell him that the professors of his universities
and M. Wieland and M. Goett (i.e., Goethe), have accepted
from me the Legion of Honour. "
Here the prisoner listened attentively to Rapp, who now
spoke slowly, distinctly enunciating his words; and as he
The Assassin 109
proceeded the boy's face clouded, and when he heard of the
Legion of Honour accepted by Goethe his head sank. He
knew the reverence with which Schiller looked up to the
greatest poet of the German tongue, and at Erfurt with a
kind of awful reverence he had looked forward to the seeing
of Goethe for the first time. With a sick misery he re-
collected once more the day on which he had seen him
walking arm in arm with a French marshal under the lime
trees of the esplanade. He had looked for that marshal
amongst Napoleon's guards on his first visit to Schonbrunn
and he had been told that he had died in battle. The
recollection seemed to confirm the hideous assertion that
he now heard for the first time, and under what circum-
stances! He saw again Goethe's figure, erect and majestic,
and his countenance like that of a god in its calm and in its
inscrutable serenity. Could that lofty spirit indeed have
accepted a decoration from the dwarf there who had barked
unmeaning words at him? There must, he reasoned, be
some explanation a vision beyond his reach. Goethe
could not be a time-server or the flatterer of brutish power.
But he was too tired to think. He had not slept for three
nights, nerving himself for his great task, his "sacrifice,"
the deed which God Himself had laid upon him, the ordeal
against which he had struggled, resisting the angel of God.
For he was young and loved his life and loved beautiful
things, poetry and the song of birds and the long day's
dreaming and the vistas which his Wanderjahre opened up
before him when his years of apprenticeship at Erfurt should
be terminated. But all this was now over; his course was
finished. He had obeyed the high command : he had failed,
and he had now only to die.
A voice roused him from his reverie.
It was Napoleon's, and it was instantly followed by
Rapp's interpretation, addressed to him once more in the
first person.
no Schonbrunn
"If I pardon you, if I give you your liberty, will you
acknowledge your error and will you give up these frantic
principles? Also will you tell me the names of those who
instigated or hired you to attempt this crime? You are
young; you may have many happy years to live, marriage
with the woman you love, and success. Why should you
surrender all? You are young to die. Give up the names
of your accomplices. "
The insult was like the lash of a whip. The prisoner
raised his head which like that of an abashed girl had sunk
on his breast. The blue eyes flashed with an extraordinary
fire and he spoke now with an energy that thrilled his mean-
ing across the foreign words to Napoleon himself and to the
heart of every man in that room.
"I repent nothing: I regret nothing, except that I have
failed to kill you. I have no accomplices and no instigators.
I have been in Vienna eleven days and I have not spoken to
anyone except to the landlord in whose house I lodge. This
deed was not my seeking. Two months ago God laid this
command on me, but at that time I did not wish to obey.
Night by night I prayed to my heavenly Father that I
might not have this thing to do ; yes, I hardened my heart,
I wept and entreated that it might be given to another.
Then God became angry and I was most wretched, for I
was estranged from my God, my Father in heaven was
angry with me. And I swore a dreadful oath that if He
would but forgive me and be reconciled to me, I would do
His will. If you set me free to-day or to-morrow or in a
year or at any time I would still seek to kill you; for you
are the enemy of God and of all men ; yes, you are a tyrant,
the oppressor of Germany, and to kill you is to serve my
country and to pacify my offended God. "
It was Napoleon's turn to flinch. Disconcerted, he stood
for some seconds silent. He looked scrutinizingly at the
speaker, and with a cold smile said briefly:
The Assassin in
"No one instigated you? You have no accomplices,
you say? Who then are the ten thousand behind you?
You are delirious. You contradict yourself. "
But mastered by his own impatience and by a new and
more plausible theory which had taken possession of him,
he did not wait for the answer, but without transition and
without a gesture, gave the order:
"Send for Corvisart."
The boy tugged at his bonds as though he would have
drawn his hands across his eyes a pathetic, confused
gesture. It was not tears; but a cloudiness that came in
front of his thoughts. He could not see the answer to
Napoleon's accusation of self-contradiction. He knew that
there was no contradiction ; that in saying that ten thousand
stood behind him he meant to express his conviction of Ger-
many's resolve to destroy the tyrant in one way or in an-
other. He was about to say this, he had even turned to
Napoleon, but an immense fatigue came down on him
what did it matter what that dwarf with the huge un-
shapely chest and head thought or said or did?
VII
No history illustrates more vividly the tendency of a
high cause to work fanaticism in the mind than that of
Friedrich Staps.
Born in 1792, at Eisenach in Thuringia, he had passed
his boyhood partly in his native city under the shadow
of the Wartburg, partly at Naumburg. The features of
his home and school life were the features habitual at
that period in every German pastor's family simple and
pure manners, deep piety, cleanliness, truth-speaking and
reverence. His father had studied enough Latin and Greek
to make the heroes of Livy and Plutarch a little nearer
and more vivid than they can ever be to the reader
1 12 Schonbrunn
totally ignorant of the classics, and he early made the
names of Leonidas and Miltiades as familiar to the boy
as those of Luther and Melancthon, CEcolampadius and
Zwingli.
As a child Friedrich was sickly but impetuous, undis-
ciplined and wayward; yet at nine he had learned at his
mother's knees to repeat her favourite passages from Klop-
stock's Messias. But the religious emotion kindled by the
subject and the solemn rhythm of the verses became already
in his boyhood secondary to the pride that as a Thuringian
he felt for Germany's great poet. This pride became an
enthusiasm as the years passed. His reading extended
itself; he became acquainted one by one with the living
writers of the golden age of German poetry Lessing,
Schiller, Uhland, Jacobi, Goethe and the fixed if secret
resolve took possession of his mind as he grew towards
manhood to take his place amongst that sacred band. He
too would be a poet.
Suddenly the horror burst over Germany. Within ten
months the entire German race, so to speak, was subject
to one of the bloodiest inundations in human annals.
The effect of the defeats of 1805 and 1806, from Ulm
to Jena, on the young Thuringian was harrowing. He
could not eat; he could not sleep. His studies and his
hopes were abandoned. He went about the village or
the woods drooping and listless. Then the change came.
The fragments of a diary written three years later have
preserved to us the nature of this change.
"From the Rhine to the Oder, from the Baltic to the
Danube, I looked and I saw everywhere men in chains.
I saw Germany like a beautiful woman in an Eastern slave
market with her head bent before a savage and insulting
tyrant. An invisible sword was already by my side. I
determined to set her free. "
The romantic and wild scenery of his early home,
The Assassin 113
steeped in the legends of the Middle Age, minnesinger
and crusader, and during his holidays long visits to his
mother's kindred at Detmold near the Teutoberg and the
field of the Hermannsschlacht, scene of the heroism of
Arminius and the destruction of Varus and his legions,
stimulated the emotions of anger, resolution and despond-
ency which alternately convulsed the boy's mind. What
German could walk in the templed gloom of those woods
and return to his home the contented thrall of a Bonaparte?
Poverty and the necessity of choosing a means of liveli-
hood, for the pastor was not rich and there were five other
children, tore Friedrich for a time from his breedings;
he refused to study theology, "feeling that his country
would yet demand from him a service incompatible with a
pastor's career." But he abandoned at the same time the
cherished dream of being a soldier. Of what use was it to
become a soldier? The very armies of Germany might at
any moment be ordered to enroll themselves beside the
hosts of the tyrant. Yet every thought of his mind was of
a German uprising and of the deliverance of his country
by war. The poetry of Schiller, especially the dramas of
Die Yungfrau and Wilhelm Tell gave precision to his fluctuat-
ing aspirations. And when he was sixteen he saw in the
secret society of the Tugendbund or League of Valour a
pledge of the practical realization of his most ardent hopes.
Suddenly blow on blow struck those hopes to the ground.
Stein, in whom he had seen at once the craft and the
heroism of Arminius, was flying into exile, no man knew
whither; Hardenberg had been bought; the diplomat Haug-
witz, like the priest Dalberg, had always been a shuffler;
the spirit of the heroic Queen of Prussia was broken; the
princes of Germany were vying with each other in banishing
the "patriots," or in surrendering to the tyrant's venge-
ance all suspected of sharing the aims of the League of
Valour. And amidst this panic of treason and defection
8
ii4 Schonbrunn
came the appalling actual defeats of 1809 and the suppres-
sion of the premature revolts of Schill and Brunswick.
Midnight once more settled over Germany, and this time
it seemed for ever. Prussia was a second Poland. The
land of Frederick was partitioned and every free spirit
banished. Wurtemburg, the home of Suabian heroism,
was handed over to the tyrant's brother. Saxony, Bavaria,
the Rhine region, were appanages of the conqueror's
splendour. Austria, bleeding to death from the hideous
stabs of Aspern-Essling and Wagram what could Austria
effect? And the conqueror was still in his prime and his
legions were growing in multitude year by year. If he
lived another ten years, would there be a refuge for freedom
on this planet ?
The shadow of Napoleon loomed to his ardent imagination
more portentous than the half-fabulous names of Sesostris
and Nebuchadnezzar. A newer and darker design gradually
took complete possession of the young Thuringian's soul
the design of murdering the tyrant. War and open revolt
were useless; for in this Napoleon there was something
daimonic. Such a deed was unprecedented in German
history, but to Staps' inflamed imagination the Napoleonic
tyranny was, in its corroding shame, unprecedented not
only in German but in human history. It was not a crime.
Many of the most shining names in history were those of
tyrannicides, and with a glow of ardour which lasted for
weeks Friedrich now recollected his boyish enthusiasm for
the verses which enshrine the memory of Harmodius, the
murderer of Peisistratos, the tyrant of Athens.
" I will wreathe my sword with the myrtle's leaves,
The sword that reached the tyrant's heart."
When, however, he turned from the conception to the
execution of his murderous design, horror seized him, and
when he conquered that horror and saw the glory of the
The Assassin 115
deed in the dazzling light of old battlefields and heard
his own name spoken in wonder by millions of liberated
Germans, a sense of his own incapacity and the innumer-
able difficulties in his way roused again the very horror
that he had recently conquered. All was despondency,
and, like the poet Kleist two years later, Friedrich Staps
thought of self-destruction as a means of escape from his
own intolerable misery and the misery of Germany.
The gloom within the young Thuringian's mind was
aggravated by the events of 1809. Austria had come forth,
and Austria had fallen. The English victories in Spain
might all be lies; they were contradicted in every French
newspaper. The one thing certain was that their armies
under Sir John Moore had run like hares the instant
Napoleon crossed the Pyrenees.
" Night must it be ere Friedland's star will burn."
Had Napoleon after Znaim concluded the treaty and
returned to France; had he even left Germany in August,
Friedrich Staps might have ended his days by suicide or
sunk into obscurity. But July became August and August
September and still the tyrant lingered at Schonbrunn
there within a day's journey there within reach of a
dagger. Was there not in this something metaphysical?
His purpose flamed up again. And it flamed up in a
transfigured glory. The cause of the transfiguration is
hidden. Nothing in his manuscripts reveals the process.
It may have been a chance study of the Old Testament. It
may have been a fresh reading of Schiller's Die Yungfrau.
It may have been a sermon preached by Oberlin. The
result is clear. The God of his father's religion and of his
own childhood, the God of whom he had learned in his
mother's talk when the hush of twilight fell with sacred
mysteriousness over river and valley, added His mandate
n6 Schonbrunn
to that of Tyrtseus and the example of Roman Brutus.
The Lord God of Hosts spoke to him at Erfurt as He had
spoken to Joan Dare at Domremy "Go forth, Friedrich
Staps, and give freedom to thy fatherland! Go forth and
strike down the evil one!"
The new design thus hallowed he did not hide in his own
breast entirely. Under the pledge of awful secrecy he re-
vealed his divine mission to Frederike Neumann, sprung,
like himself, from a pastor's family.
She went home, and whether in weakness, or, infected
by his heroism, desirous of sharing his glory, she informed
her mother.
Horror-struck, the latter communicated the design to the
pastor himself, and Staps was forbidden the house. The
girl was at the same time sent to a distant province.
Staps was thus left to execute his fearful design alone.
VIII
Meantime, waiting for Corvisart, the buzz of conversa-
tion once more filled the room.
Emotions had crystallized, judgments were expressed.
General Hedouville, one of Napoleon's escort, a Frenchman
with the soul of a janizary, fixed his flashing black eyes
now on Napoleon, now on the prisoner. He seemed quiver-
ing with impatience for the order to cut the latter in pieces.
Bertrand, impulsive and theatrical, gesticulated violently,
calling heaven to witness his horror at the crime. The
hussar Lacourbe's figure towered over his two fellow-officers.
He maintained his air of haughty superiority which dis-
guises the stupidity of the mere horseman. When Lacourbe
was mounted, as Savary once said, the brains were in
front of the saddle. Bertrand began again to deplore the
recklessness with which the Emperor continually exposed
himself.
The Assassin 117
"At Valladolid six months ago I saw him with my own
eyes go down amongst a company of evil-looking monks
and start a theological discussion upon the Inquisition.
What was there to prevent one of those ruffians from
plunging a dagger in his breast? The Pope would have
beatified him." And to-day, this young German, he
could bet, had been egged on by the priests, just like that
Dominican who stabbed Hubert, the Emperor's valet, at
Burgos. "The Emperor is brave as a lion; but he ought to
think of us. On his single life how much depends!"
"Truly," said Mouton, with humorous sarcasm, "how
much, how very much, as our creditors know!"
The young dragoon aide who had lost at cards groaned
a deep assent. In every heart in that room now crouched
the question "What if the assassin's dagger had actually
reached its mark? To me what would have been the
consequences?"
Some looked to the future and the chances of a new regime,
Jacobin or Constitutional; some remembered Moreau and
mused fugitively on his designs for the restoration of the
Bourbons; others thought of Talleyrand and his "legitimist"
obsession. Some plotted a republic in which they them-
selves might play a political r61e ; some again quite seriously
thought of an elective empire, the ruler being chosen by the
army. Davout or Bernadotte or even Murat might at
once succeed Napoleon. Some again contemplated anx-
iously the risks to honours, titles, riches, lands which any
change must involve. All, however, saw in Napoleon's
death the certainty of a temporary peace, and for peace
every man in that room was longing.
Napoleon, his brow laden with thought, was again walk-
ing slowly up and down. He was not unaware of the loyal
or disloyal thoughts swarming behind those eyes that
looked at him with so much affection or so much concern;
he was old in the experience of men; the human heart had
n8 Schonbrunn
little that was ugly to reveal to him now. Their fidelity to
him, which was their honour, was the fidelity of brigands
sworn to the same enterprise. He had never been the dupe
of the hypocritical codes of compassion and fraternal love.
The ethics of the tiger were the ethics of man.
Rapp, meanwhile, had placed himself nearer to the
prisoner. His return to the language of his own boy-
hood, or something sympathetic in Staps' appearance, was
working in him a curious change pity, or at least under-
standing. The boy himself appeared to be once more
unconscious of his surroundings. Now and then he tugged
nervously at the cords fastening his hands. They had
been knotted violently and awkwardly, and Rapp saw a
bruise, ragged-edged and bleeding, on one of the wrists.
His hands were finely made, but, like his face, sunburnt.
Swift to feel sympathy or moved by some suspicion in his
own mind, he now said to Rapp in confidential undertones
and in German:
"WhoisM. Corvisart?"
Rapp did not at once answer ; then in an indifferent tone
he said curtly:
"His Majesty's physician."
At once the prisoner's countenance was all excitement
and he exclaimed protestingly :
"But I am not ill. What has a doctor to do here?"
He turned as in anger towards Napoleon, who, arrested
by the question and Rapp's answer, had stopped in his
walk, and stood eyeing Rapp and his prisoner. He seemed
about to speak when the doors were again flung open and
Corvisart entered.
IX
Though only fifty-five the famous physician looked a
man of sixty. His quiet dress, decorated only with the
The Assassin 119
small red ribbon of the Legion of Honour, formed a con-
trast to the blaze of uniforms, just as the intellectuality of
his features formed a contrast to the manly unintelligence
which characterized most of the officers, making him, as
it were, the sole companion to Bonaparte in that room.
His naturally keen features were sharpened by suffering or
weariness, and his eyes were tarnished.
Savary, wishing to oust Rapp, began to explain the
incident to the physician, but Napoleon interrupted him at
once:
"Corvisart, here is a patient for you. Examine him and
tell me what you think of his state. "
Uncertain whether it was a mystification, for he saw no
signs of sickness, Corvisart hesitated.
"To work! To work!" the Emperor said with false
gaiety, and, determined to prevent Savary or Rapp from
impairing the impartiality of the physician's opinion, he
came and stood near and pointed to Staps.
Corvisart looked at the prisoner in silence, then placed
his fingers on his pulse. His own wrinkled hands, of a
dirtyish red colour and covered on the back with sickly
hair, made more marked the boy's smooth and delicately
modelled wrist. Corvisart's sight was dim, but his touch
was marvellous in its delicacy. His patient felt this and
looked at the physician in trustful naivete. He failed,
however, to understand the questions which after a second
or two Corvisart put to him in low, reassuring tones.
Receiving no answer, Corvisart once more felt the pulse,
looked into the boy's eyes, which met his with an eager,
almost childlike intensity, and, to the astonishment of
every hearer, the prisoner suddenly said in bad French :
"Je ne suis pas malade, monsieur, pas vrai?" trans-
lating the last words literally from the familiar German
idiom "nicht wahr. " " I am not ill am I?"
In the strung state of the onlookers' nerves, had a deaf
120 Schonbrunn
mute suddenly spoken the effect could not have been more
instantaneous.
Smiling, Corvisart was about to reply, but the Emperor
by a gesture indicated that he was to speak to him, and to
speak to him only.
"No, your Majesty, he does not seem to me ill. The
pulse is irregular, wavering a little, but nervousness would
explain that."
' ' You are certain ? Be careful. ' '
Impatient a little for as he afterwards told Duroc, he
imagined that he had to do only with a Viennese student
who, in his eagerness to see the parade, had forced his way
past a sentry or, as had happened before, had hidden in the
grounds all night Corvisart again examined Staps and
again took his wrist.
"It is quite certain, sire; he is suffering from nothing
except a slight shock to the nerves. "
"Well, my good Corvisart, this youngster has just at-
tempted to murder me. How do you explain that ? Eh ?
Is that the mark of a sound brain? " And in malicious glee
he took the physician by the ear.
Napoleon's reply may or may not have surprised Cor-
visart. His manner betrayed nothing. The steel-grey
eyes remained steady, nor did he drop the assassin's wrist
in horror. Corvisart, indeed, had long since come to see
in all life a malady; and now, before Bonaparte's irritating
insistence on Staps' madness, his mind in a tranced flash had
darted across the mental phases of Napoleon's own career.
To Corvisart, Napoleon, the greatest man on earth, was a
sick man; and in the genius which convulsed a world he saw,
point by point, the progress of two maladies, frightfully
interlaced, epilepsy and cancer. The first had triumphed
in Bonaparte's youth ; in the melancholia of Valence, in the
erotomania kindled by Josephine Beauharnais, who to Cor-
visart had, as to a confessor, revealed every secret of the
The Assassin 121
alcove, every secret of her "maniac lover " And now in
mid-life canceroid tendencies were declaring themselves.
"Which is the true madman the young assassin or the
middle-aged world-tyrant, his victim?"
The problem roused all Corvisart's interest in the
pathology of the human mind. During the recent cam-
paign he had had opportunity enough of indulging that
interest. To the prolonged rage of battle and its effects
on the human mind had been added, during the hideous
weeks in Lobau, the ravages of typhus. Hospital fevers
were peculiarly malignant in type. The Danube was in
flood. The war of the elements imitated the warfare of
men. Thunderstorms alternated with periods of torrid
heat or continuous rains. The cases of madness and
cerebral affections were unusually numerous and violent.
That of Pfeister, the Emperor's body-servant, had been
the most painful. Distracted by over-excitement and the
terrific cannonade of Wagram, he had, on the day of the
battle, rushed shrieking into the woods, and was found four
days afterwards a gibbering madman, gnawing the root of
a tree whilst he crouched stark-naked in a grave which he
had dug with his finger-nails. The contagion had spread.
Fortunately the Spaniard, Esquirol, had at that very period
abolished the savage custom of loading the mad with chains
and pinioning them to an iron staple in their solitary
dreadful cells. Corvisart had been one of the first, during
the Wagram campaign, to adopt a humaner treatment.
That Napoleon himself had been affected by the tainted
physical and the tainted moral atmosphere the physician
had not a doubt. His silences, his transports of rage, his
bursts of garrulous confidence, recalled the consular period
and the soliloquies of Pont-au-Faix; whilst the recrudes-
cence of his passion for Madame Walewska recalled only
too faithfully the erotomaniac infatuation for the over-ripe
charms of Josephine. And at this very moment, surveying
122 Schonbrunn
the Emperor furtively, Corvisart, to his anxiety, detected
symptoms which were rarely misleading the earthy com-
plexion, the toneless gaze, and at intervals a faint yellowish
foam at the corners of the mouth, which now began to twitch
incessantly.
" Bigre this is my real patient, " he muttered to himself,
seized again by the same presentiment as some seconds
ago.
Napoleon, meanwhile, had resumed his fevered walk to
and fro. He desired to prove on the spot that Staps was
insane. This, he considered, was the only answer that he
could make to Staps' accusations which, he imagined, had
affected some of his suite, especially Rapp and the republi-
can Hulin. Profoundly sceptical of man's wish for truth
in any department of human activity, how was he to trust
to the silent eloquence of fact or to the tardy justice of time
to eradicate these accusations? Again, he desired to hide
from his staff and if possible from Corvisart himself, the
distinction of this from the former attempts at assassina-
tion or former plots, imaginary or real, which Fouche had
from time to time unravelled or pretended to unravel. All
these were tainted with personal ends. But here he was
confronted by something new, something disconcerting, in-
explicable.
"England, the cabinet of St. James, is not in this," he
told himself in the interval of intense meditation. "This
is German only."
And in that German youth there was something of the
ancient world, something Greek, as he stood there, negli-
gently scornful, it seemed, his head again drooping a lit-
tle on one side, in fatigue not in shame, the eyes lowered
and half-closed, yet fixed, musing on things beyond Bona-
parte's range or perhaps, he suddenly said to himself, med-
itating merely his frustrated attempt, or the resumption of
it at some future time or even now, now and here in this
The Assassin 123
room? Why not? Seizing with a leopard-bound some
weapon, why should he not complete the design?
Napoleon had the heavy sickening sensation of a stab;
he felt the dagger point dully searching the fibres about his
heart, and ever the victim at least for a period of his own
vivid fancies, he stepped back involuntarily so deadly, yet
so incomprehensible and portentous was the force of hate
or scorn that now seemed to encircle or to emanate from
the prisoner's vicinity.
But was Corvisart the man to aid him in declaring mad
a sane man even in Austria ?
He wheeled round and looked fixedly at the physician
standing imperturbable, quietly observant, his head slightly
bent in ironic courtier-fashion. For several seconds Napo-
leon did not speak, did not stir, but, a lion about to spring,
stood studying the man whom, rightly or wrongly, he classed
with Hulin as "an unperverted Jacobin." Then with a
brief gesture pointing to the prisoner, he dropped rather
than spoke the words:
"Take him away. "
And at a sign from Savary, Friedrich Staps, accompanied
by the two aides-de-camp, walked with a light step from
the room, and, transferred to the gendarmes waiting out-
side he passed from Schonbrunn and from the general ob-
servation and knowledge of men for ever.
Napoleon being Napoleon, it was impossible for him
not to observe that the Thuringian had neither looked
round nor exhibited the slightest curiosity in his imperial
person, as though, lifted above the grandeurs and distinc-
tions of time, his thoughts were bent only upon the dark-
ness or upon the light whither he was moving, and at how
frightful a speed !
" He is young to die. "
Berthier alone caught these words which Napoleon spoke
carelessly, yet in momentary compunction. The boy's
124 Schonbrunn
simplicity and dignity, like that of a wounded duellist who
knows he has to die but studies to bear himself greatly, had
extorted his admiration. Intrepidity, indeed, was now
almost the only quality which could excite admiration in
Bonaparte. Every other admiration was dried up in
him; but this boy had intrepidity.
As soon as the prisoner had been removed, Napoleon's
suite, princes, dukes, marshals and generals, with a single
elan crowded about the Emperor with words or cries of
felicitation, each according to his temperament, his real or
feigned enthusiasm. Napoleon's well-known willingness to
receive petitions made the indignation, above all in soldiers,
very sincere.
He quickly silenced their empressement, and turned to
Corvisart.
"You are certain he knows what he is doing?"
Corvisart's face had assumed the morose aspect which
it had worn throughout the campaign. Napoleon put it
down to his jealousy of Larrey, made a baron after Lobau.
"Quite certain, your Majesty."
"Not a trace of mania not even of religious mania?"
Corvisart's smile was like a sneer.
"Who can tell the bounds of madness? And religion,
sire, is never far from madness, at least in a German. They
are a nation of dreamers and idealists. Even their scien-
tists here in Vienna talk as if the soul were a distinct entity
a guest in this inn, the body."
"Ah?"
Napoleon again looked at him scrutinisingly. He did
not like the answer. It savoured of Jacobinism. And he
did not like Corvisart's bearing.
Born of a Romanist family, and, like Duroc, a native of
the Ardennes, Corvisart had lost his faith in the Revolution
The Assassin 125
without finding it possible to believe in the Empire; but
from '93 he had kept at least one conviction, which time
only strengthened in its bitterness the conviction ex-
pressed by Fouche's inscription, carved in that year of the
Terror upon every cemetery in France "Death is an
eternal sleep." Destined for the law in his youth, but
passionate for science, above all for the writings of Buffon
and Cuvier, he had by a bold device freed himself from its
hateful drudgery, and hearing at Brussels some lectures on
anatomy, had seen in that the path to the knowledge for
which he thirsted. At the house of Barras he had met
that other perpetual malade, Josephine de Beauharnais,
and, consulted by her, he had become an habitue of her
own and Barras' circle, and there in '95 had met the hun-
gry, threadbare, taciturn, stiff-mannered, provincial artil-
leryman, Bonaparte. His attitude towards the Emperor
had retained something of that first relationship.
Divining some intention in the Emperor's persistence
and wishing also to disarm his suspicions, he now said:
"But I have not seen much of the patient, your Majesty.
I should like to examine him again. There may be a latent
neVropathie."
Napoleon's brow cleared. "Go, my good Corvisart, go.
Talk with him in the guard-house, sit beside him, question
him, win his confidence, speak to him of his home and of
his childhood, of his friends. The wild writings of the
Illuminati and the ideologues of Weimar and Berlin have
perverted him."
He took Savary aside, spoke to him some rapid words,
gave instructions. Taking Corvisart with him the due de
Rovigo then left the presence.
XI
Napoleon resumed his pacing of the floor. His false
calm gradually disappeared. His features worked inces-
126 Schonbrunn
santly; his glances darted suspicion. He seemed ringed
in by traitors. England was forgotten. He had before his
imagination a more insidious peril.
This was the Tugendbund, the Bond of Valour, the
League of Virtue, that singular secret society which was
everywhere in Germany, but everywhere disappeared the
instant it was approached. For nearly two years, by the
aid of Davout's spies and Fouche's police, he had been
observing its subterranean operations. Its invisible but
omnipresent activity recalled the action of the Jacobins
during the Terror. Its Board of Six sat at Konigsberg, but
it had its branches in every town and principality from the
Oder to the Rhine and from the Baltic to the Styrian Alps.
Its ostensible aim was the regeneration of the Father-
land. Its abettors, it was alleged, sought at once to restore
religion and purify taste, and to fight against corruption in
political as in social life ; but its real design was to overthrow
Napoleon. The King himself, Frederick William III.,
was said to be its Grand Master. The Queen of Prussia,
the beautiful Louise, was its Armida, was suspected of
inspiring its leaders by enticements similar to those by
which Marie Antoinette seduced the leaders of the Revolu-
tion. Minister vom Stein, le nomme Stein, of Napoleon's
dispatch from Madrid, was, it was rumoured, its Mirabeau;
but every man prominent in German public life had en-
couraged or joined this infernal conspiracy Hardenberg,
Niebuhr, Scharnhorst, Goltz, Stadion, Blucher, Dalberg
himself, the Primate, Napoleon's most servile flatterer.
It had its agents in every university in Germany Gottin-
gen, Heidelberg, Jena, Marburg, Tubingen. How could it
fail to extend its venomous influence to the great University
of Vienna and its three thousand students? Another of its
reputed agents, the celebrated August von Schlegel, the
friend of Madame de Stael, had lectured to those very
students less than a year ago.
The Assassin 127
"Fanaticism in the blood of youth works like a subtle
flame," Napoleon reasoned, "prompting to heroism or to
deadly error." The poet Collin and his brother he had
had his eye on them and their songs and their writings
since February last. Translations of their stuff had been
distributed in Paris itself. He had ordered their arrest the
day of his arrival at Schonbrunn, but it was too late. The
conspiracy had drawn other elements to itself the dis-
content with the feudal tyrannies, was as violent in the
Germany of Frederick William and Francis II. as in
the France of Louis XVI. Schiller's Robbers, and even
the melodramatic patriotism of Firbellin, the village-born
youth loved by his mistress, condemned by her lord to be
thrown alive into a smelting furnace, expressed phases of
this social and political discontent.
But the peace the terms of peace? What would be the
effect of this attempted murder upon them?
He stopped his walk and stood.
"Send Nicas here."
The famous courier, whose midnight ride through the
Wienerwald had extorted the admiration and the laughter
of Vienna and the army, was in waiting. He entered at
once, light, agile, with the look of an explorer or traveller,
the finest figure except Favrol's in the room.
Nicas seemed to have expected the summons. Indeed,
since eleven that morning, when Prince John of Liechten-
stein and Count Bubna left Schonbrunn, he had been
lounging about the palace with his instructions known and
sealed, waiting for this order. For just as in war Napoleon
always had plan behind plan lightly held within his brain,
so in diplomacy he had scheme behind scheme ready to be
sprung on his adversary at any unforeseen moment.
Napoleon took him to the end of the room, but almost
instantly returned, and some seconds later Nicas, on a
black powerful horse, the same as those upon which the
128 Schonbrunn
Chasseurs de la Garde were mounted but with better
staying power, was on his road.
Those who saw him gallop through Vienna twenty
minutes later saw that he left the city, not by the road that
went to Brientz, but by a road which went to Altenburg.
And with a thrill of excitement men asked for his figure
had become known in Vienna "Has the peace been signed
then, and is he the bearer of the news to Petersburg and to
the Czar Alexander, or to Warsaw?"
Meanwhile, in the presence chamber, at a sign from
Duroc, the Grand Chamberlain, several officers had retired.
There now remained only a select group composed of Na-
poleon's great officials or most trusted generals.
Napoleon's aspect had not changed, unless that after dis-
patching Nicas his expression had lightened somewhat.
His eye fell on Berthier. "Ah, you rogue ! " he exclaimed
laughing. "What became of you and your Mameluke
Guard? You made a run to the town? You have your
plots with Maret?"
"But your Majesty " Berthier expostulated.
He took hold of Berthier by the ear. The demonstration
of affection seemed sincere. Tears stood in Berthier's eyes.
"Yes, yes, I know," Napoleon went on. "You are both
alike ; you must have your fingers in every pie. That devil
of a Maret, " he continued, his good humour flowing out like
sunshine, "turned up at Soma Sierra on a November night,
half frozen 'Sire! Sire!' He seemed to think it a crime
that I had fired a shot when he was not there to see. Le
bon Maret!" And he laughed again.
In this deliverance from a great danger a pleasant sense
of well-being had at first diffused itself over him. But the
mere mention of Spain was vitriol. The cloud returned to
his brow, darker and more ominous than before.
"These hired assassins it is not against me but against
my brave grenadiers that they are sent. You saw their
The Assassin 129
wounds to-day. You heard their cries. But they shall at
/east have bread, my brave ones. I will rule Spain with a
rod of iron. She has refused my good. She shall know my
evil. I will turn her cities into garrisons. I will stall my
horses in her monasteries, and her cathedrals I will make
granaries for my armies."
And releasing the Prince de Neuchatel's ear which till
that moment he had been affectionately holding, he pushed
him almost rudely aside. The real storm, which during
Corvisart's presence had announced itself only by prelimi-
nary flashes now hurtled over the heads of the courtiers and
soldiers.
"The ingratitude of men!" he suddenly burst out.
"L'infamie humaine that is the maxim which down the
centuries each man has to learn, and to each it is surprising
as death! What gratitude had Caesar or the son of Philip?
And I, whom can I trust?"
And turning sharply, and glancing alternately at Berthier,
Duroc, Bertrand, Rapp and Hulin, "Fidelity? Where is
fidelity?" he exclaimed, unconsciously imitating Nero's
cry as the sword of the pretorian entered his breast, "I
find egoism everywhere. What is this I hear of Soult?
I hunted the English leopards to the sea. I go, and the
English are back in Spain. And that is the moment
which this fanfaron of a Soult chooses to make himself a
king! When he ought to be on Wellington's traces he
organises conspiracies in Oporto, talks like an avocat,
sends me a committee requesting me to give Portugal a
monarch King Nicholas I.! For what dynasty but that
of Soult can succeed the House of Braganza eh? Le
brave Soult! And whilst the courtiers are kissing the
hands of King Nicholas, the English cannon send them
skipping and I have lost Oporto."
He darted to a table on which a map of Germany was
lying outspread. It was the same that he had used that
9
130 Schonbrunn
morning with Liechtenstein and Bubna. Flinging it on
the floor Napoleon bent over another, a map of Spain.
"There, there," he cried, pointing to a spot, "there is
Wellington, or there was Wellington three weeks ago: to-
day for anything I know he may be sitting in Madrid.
And what does Joseph do ? How does the King my brother
act? Wellington has not more than thirty thousand men
and he is three hundred miles from Torres Vedras, his base;
yet Joseph does nothing; he writes to me that he has only
ten thousand troops. Ten thousand! Good God! Has
then Wellington no communications? And why did he
publish his numbers to the world? Am I a conqueror? Yet
at Eckmiihl I had only one against five ; but in the orders of
the day I declared that I was fifteen to ten, and my brave
grenadiers fought as if it were a jest. Soldiers do not
reason. They believe. "
Hulin did a piece of mental arithmetic and suddenly
looked at Rapp. Even at three hundred miles from his
base Wellington must still have had twelve thousand to
fifteen thousand men. A sarcastic light had risen in his
eyes. He had been through the Italian campaign with
Bonaparte. This was not the spirit in which Bonaparte
at that period, at Arcola or at Rivoli, addressed his troops.
Was Napoleon's brain becoming dulled, Hulin asked
himself, or was he simply talking for effect, unscrupulous
in argument, haranguing the imaginary Joseph?
Napoleon pushed aside the map and, his hands behind
his back, began to walk up and down.
XII
All were congratulating themselves that the storm was
over and Duroc was about to remind the Emperor that
he had eaten nothing since breakfast, when on a sudden
the thunder gathered again, and this time it burst over Ber-
The Assassin 131
thier, who, with his arms folded, stood in perfect uncon-
sciousness that this attitude, good enough in Napoleon's
absence, was ridiculous and supremely irritating in Napo-
leon's presence. It prevented the Emperor taking that
attitude himself.
But with a curious cunning or malignity he did not at
once attack Berthier directly.
"Ingratitude and imbecility are my world." And as
though appealing to the Prince de Neuchatel for support
he looked at him searchingly. "Nature should have given
me a hundred heads as she gave Briareus a hundred hands.
I loved Marmont as a son. Yet you know, you know his
fatuities at Laa there where a single squadron of Radet-
sky's hussars might have destroyed the bridge and made
my victory and the death of twenty thousand men in vain.
And in Passau and in Antwerp, in Madrid and in Rome
why am I not there myself? Why am I still in Vienna?
Why am I not with my armies in Spain? It is you, Ber-
thier, you who are to blame."
Berthier unclasped his arms and stepped back, staring at
his master. The latter poured on the astonished Prince de
Neuchatel a torrent of picturesque invective, now a single
epithet, now an unforgettable laughter-provoking phrase,
caricaturing, ridiculing in every possible manner Berthier's
disposition of the army in April last, scattered over an
area of sixty miles.
" Dites, dites ! If the Archduke had stood in your council
of war as your most trusted adviser, what other dispositions
would you have taken ? You could have been annihilated ;
you ought to have been annihilated."
And as though he intended himself to supplement the
Archduke's neglected duty and annihilate Berthier now,
he advanced upon him ; but suddenly checked himself with
a gesture of mingled grief and discouragement.
Berthier, "the heaven-born chief of the Staff," the con-
132 Schonbrunn
stant lover of Madam d'Este*, a passion perplexing to his
master as to himself, was a man who in service found his
greatness as others in command ; in his youth the follower
of Lafayette and freedom's daybreak in the West, the hero
of Lodi, extravagant, indefatigable, squandering a million
a year.
Napoleon resumed.
"I came to Donauworth. I had to fight five battles in
five days. I stormed Ratisbon. I had to lead my armies
to Vienna against a massed enemy, three hundred thousand
of them, and I had to do this as rapidly as a man travels
in a time of peace, fighting eleven battles and thirty-seven
combats. Do you suppose that is good for a nation or for
an army ? And, but for you, it might all have been avoided."
If this were acting, General Hulin thought indignantly,
it was greater than Talma's. If Napoleon actually knew,
if at that moment he was actually conscious that Berthier's
dispositions were due to Napoleon's own mistake or to the
failure of a semaphore message, how could he or any man
speak in those tones ?
Another brusque change in Napoleon's ideas stopped
Hulin's morose speculations.
"But I should do everything myself, everything. In
Paris, my capital, nothing is right. Cambaceres does
nothing; Clarke does nothing. My minister for war
allows the English to believe that I have only fifteen
thousand men to spare and if they care to land at Flushing
the road to Paris is open. My ministers ! By the God of
battles, they will lie in bed and snore till the English wake
them! And Fouch what does that traitor mean?"
He looked round for Savary forgetting for the moment
that the due de Rovigo had left the room with Corvisart.
Duroc explained. The explanation appeared to bring
Napoleon's thoughts back to the incident of the morning.
But now he took it up from yet another standpoint.
The Assassin 133
"He stuffs his imagination with Roman histories, that
young hothead. But in Paris itself books appear every
week, newspapers appear every morning and of what are
they full? The History of La Vendee, Suetonius and
Tacitus, and the falsified, distorted lives of the Roman
Caesars is that the reading that Fouche thinks most
suitable for the great French nation, the successor of Rome?
It is to place daggers in the hands of my subjects. /
become Tiberius, Nero, Domitian que scais-je? If this
is done in Paris what wonder that I find a Brutus at
Schonbrunn!"
Berthier, though no ally of Fouche, made a conciliatory,
half-protesting gesture and glanced insinuatingly at Duroc.
Both dreaded the due d'Otranto. Was not the Emperor
exaggerating?
"Do you wish proofs?" Napoleon burst out furiously.
"Tiens, I will give you proofs."
He sketched with amazing accuracy and rapidity the
books which had appeared during the campaign, especially
the writings of Beauchamp, a former agent de police, who,
simulating the desire to return to Napoleon's service, had
taken to the writing of "history," and into a brochure
upon La Vendee had woven an appeal for a rising against
Napoleon, the gaoler of the Pope, similar to the rising of La
Rochejaquelin against Robespierre. Again, in Rapin's
treatise on Roman Law Savary's secret police had dis-
covered this sentence, and used it against Fouchd's secret
police "Thus Tiberius, till now a friend of the Senate and
of the Republic, when once he had embrued his hands in
the blood of the high-born Germanicus, turned to tyranny
and waded deeper and deeper in blood." To an unpre-
judiced eye there was nothing in this that could offend the
most susceptible of tyrants, but Savary, tormented himself,
it was said, by the injured phantom of d'Enghien, had
pointed out to Napoleon how easy it was to interpret the
134 Schonbrunn
paragraph and the succeeding chapter as a deadly satire
upon his own history since March, 1804.
"Am I Tiberius?" he exclaimed, this time appealing to
Duroc as though to destroy the effect of Berthier's re-
monstrance. "Is this Capri? But Fouche is conspiracy
incarnate. And Murat that popinjay, ce geai de Murat
is still his tool. 'No conspiracy without a sword' is
axiomatic, and in the conspiracy against me the King of
Naples ii that sword. Murat? He would sit upon my
throne mine that plumaged cock who thinks he has the
pinions of an eagle! And now, if Murat fails, Bernadotte
will serve. Bernadotte! The blase old ruffian who nearly
lost me Jena. And why was he not at Eylau? And why
was he late for Austerlitz? Every grenadier in the army
knows why we had to wait three days in the terrible Decem-
ber weather, with neither food nor brandy, and then arise
and defeat two Emperors and the armies of two Empires.
And now, that is the man who issues his proclamations
without my permission and demands money money
money, but will do nothing to earn it. Does no blasted
tree grow by the Scheldt to which this Judas might hang
himself? But it is the same with Massena, the same with
Ney, with Junot, with Augereau, with Suchet, with Murat."
And he enumerated the sums disbursed annually to these
marshals. Berthier alone had two millions a year; Davout
900,000; Massena 1,200,000; Marmont 700,000. Certainly
there seemed a reason for Bernadotte's exclamation long
afterwards: "Once I was a marshal of France. Now I
am merely King of Sweden. "
"Gold, gold! I would need a Golconda, and have but
a Spain. The ingratitude and rapacity of men! Was
Genghis or Timour surrounded by such vultures? Spain
costs me millions and yields me nothing. I have spent
seven hundred and ninety millions this year, and in 1808
I spent seven hundred and sixty-five millions. How much
The Assassin 135
did I get from Spain? Not a sou, and it absorbs some of
my bravest troops. I should be there amongst them I
should be there amongst them. ..."
Anger now fled from his voice ; it was full of nothing but
self-reproach.
Berthier chose this moment to let fall the question which
for several minutes had been in his head:
"Where should your Majesty not be?"
And Napoleon, as if conscious that he had exceeded the
measure in his rebukes, ignored the flattery and once more
spoke in a tone of bitter self -exculpation.
"If I were what my enemies and the English say, do you
think my soldiers would not know it? They see me every
hour of every day. Or do you suppose that they fought
as they have fought these twelve heroic years from Arcola
to Ratisbon and Wagram for three pence a day? No, it is
because I speak to their souls, to something in them pro-
found, mysterious. They accuse me of being a slave to my
ambition. Ambition? I and my ambition are one. How
can I be its slave unless I am slave to myself? Do they
imagine that I am a Romanoff? Do they think that I
would commit murder for a crown? And a throne! What
is a throne? The throne of Clovis was the stump of an
oak. And the sceptre of the first of the Capets was, like
the sceptre of Agamemnon, cut from the nearest hedge.
A throne! On the day of my coronation I had no rest
until I had torn my robe to tatters and kicked them about
the floor. Duroc is my witness. I could neither think nor
act in the gew-gaws. I could not even feel myself a man. "
And in a voice like that of a man in a trance, Napoleon
uttered the singular words :
"If I could but have ten more years or even five.
With peace in Europe I could do much in five years. Paris,
Europe, Asia, and then But too much is against me.
I have come too late. The fire is extinct. "
136 Schonbrunn
But caught again into the vortex of self-exculpatory
denunciation, he hurried on:
"It is the kings that are to blame. The kings have
vowed my ruin. They will not give peace to Europe. To
cover their own crimes they accuse me of crime. Assassins,
they declare that I am an assassin. The Czar accused me
of the murder of d'Enghien and put his court in mourning.
Where was his virtue, his indignation and his abhorrence of
foul play when the cut-throats sent by Pitt were lurking
round Petersburg ready to strangle his father, my friend
and ally, Paul I.? And Gustavus IV.? He too calls me
assassin. But he is fallen, and I do not make war upon the
fallen. And these Prussians, dreamers and cretins they
make an idol of the Mecklenburg-Strelitz princess that
infamous House Frederick William's Queen, Louisa.
They lie and lie about my interview with her. She is thirty-
five and already passte and Frederick William is a year
older than I am. They had come to years of discretion at
Austerlitz, both of them. Where then was the great-souled
Queen Louisa? Where were the Prussian Hector and
Andromaque when, on the morning after the battle, I made
Haugwitz demand that Prussia should seize Hanover?"
His laugh was terrible the laugh of the Hebrew; but
his brow remained black, and he walked up and down ab-
sorbed in still blacker reflections.
"You appeal to laws?" he said flashing round and ad-
dressing an imaginary throng of adversaries. "What do
I care for your laws, human or divine so called? Laws,
human or divine, are temporary contracts between tem-
porary and changing aggregations of men. The ancients
made the gods themselves bend before Destiny. And my
politics is Destiny. The laws that I obey spring from
within me. My will, withdrawn and apart, unites in the
dreadful solitudes with the inmost will of the worlds and
then I act and I then am Destiny. "
The Assassin 137
He resumed the attack on the court of Berlin.
"His Majesty of Prussia at my bidding picked Hanover
out of England's pocket when England's back was turned,
and your Queen Louisa, your Andromaque, flung her
white arms round the pickpocket Hector's neck your
tearful heroine, beautiful in her disaster, heroic, unyielding,
constant! And elated by the heroic success she gave a
dance on that very jour de Van; she was insolent to my
ambassador. The two criminals, with Hanover safely
pocketed, dreamed that Prussia single-handed could now
meet the victor of Austerlitz. Jena taught them a lesson
Jena. But only for a time. The wise remember Des-
tiny's chastisements; the fool quickly forgets all save his
folly, and Prussia is that fool. She is my ally; yet a
Hohenlohe fought against me at[Eckmuhl and galloped back
to Berlin like a jackal to its lair. So are they all, all your
hereditary kings and princes, Habsburg, Hohenzollern,
Romanoff, your English Guelph and Spanish Bourbon!
Europe is one huge Augean stable. And Prussia? Prussia
is the foulest corner of it all. But they shall know, they
shall know what it is to arm against me the fanatic's
dagger."
A tracery of ideas swept across Napoleon's face. He was
sick of the word "Revolution"; for his would-be assassin of
that morning was a Revolutionist; and he could not now
speak of his dynasty without betraying a secret that he
wished to maintain until at least he had returned to Paris.
Yet something he must say; for he was wrought to the
height, and with a curious blending of craft, prudence, and
extreme audacity, feeling a joy in thus expressing his
contempt for men by uttering truths perhaps profound,
but to those who heard him unintelligible, or, if intelligible,
certain to be regarded with furious opposition. Danger
Bonaparte had rarely shunned; and this was danger. And
now crushing in his hands his old hat, already soft and
138 Schonbrunn
kneaded, though provided every three months with a new
white silk lining, he stopped, and with that oratory which
at these moments, aided by the real mystery and power of
his personality, always electrified:
"Do you know what it is against which I war? It is
against Patriotism; it is against Nationality. Patriotism is
the eating ulcer of humanity. War alone can cauterize
the sore. Like range behind range of mountains I see new
wars arise; mine are only the prelude. "
Hulin lifted his head. Standing with both his hands
lightly poised on the gilt edges of a richly carved table he
looked at his master.
"A federated Europe with France at its head? There is
a thought here, " Hulin said to himself and waited.
But Bonaparte permitting a storm of ideas to pass un-
spoken, Hulin saw suddenly the Emperor's face flush, his
eyes lightened, the sound which his hands made twist-
ing and untwisting his hat, soft as it was, could almost
be heard in the silence. His right leg was trembling
convulsively.
Duroc, fearing another epileptic attack like that in
August which had brought Corvisart flying to Schonbrunn,
crept nearer him, but stopped at the Emperor's next
words.
"But you do not understand. Not one of you under-
stands. What? Is there one of you who would not have
been glad in his very soul had that dagger sunk to the hilt
in my breast? Is there one of you? There was a Ganelon
in the army of Charlemagne. Why should not Schonbrunn
have been my Roncesvalles? To-night perhaps it may be;
these walls are full of daggers."
His face at this moment had the look of a death-mask, the
earthy pallor, the tintless vitreous gaze, the lashless eye-
lids, the forehead without eyebrows, as if thought and life
together had receded into some inaccessible heights or
The Assassin 139
remotenesses from which he surveyed the whole course and
end of human life and history.
"That venomous boy, hired by Austria or hired by
Prussia, or by the Jesuits at the bidding of Cardinal Pacca
what do I know? Perhaps in collusion with my own
followers, my own ministers for it needs but this that
one of you should betray me. Austria? But they shall
not succeed. They splinter their daggers on adamant.
You give me counsels unasked, you din my ears with your
snoring banalities moderation, peace with England, to
come to terms with Liechtenstein, the inconveniences of
the Continental System. Is it that I do not know them,
these inconveniences I?"
He sought for words. His eyes darted ineffectual light-
nings about the room. The words came.
" You warn me? You? You would dictate my duties,
thrust yourself between my goal and me? You would
frustrate my designs, moderate my course, even guide my
path mine! You, you would prescribe a path to the
avalanche?" he exclaimed, grasping at the metaphor which
had occurred to him on his ride. "You deform, be-monster
yourselves by your folly, not me. "
Suddenly he rushed at Berthier and seizing the lapel of
his heavily embroidered coat he dragged him to the window
which looked out across the garden and fountains, the
statues and parterres, bathed now in the last light of the
October afternoon, and, pointing to the sky, Napoleon
exclaimed :
"Do you see that star? Do you see it?" he repeated in
a voice that sent a shudder to the heart.
Berthier, thinking that his master was mad at last, or
that he was the victim of a cataleptic attack similar to that
of August, stammered some vague words his sight was
not so keen as his Majesty's; stars, by ordinary men, could
be seen at mid-day only from the bottom of a pit.
14 Schonbrunn
"You do not see it? Yet you counsel me; would control
my course? I see it, moi. And that star is the ruler of my
fate. It is the star of my destiny guiding me on, on, on! "
Trembling violently, he released Berthier, and struggled
against the emotion convulsing him; then, furious at his
own loss of self-command, he stuttered fiercely the word:
"Sortez."
He sank back, shuddering and shuddering again. His
features, sickening pale, were convulsed. The faint dirtyish
foam gathered more thickly about his lips.
At a commanding sign from Duroc the room was cleared.
He and Berthier remained alone with the Emperor.
CHAPTER V
THE MIND OF A CITY
IN Vienna that afternoon the ferment provoked by the
conflicting rumours was extreme. War was judged to
be inevitable. The Bourse within half an hour registered a
fall of three per cent. The shops in the main thoroughfares,
in the Graben and Karnthnerstrasse, closed as usual for
the mid-day meal, had not re-opened. Thousands of
citizens paraded the streets or stood in excited groups,
especially in the Alleegasse and its vicinity, awaiting
the arrival of Berthier, Prince de Neuchatel. Hundreds
thronged to the Cathedral or to the great churches of St.
Michael and St. Dominic to pray. For what?
Towards evening the cafe's, restaurants, bierhallen, were
packed. At the Cafe" Che'nier, recently opened in the
Kohlmarkt and frequented by the middle class, the crowd
outside became so large and so menacing that it was twice
dispersed by the gendarmerie. Their new uniforms, an
invention of Napoleon's satellite, exposed them to the
jeers and hoots or to the witticisms of the mob.
Inside the cafe* a babel of guttural voices drowned the
tzigane orchestra.
"I saw the blood on his vest. With my own eyes I saw
the blood!" a Greek "banker," really a money-lender,
asseverated, waving his plump brown hand covered with
141
142 Schonbrunn
rings. "I was standing beside the Prince de Ponte Corvo,
who is my very good friend. Napoleon threw up his arms,
then dropped them, so, so, so" imitating the gesture
"closed his eyes, staggered and was about to fall when the
Prince de Ponte Corvo "
But a ponderous, hulking figure, a Viennese silk-merchant,
interrupted the speaker. "The Prince de Ponte Corvo, did
you say?" he began with slow emphasis. "Nonsense!
Bernadotte is in Belgium. I read it in the Gazette yester-
day. " And he muttered contemptuously, "These usur-
ers are all alike, liars or coiners to a man. "
The dispute became bitter. Several of the Viennese
took the side of their fellow-citizen against the hated Greek ;
others, who had borrowed or hoped to borrow from the
latter, asserted that they too had recognized Bernadotte;
some had seen him that morning, others had passed him
yesterday riding in the Prater.
But a new-comer who had forced his way through the
cordon gave a new trend to their ideas. He was a great
timber-merchant and the barges of his fleet were known on
every jetty of the Danube from Rustchuk to Ratisbon.
"Napoleon?" he began mysteriously, rolling out the name.
" No mortal hand struck him down. His time is up. Ten
years ; ten years of power and glory ; gold and women and
palaces and gardens. He's got 'em all. The demon has
kept his bond. But what of that? The time is up. What
hasn't happened to-day will happen to-morrow. Ten
years ago to-morrow, Saturday, I4th October, 1799, General
Buonaparte came back from Egypt. He landed at Frejus.
Why was he not shot for deserting his army? For the same
reason that he was not guillotined when, a few weeks later, he
conspired against the Republic. For the same reason that he
was defeated at Marengo, yet victorious. It is Hell's doing.
It is his compact with Hell. Until this time to-morrow, I4th
October, he is invulnerable. But after to-morrow "
The Mind of a City 143
This account, which explained everything, made a deep
impression and a man who had not yet spoken now asked :
"Can any one inform me whether that story of Madame
Walewska having borne the Corsican blackguard a son
in the apartments sacred to our blessed empress Maria
Theresa, is true or false?"
He was a thick-set, combative individual, and though a
Styrian he had Magyar blood. He too was a merchant,
but traded with the Ionian islands trafficking in the sul-
phur and marbles of Corfu, in the currant vines of Zante,
and for the last two years in the spices of Cephalonia.
"That can I, " the barge-owner retorted. "It was no son,
but a monster born the evening of the demon's apparition.
It is whispered that she too had abandoned her body to the
embraces of the demon. His son, not Bonaparte's. Bona-
parte can't have a son. "
All except the Greek crossed themselves, some phleg-
matically, some with looks of horror.
"Has the Tempter still those tastes then?"
The other nodded significantly.
An old fellow with a long thick dirtyish white beard said
in a greasy voice: "It fulfils the scriptures. It fulfils the
prophecy which was on every lip on his birthday fe"tes
' The black eagle shall raven no longer, struck down within
Wien's walls.'"
The prophecy was not in the Old Testament; but it was
the most famous of the anagrams formed by blending
Napoleon's full name with the motto of the city itself, and
the whole serious company became absorbed in the discus-
sion of omens and portents, prophecies and comparisons of
Napoleon and Suleiman, and the siege of Vienna by the
Turks with the sieges of Vienna by the French.
"You speak of the I4th October. Let me tell you about
the 1 5th, the day after to-morrow, when Suleiman the
Magnificent was forced to raise the siege of Vienna." Who
144 Schonbrunn
could tell what deep plans were not in the Archduke
Charles's head, or in that of the Archduke Johann there
behind the Russbach?
And with a simultaneous impulse of bourgeois loyalty,
they rose heavily to their feet and shouted gutturally
"Es lebe der Herzog Karl; es lebe der Kaiser; es lebe der
Herzog Johann! Hoch! Hoch! Hoch!"
II
In the Villars cafe*, on the other hand, situated in the
Stephanplatz, a very different state of feeling prevailed.
The Cafe* Villars was the rendezvous of fashion, and though
not by any means crowded this afternoon, for the majority
of its habitue's were with the army or with the Emperor, it
still presented a scene of great animation. A fine orchestra
was playing. The guests were talking in low tones and
drinking coffee or sherbets or wine. Here the attack on
Napoleon was pooh-poohed. It was even insinuated that
it was a got-up affair, designed as an excuse for breaking off
negotiations or more subtly to dissemble, by the appear-
ance of his personal danger, his real weakness and an in-
tended concession to Austria.
"Nothing is too diabolically subtle for Bonaparte," a
brother of Lan-Lan's observed; "but the affair does not
strike me as a fake. Bonaparte rode away. If it had
been a fake he would have become histrionic and talked
Plutarch. It was Savary who arrested the assassin. I
saw him taken to the guard-house. I thought he had
been stealing."
Lan-Lan's brother had a face less oval than his sister's, but
he had her soft voice and half-humorous dogmatism of
manner; he had her long eyelashes, and their upward curl
was very visible as he blinked before a broad shaft of sun-
light that suddenly flooded through an open door across the
The Mind of a City 145
room, lighting up with phantasmagoric distinctness the
inlaid patterns on chairs and tables, glasses, bottles, the
faces of the Austrians seated around them.
The report that Staps was a Viennese student was dis-
missed with the sententious comment, "Vienna might breed
a Caesar or a Sulla, but a Brutus never."
Here also the conversation settled upon the probable
effect of this real or imaginary conspiracy upon the pro-
spects of peace. Would the Archduke be reconciled to his
brother, Stadion replace Metternich, and the war be recom-
menced ? Such a war, it was admitted, could only end in the
fall of Bonaparte or in the erasure of Austria from the map of
Europe. One man, a councillor of Mines, stated his opin-
ion categorically.
"Begin the war again? And why? To please England?
To please Prussia ? How long is Austria to act the gladiator ?
It is all very well for the Archduke Charles to cry, 'The
freedom of Europe has taken refuge under our banners.'
The freedom of Europe! Freedom is a dangerous word and
should be left to the Jacobins. What is 'Europe'? A
name. Five bloody battles in one year. Austria has done
her part."
"Besides," said another, placing his epigram once more,
"the Archduke is played out. He began as a second
Eugene; he ends as a second Mack. "
So in the cafe's men talked and conjectured, and in private
houses, where they sat watching the hands of the ladies at
their enfilage or mizzling the picking apart of gold bro-
cade the same conjecture, varied a little, went on.
Towards the dinner hour, which in Vienna at that period
was about six o'clock, an approximation to the truth be-
came known; and in hundreds of families that evening, in
the city and in the suburbs, one mysterious word passed
from lip to lip.
"The Tugendbund? It is a reality then?"
146 Schonbrunn
m
That same evening the Opera House in the Karnthner-
strasse was crowded. Members of the nobility and of the
leading families of Vienna had begun to slip back to the
city and now occupied their boxes or sat incognito in the
stalls, entered under various false names on the Governor's,
Count Andre"ossy's register. The attaches of the Russian
ambassador, Czartorysky, and the prominent members of
the Russian colony, the Ostrakovs, the Gradins, the Petrow-
skis, refusing to submit any longer to the boredom of Press-
burg or the filth of Buda Pesth, were there almost to a man,
relying on the friendship of their master with Napoleon.
Many of the boxes and almost all the fauteuils were occupied
by French officers quartered in the houses of the owners.
French officers also mixed with the Viennese in the huge and
dimly lighted parterre.
The piece was Co si fan tutti; but only a few virtuosi, or
partisans of the new school, listened. Mozart's music,
even this, the gayest of his operas, the least tinged with
"Mozartian melancholy," was to French and to Italian
ears in 1809 heavy, slow and uninspired, and in some por-
tions barbarous and absurd, as the E flat Symphony or the
Finale to Don Giovanni. Great music, these critics de-
clared, had come to an end with Cimarosa. Pergolese and
he had found no successors, and, except Mayer and Baer,
Germans in blood but Italians in manner, not even an
effective imitator.
But to-night the question occupying every mind was still
the probable effects of the sensational incident of that morn-
ing upon the peace negotiations.
In a box on the right-hand side of the stage, on the same
side as the Imperial box but a tier higher, sat the old Count
Esterthal and two French aides-de-camp, one of whom was
Favrol, the other Colonel Legros, a cavalry officer of the
The Mind of a City 147
swashbuckler type. He was aide-de-camp to Oudinot,
successor of Lannes in the command of the Second Corps.
It was now the end of the first act. The wish to talk in-
stead of listening had become universal, alike in the par-
terre, in the stalls, and in the boxes. The stage manager
had repeatedly appeared and been as repeatedly sent
back amid impatient or angry shouts of "Attendez!
Attendez!"
In the Esterthal box the conversation, studiedly avoiding
politics, had turned upon music and the drama. Favrol
admired Haydn and was an enthusiast for Mozart. He had
had, he once told Amalie laughingly, but three passions in
his life, Mozart, Cimarosa, and Shakespeare. And in herself,
though he had never had the courage to tell her this, he had
discovered something of each of his passions the reckless
joy and rich laughter of Cimarosa, Mozart's ethereal melan-
choly, and the foreshadowings of that energy and passion,
the desire for which had driven him from the vapid liter-
ature of his time to study day and night the Italy of the
Renaissance and the tragedies of Ford and Webster, Tour-
neur, Marlowe and Shakespeare.
The old Count, on the other hand, detested everything
modern, the new German poetry and the new German
music. He called Schiller "a Jacobin," and Goethe "an
enemy of religion," and Werner "a maniac." But he liked
the military plays of Ayrenhof, which Favrol styled "head-
quarters timber," and he praised the simple and homely
pathos of the Suabian, Konrad Grubel. Rentzdorf's art
the Count simply refused to discuss.
"We Germans," the old aristocrat declared, after the
momentary silence caused by Rentzdorf's name, "read too
much, write too much, think too much. What is this chat-
ter about the Aufklarung and these philosophies of enlight-
enment? Sensible men despise such mountebankism. We
have had enough of Josephinism. The doctrine of equality
148 Schonbrunn
would require society to begin at the beginning with each
new generation. Men are not equal. That doctrine cost us
the Netherlands: it cost us Italy. Now we are about to
lose Illyria. And why?"
Favrol had a singular sensation. He ceased to be a sol-
dier sitting by right of conquest in a captured city. He was
merely the son of a small landed proprietor of Languedoc
talking to a member of the oldest and haughtiest, if stupid-
est and most bigoted caste in Europe. Yet he had neither
the power to answer nor the will to laugh, so actual and so
unbridgeable was the gulf separating him from this man
and from his convictions. And what if Count Esterthal's
convictions were an anticipation of that "judgment of
posterity" upon the French Revolution to which each fac-
tion whether in triumph or beside the guillotine, had suc-
cessively appealed?
"But Colonel Legros cannot see the parterre," Count
Esterthal said.
With a courtesy full of irony he forced the aide to come
forward whilst he stepped back himself, leaving the two
French officers to study the house.
The scene they looked on had in its distinction and variety
no equal in Europe; for here were grace, rank, richness of
costume, famous names, reputations military and civil;
and here too every effect that woman's seduction can impart
to variousness of origin, temper, pose, or attitude. To
Favrol its seduction to-night was extreme; but poignant
too was the impression of its transitoriness ; for this that
moved there so full of life was to him in his present mood
unsubstantial as a picture cast by the rising sun upon a mist
above a cataract, to-morrow to be replaced by another, and
yet another, eternally, cycle beyond cycle; and out there in
other worlds, myriads of them crawling blindly round my-
riads of suns, in their mad flame dance the same unmean-
ing drama youth, passion, glory, age, and the grave
The Mind of a City 149
monotonous as the season's alternations, monotonous as
day and night, monotonous as all things, as all things.
Nevertheless, for a second or two, the sheer sensuous
appeal lifted his spirit to that region which the medisevalists
name "the heaven of pure joy" verum gaudium coeleste.
An unseen, mystic trumpet-call, the triumph of the existent,
the spirit of vital joy, laughed there, murderous, inexorable,
whispering in those voices, pulsating in those white forms
as once it had pulsated, murderous, inexorable, in the rangers
of the forests and the night, the tiger and the puma.
"The beginning and the end, alpha and omega," Favrol
said, turning away.
The glistening black eyes, vigorous moustache, olive
skin warmed by the sun, and red mouth of Legros confronted
him.
"What's that old poll parrot been talking about?" the
aide-de-camp asked Favrol in a husky whisper.
"Art."
"Art! Holy Moses! What I want is a woman, a real
live girl. I'd rather talk about these Viennese high-flyers
where's the old poll's daughter? What did she leave the
box for? Hell and lightnings, did you see her look when I
squeezed her arm? But I'll bring her down a peg. I'll
teach her to respect an officer of la Gr-r-rande Anne'e!
What's the matter?"
"Nothing," Favrol answered indifferently, "but you'd
better not forget what happened to Gavroche. "
Gavroche three weeks ago had been sentenced to death
by Napoleon for offering an insult to the Princess Esterhazy
within the precincts of Schonbrunn itself, and had only
been respited on the urgent intercession of the entire staff.
"Oh, I didn't mean that, " and twirling his moustaches to
vertical points he said with an air of tipsy gravity, " Charles-
Aristide Legros is too much a man of honour to squeeze a
woman against her will a second time. All I meant was ' '
150 Schonbrunn
Favrol looked down at the stalls. In the crowd which
was increasing amongst the fauteuils he suddenly saw the
Countess Amalie. She was in white; and to his eyes her
dress, from the ostrich plumes above her hair down to the
white silk shoes, became a shimmering cloud. No other
woman in that room was quite like her the brow, the fine
nostrils, the poise of the classic head, the symmetries of the
figure, shoulders, waist, and hips. Beauty streamed from
that woman, environing her with a raiment of sorcery; yes,
of her that word could be spoken.
A deep melancholy invaded Favrol; an aria of Pergolese
sang in his ears like a refrain from an irrevocable past,
"Si cerca, si dice, "L'amico infelice,
"L'amico dov'e?" . "Respondi, mort."
Favrol had never told himself that he was in love with
Amalie von Esterthal; but in her society he experienced a
sentiment for which he had to coin the phrase "serene
splendour. " In their talks he had again and again met with
unexpected utterances which, he judged could only have
arisen in a mind habituated to unusual thought, and with
a capacity for suffering or bliss beyond that of most women.
Leaving the Palazzo one afternoon in September he had, as
he sauntered along the ramparts, compared the conversa-
tion, because of its subtleties, to the talk of two mathe-
maticians upon the motion of a wave and its equations.
But instead of a profound study of curves and lines, her talk
had seemed to him to imply the profoundest study of hu-
man emotions and ideas.
"Yes, I must get away from Vienna; the sooner the
better."
In Vienna he always felt beneath himself. Its caste
system froze. Artists, composers, poets, unless they were
men of birth, were in Vienna treated like valets. Mozart
had been kicked out of doors, nor had he seemed to resent
The Mind of a City 151
the outrage. Yet what hideous scarecrows many of the
women were, and what cretins the men! Francis II. himself
went slinking about like a frightened hound.
Legros meanwhile looked at the scene, his shining black
eyes glancing from woman to woman, finding each face,
each contour desirable or indifferent.
"By God," he said to Favrol, pointing to the semi-
transparent costumes that like soft-hued flowers showed
themselves everywhere about the theatre, outlining women's
forms, "when a young man in Vienna marries he knows at
least what he is marrying, and on his wedding night he can
have little either to learn or fear eh? Look there! Look
at those two! I've got as much on when I go slap into my
bath. Mon Dieu, Vienna's the place to study the perfec-
tions of the feminine figure!"
The old Count had risen abruptly, and placing his box at
the command of his two enforced guests, he excused him-
self. There was a marked touch of haughtiness in his
courtesy.
IV
Downstairs Count Esterthal forced his way through the
crowd with some difficulty, ignoring the outstretched hand
of friends and acquaintances. The one subject upon which
they wished to speak with him, was the one subject which
he wished that night to avoid. He reached the front row
of the stalls. Amalie smiled to him from a distance and
raised her fan; but arrested by the dense crowd the Count
shook his head in amused perplexity. He stopped to take
breath beside a faded crimson curtain looped back by a
cord and a heavy gold tassel, underneath the first tier of
boxes.
The stalls here were chiefly occupied by French officers,
strangers to Esterthal. Other officers from various parts of
the theatre had joined them. All were talking and gesticu-
152 Schonbrunn
lating. Further back, in the fourth and fifth rows, servants
in livery with numbers affixed to their hats were handing
round ices and sherbets.
The Count turned from these to the group of which
Amalie and Toe were the centre. In one of them he recog-
nized Count Markowitz, Johann's elder brother; beside him
stood an official in the War Department. He too, like
Markowitz, was a dilettante and "patron of religion, moral-
ity, and the arts." Kaas, the Dresden landscape painter,
stood a little behind, stroking his long fine beard. Amalie
herself was talking to a tall, erect, white-haired old man,
with a distinguished bearing but insignificant features. He
wore the dress of an abbe. But another member of the
group, talking to the Princess Diirrenstein, made upon
Count Esterthal, fatigued as he was, an instantaneous and
extraordinary impression. This was a man of middle height
powerfully built, slightly aggressive in his bearing. His
face, dull red in complexion, was marked by smallpox; but
a countenance more commanding in its genius, a head more
lion-like in its tranquil power, its masses of black hair
growing low on the forehead which they seemed to grip like
a helmet, Count Esterthal had never seen; and for one
singular moment he experienced the exact sensation which
he had experienced that morning in looking at Bonaparte
from about the same distance. Mistrusting his own sensa-
tion, Esterthal looked at Toe and then at the face of the
man she was addressing. His eyes were half-closed; but
there was at once suspicion and the most haunting pathos in
the glances which, when Toe ceased speaking and there was
a silence, these eyes cast upon the faces around; nor could
anything exceed the locked energy of the mouth, the con-
flict of extreme suffering and extreme will.
"I must be getting old, old and fanciful, like Wunnser at
Mantua," he said to himself irritatedly, and with an impa-
tient step he advanced towards the group.
The Mind of a City 153
There he exchanged a few words with Count Markowitz ;
then taking Amalie's arm he drew her aside. Before he had
spoken a word she had divined his wish.
"You are tired? I too am tired a little. Let us go
home, " she said hurriedly.
Uncertain of her real wishes he did not at once answer.
He had divined the unrest in her mood all day, and to-night
at the Opera under her tranquil reserve that unrest, he had
easily perceived, had become a fever.
"You have heard nothing?" she said carelessly.
"Of the negotiations? Nothing."
She turned, hiding her pallor and under her lowered
eyelids her eyes, discouraged, half-desperate, seemed to
probe every corner of the Opera.
The Count to gain time looked at the group from which he
had just taken her, above all at the thick-set figure of the
stranger. The latter now stood not fifteen feet away, so
that his features were clearly visible, the deep dent in the
chin, the changing grey and blue of his eyes, deep-set and
under thick, dusky brows. His voice, though he softened
his sibilants like a Rheinlander when he answered the tall,
white-haired personage, in whom Esterthal now recognized
the famous organist and composer, Abt Vogler, was abrupt
and aggressive as his bearing.
"What, you here, Beethoven?"
Beethoven? The name suggested nothing to Count
Esterthal.
Piqued at his ignorance of so notable a personality in
Vienna, the Count was about to enquire the name of this
man, when Amalie, drawn by the wild hope that Rentzdorf
might be waiting for her at the Palazzo, said again,
"Shall we go home, padrino? Do you mind? You will
see Count Markowitz later. I have asked Charlotte and
him to supper. Toe too is coming. They are all going to
the Rittersaal. Prince W.
154 Schonbrunn
A shout interrupted her. The stage-manager had once
more appeared in front of the curtain, but once more his
excuses and appeals were silenced by the angry and derisive
hootings. Amid the hubbub in French, German, and Italian
Count Esterthal and Amalie started slowly to walk towards
the main entrance. Near the extremity of the parterre a
sudden rush of a part of the audience towards the stage,
where the tumult had increased, separated them, and two
acquaintances, pouncing on Count Esterthal, announced on
"positive information" that the armistice was interrupted,
that Champagny had left Altenburg, that Liechtenstein
had been peremptorily recalled by Francis II., that Stadion
was once more in power and war declared.
"But what the devil is happening yonder?"
The old Count turned his impassive face backwards to-
wards the stalls. A number of French officers had sprung
upon the stage and had begun to sing and gesticulate as
though acting an improvised piece. Others roamed about
the orchestra, wrenching the instruments from the players,
and amid laughter and ironic applause began themselves to
produce the most ear-splitting and discordant sounds, whilst
the officers on the stage imitated the crowing of cocks, the
barking of dogs, the mewing of cats, or neighed like horses.
"C'est une emeute, " someone said beside him.
It was a riot, but as yet it was good-natured.
Amalie had made her way alone to the entrance. There
she stopped and stood for some seconds looking back. The
light was dim. The parterre of the Vienna Opera House,
like the parterres of all German theatres at that period, was
lighted by candles and a few oil lamps.
She was about to return in search of her father-in-law
when from the direction of the boxes behind Her on her
The Mind of a City 155
left she saw or thought she saw an officer in the uniform
of Kinsky's Horse make towards her through the crowd
tall, very erect, with an air of extreme distinction at once
in his features and his bearing, yet it was the bearing of a
poet or artist rather than that of a soldier.
Amalie in the dusk looked at him unrecognizing, though
conscious that her heart was beating wildly; then, mortally
pale, she stood still, suppressing the cry of half -delirious
joy and suffocating tears.
The next instance her lover was bending over her out-
stretched hands.
"Heinrich! Caro mio, mio diletto, mio diletto. . . ."
Her voice trembled in every syllable, but the unforgotten
and unforgettable language of her girlhood was cadenced
like a passion-song. It was the very language of passion;
the language of all intense feeling, of suffering or of joy.
His eyes drank in like an enchanted wine each seduction
of her figure, from her brow under its high nodding plumes
to the brilliants that flashed on her shoes.
"How you are beautiful!" he said. "Great God, to see
you again this, this! It is madness to look at you. "
"Heinrich, Heinrich, speak to me! You have come?
I was going away. Whose is that uniform? How badly
it fits your shoulders ! It is too narrow. "
She was trembling in every limb.
He laughed and his voice chimed strangely with hers,
burdened with the same delirious bliss.
And maddened by her beauty, the burning rose on her
face, her smile, the ardently parted lips, he bent again over
her hands.
"Ah, not here," she said faintly; "this way come this
way, " she entreated, "come with me. " She drew him im-
petuously into an obscurer angle.
"Caro mio, I love you, I love you," she whispered again,
and to his blinding surprise her lips touched his lips. "How
156 Schonbrunn
are you here? You have not told me. Or have you'told
me?" she repeated, dazed by her own bliss.
He laughed and answered "I am here as one of Prince
Liechtenstein's aides. Zettich you remember little Karl
August von Zettich? I have his passport and his uniform.
Seven of our men have been arrested as spies. Schonbrunn
is a nest of angry wasps. But where were you going? "
She remembered Zettich. He had the courage of a
demon. Like Rentzdorf he belonged to Kinsky's Horse,
which since Aspern had become legendary for its courage
wherever German was spoken. At Znaim Rentzdorf had
at the peril of his own life saved Zettich's, rescuing him from
under his horse after sabring two Polish lancers.
"Going? I do not know what I am saying. Yes, I was
going, but ..."
The uproar on the stage riveted every eye. They were
for this brief moment practically alone.
"Listen, beloved," she said hurriedly. "There is a
supper party before the masked ball. You know about it
the ball, I mean? Come to supper; come to me at ten.
We shall go together to the Rittersaal. Toe will manage
that you enter. She is in front there, talking with Marko-
witz and Beethoven."
The passion burning in her eyes dazzled him.
"You do not wish to see Beethoven to-night? Ah God,
I have to leave you. There is padrino."
"There is nothing on earth save you," she whispered
and the next instant she was standing beside padrino under
the wide awning outside the Opera House.
The old Count peered with angry eyes from group to
group, carriages, sedan-chairs, phaetons, hackney coaches,
link-boys, and mingling here and there with the blaze of
servants' liveries the brown uniforms and white epaulettes
of the new Viennese gendarmerie.
"Why are these fellows loafing outside?" he grumbled,
The Mind of a City 157
glaring at the gendarmes. "They ought to be clearing the
house of those dogs. "
He did not care a straw for the piece ; but the arrogance of
the French in interrupting the performance had exasperated
his pride.
VI
"We are nearly arrived, " Amalie said to padrino twenty
minutes later. "You are not cold?"
Glancing out of the window of the carriage she saw rise,
spectral in the darkness, the sinister black hexagonal tower
of the Lowel Bastion.
The old Count, still crouched in the corner into which he
sank on leaving the Opera, lifted his head wearily. Had
the lumbering gilt-laden Estherthal coach been his coffin
he would not have greatly cared. These home-comings
from the Opera always made him feel his isolation and his
age. The tramp to the grave that every man must com-
plete alone "C'est ga, c'est gal"
Two minutes later the carriage stopped. The link-boys
thrust their torches into the sockets fixed in the iron railings.
The glare lighted up the ancient stones. The smoke above
the yellow flames rose in little jets of blue and grey.
Amalie sprang lightly from the carriage and swinging
round stood drinking in the cool night air fragrant with
shrub, flower, and tree.
In the hall, which was large and badly lighted, a servant
with powdered hair came forward and handed her a letter
on a silver salver. The courier, he said, was waiting to
take back the answer. He was to start again for Buda-
Pesth at midnight.
Amalie tore open the letter. It was, she knew, from her
husband. The light from a bronze candelabra fell on her
neck and finely modelled shoulders as she read.
158 Schonbrunn
The letter was elaborately worded, yet singularly am-
biguous, and in some parts obviously insincere. He antici-
pated, he said, a renewal of the war. His corps had been
ordered nearer to the Bohemian frontier; in two days they
were to be at Troppau and there await "developments."
Metternich, it was rumoured, had been recalled. He
himself might be in Vienna next day ; he might be detained
for an indefinite time. In any case, the honour of kissing
her hand was unavoidably deferred.
"Ah, merci!" she said under her breath. "God be
praised for that, anyhow!"
Aloud she asked, "Where is the courier?"
"He is resting, Madame," the servant answered. "He
will require a fresh horse. I have informed his Highness."
"I will give you the answer in an hour. He can have
Sigismund if the Count cannot spare a mount. Rothgar,
the bay, I shall want to-morrow."
"And Father Giacomo?" the servant said hesitatingly.
"He came again this evening and awaits your Serenity. "
But at that moment a Capuchin friar, preceded by an-
other servant in livery, came forward, and lifting his hood
discovered Fra Giacomo's fine intellectual features, the
mask of the Italian priest of the higher ranks.
Involuntarily she bent her head to receive his blessing.
"Forgive me," she said in Italian. "You have been
kept waiting. "
"This makes amends."
She knew the imprudence and even the danger of receiv-
ing a Capuchin in her house, but danger allured her, and
this man had been her mother's confessor, and, like her
mother, was a Lombard of great family. During the war
he had acted bravely; for, though not an Austrian, he had
been one of the devoted band who in the thick of the fight
had carried the wafer in a consecrated box to the dying in
battle after battle from Eckmiihl to Wagram.
The Mind of a City 159
They spoke together for some minutes in low voices.
She heard again in the Lombard tongue the familiar phrases
about the poverty and the suffering in Vienna ; the price of
bread in the Leopoldstadt black bread had risen to ten
kreutzers the loaf; no meat was to be had except horse-flesh
in that quarter, and in the villages no meat of any kind.
Winter was coming.
"Yes, yes; I know, " she said wearily, yet not impatiently.
The friar, though her face was hidden, seemed to read her
thoughts. The set of his mouth became more rigid.
To Amalie Christ had long ceased to be a force in her
spiritual life, and, possessor through Rentzdorf of another
vision of good and evil, she had little patience with Dom
Giacomo's superficial subtleties; yet Jesus' ethics still exer-
cized a sentimental control over her conduct ; the sound of a
vesper bell still had a power over her soul ; she clung tena-
ciously to Monza's cloistered calm, to the memories of her
girlhood there, her early dreams of sainthood or heroic
romance.
"Shall I see the steward?" the Capuchin asked, vexed
with himself, and desirous to end her embarrassment.
"Yes," she said quickly, "see Adrian; I will send him to
you at once. "
She gave an order to the servant.
"God keep you in His holy guard," Fra Giacomo said
in Italian, pulling forward his hood.
VII
Amalie went straight to her boudoir the room immedi-
ately adjoining that in which that morning she had dis-
covered Toe in corset and petticoat stationed before her
toilet table.
The door of this room once closed behind her, the hate-
fulness in things was exorcised or excluded, and in its still-
ness and memories she could surrender herself to her joy.
160 Schonbrunn
Her maid in the bedroom was already busying herself
with her dress; but even for the supper she had still two
hours, and for the ball she would not start till midnight at
the earliest. She gave Tita some direction, ordered a bath,
returned to the boudoir, and, sitting down in front of the
fire, she stretched out her hands to the blaze. The flames
sparkled on her rings and lighted up the modelling of her
ringers and the exquisitely rounded, firm white wrists.
"The vision beatific?" she murmured, impelled by some
reflection of the day and an interview with Toe late that
afternoon. "Lost in this, God in me sees His end His
goal; that is the vision beatific, my beloved, O my beloved."
Her lover's face rose before her now in a celestial efful-
gence; her lover's voice, trembling with adoration it had
the accents of her own heart's craving, the world-soul's
craving.
Sighing, she flung herself back and lay with closed eyes,
conscious of the charmed stillness and faint perfumes of the
room, conscious of the darkness outside, the garden, the
motionless trees, the dark environing earth outstretched
under the night-sky.
Here in this room, in the ornaments or in the books, as in
her bedroom in the very articles on her toilet table, were
objects sanctified by some hour of passion's ecstatic vision
darker or diviner than its predecessors. And here above all
on the shelves of a cabinet in tulip-wood, were Rentzdorf 's
own writings in various editions and bindings, priceless to
her during this frightful campaign as to her sister Ulrica in
the convent at Prague her prayer-book a new God indeed
and a new missal, but more overpoweringly glorious day
by day.
And it was just this constant appeal to the universal and
to the transcendental which, to her rigid own self-examin-
ing, redeemed Amalie von Esterthal's judgment upon her
motives from mere self-approbation or empty self-will.
The Mind of a City 161
Outside God there was for her no reality, no goodness, no
knowledge, no vision, no joy. But this that she lived, this
that she knew, this was very God.
In the same cabinet on the same or on a separate shelf,
were the writers for whom Rentzdorf had kindled her inter-
est the Spanish dramatists Tirso and Calderon, Jacobi's
translation of Hamlet and four other Shakespearian
plays, Wieland's Oberon and Holderlin's romantic fantasy
Hyperion.
She felt a smile about her lips and, opening her eyes,
glanced round the fragrant twilight of the room, lit only by
the fire and a single silver lamp, and closed her eyes again.
Her lover's voice thrilled in her ears ; his thoughts in her
spirit; his hand-clasp on her breast. Impatient to have
something of his, she took out one of her favourites amongst
his books the Runes of the Acropolis. Rentzdorf had
wished to destroy every copy but she had several.
"I hear your voice. You are here, the characters,
protagonist and denteragonist, the others, men and
women."
"What can it be like to have a poet for a lover? " Toe had
once asked her. "It must be idyllic, to sip the cream of
all his thoughts his poems, to read his books, and to know
the veriest thoughts of his very heart upon all things. "
"Idyllic perhaps; but stormy a little? It should not be
exactly a tranquil existence do you suppose?"
In her admiration for the Runes Amalie was not unjusti-
fied. The fever which tormented Rentzdorf 's manhood
burned in those pages which he thrust aside with so
unfeigned an impatience. Greek tragedy there was re-
cast, and spoke in accents of a spiritual anguish transfigured
by his own unrest. Where, he demanded in an early para-
graph, was that Heiterkeit, that serener calm which Winkel-
mann had already made fashionable as the characteristic
of Greek thought, art, culture, and Greek life? Thu-
162 Schonbrunn
cydides was not heiter, nor was Herodotus serene. Despair,
fierce suffering, was not unknown in the Cyclades ; and from
Pindar and from Homer, as from Archilochus and Hesiod,
it was easy to cite judgments upon human life frightful
as that of Lear or (Edipus. In the same manner the lords
of those who know Empedocles, Orpheus, Plato, Heraclei-
tus, and Julian were made in this transfiguring light
to pass before the reader, and spoke or answered. And
the Parthenon reappeared, this earth's masterpiece of
beauty, the Doric columns, the frieze, the shapes of colossal
loveliness, transfigured by the eyes that had gazed on their
sun-steeped marbles; and the tragedy in stone was subtly
woven into the tragedy of human life itself the transiency
of things, the eternal mystery'of birth, persistence, and the
grave.
"He who defines Existence, defines suffering. Being is
the transient; it is that which perishes and ought to perish.
The Beautiful, on the other hand, is the mirage of that
which is beyond Being, of that which is not yet; that which
God desires to be, and to be eternally. Therefore its per-
fect symbol is death, and its test is the ardour of the death-
desire which it provokes within man; for this desire is the
desire to be one with the end towards which throughout
eternity God strives." "The existent, all that is," he
said in another paragraph, "is on fire with the world-soul's
anguish; but to that anguish, inscrutable in its origin, the
universe owes its origin; the Beautiful is the vision of that
which shall arise when the world-soul's strife is attained. "
She laughed in restless happiness reimagining the inci-
dent and other kindred moments. But the laugh startled
her from her trance; and she recollected the waiting courier.
"Mon Dieu! To write a letter now and to him?"
Walking up and down, her shadow moved beside her on
the floor as she passed and repassed in front of the silver
lamp that stood on a cabinet richly inlaid and decorated
The Mind of a City 163
with paintings on porcelain representing some scenes in
Arcady.
But she tore herself from the seductive enticements
drowning her, and sitting down she began the letter, but
tore up the first copy; then very rapidly, then very slowly,
weighing the syllables, she commenced a second copy.
But she found the task difficult; for the more she considered
the letter she had received the more she felt convinced that
its words were meant not for her but for Napoleon's police.
"That?" she thought; "is it that again?"
The "That" to which she referred was her husband's
visit to Vienna a few weeks ago in violation of his parole
to Napoleon.
She knit her brows; but abruptly she thrust aside the
fear. Nevertheless, she was careful to answer the letter
in accordance with its tenor. In this she was loyal.
"It is done!" she said.
Her glad cry was like a school-girl's liberated from a task.
She glanced down the page with knit brows. Her style
was ornate as Count Esterthal's own. She burnt her fingers
as she sealed the letter.
"Tutf menzogna," she said, stamping her foot involun-
tarily. "No; the only lie is the world's lie. This, this is
reality each timeless hour. What other truth, what other
God is there or can be?"
A light as of very heaven descended on her face. Her
spirit, onward-driving on waves of sunlight, rushed to the
event. And in and through that soul, thus in ecstasy, a
mightier, darker power strove to an end not her end, to a
peace not her peace.
Her maid, re-entering, announced that the bath was ready.
"The bath?"
Amalie had forgotten her own order. She took off her
necklace, her bracelets, her rings, laying them one by one
on her dressing-table, and began slowly to undress.
CHAPTER VI
THE MAKING OF A POET
IN the autumn of 1808 it was rumoured in Viennese literary
circles that Goethe was at work upon a new novel, the
Elective Affinities. Shortly afterwards there arose one night
in Rentzdorf's lodging in the Rothenthurm a discussion of
the methods of fiction and the drama, and Axel Petersen,
impatient to submit all literary forms to the hydraulic
press of the four-act play, had derided as bad art the novel-
ist's habit of inserting character sketches of the various
personages in the romance as they successively appear.
"Absurd in a drama," Rentzdorf had asked, "but is it so
absurd in a novel? The novelist by a single page has to do
for the reader all that in the drama is entrusted to the ac-
tor's genius, to costume, to scenery, to facial expression,
gesture, voice, silences. Besides, a novel is un miroir qui se
promene and in everyday life what is more common than
that on your first introduction to a distinguished man, every
friend or acquaintance acts in just the manner that you
censure in Agathon or Wilhelm Meister? To me, with all
its prolixity, the latter book is serene as. an autumn day in
Attica."
Rentzdorf, who has noted the incident in a scrapbook
destined to be worked into a volume on the art-forms of his
time, can have had no anticipation that exactly a century
164
The Making of a Poet 165
later it would be quoted on this page by an English writer
in defence of a summary of his own career in a novel in
which he figures side by side with Napoleon.
Heinrich von Rentzdorf was now in his thirty-first or
thirty-second year. His life in Austria had been the life
of an artist tormented by the intellectual unrest of his era
its scepticisms, political violence, spiritual ardours, reac-
tions, and wrathful despairs.
Genius for religion is rare as genius for art. Rentzdorf
possessed both.
"I can scarcely remember the time, " he had said once to
Count Johann, "when in my breast two passions or two
wills were not in conflict the passion for Art and the pas-
sion for Religion, the will to Beauty and the will to Truth.
And to this day, when I descend into myself I recognize the
same two forces. They have dominated and dominate my
entire life. Their conflict is that life. And yet what a
waste and sterile history is mine! For seven years religion
to me meant no more than an incessant sifting and testing,
or an endless accusing and defending of faiths and philo-
sophies of other eras and of other minds of one faith and
philosophy above all, that of Jesus the Christ. Morning
by morning I sprang from my bed and, flinging back the
curtains, saw the glory of another day. Why had it
been given me? And on the instant the enchantment was
shattered; the splendour was fog and dust. I searched in
my own heart ; I brooded over the processes of my faculties ;
I pondered the mediaeval theologians and the system-
mongers of modern times. And in Kant as in Aquinas I
found but variant upon variant of the dreary eternal story
of Eden, Israel, Nazareth, and Golgotha. 'What art
thou,' the fathers at Gratz used to say to me, 'that puttest
questions unto God? ' I knew it well, that priggish refrain.
I knew it in St. Augustine as in Dante and St. Paul. And to
1 66 Schonbrunn
what other end was I born, I asked, except to put questions
unto God? What right thus to interrogate is greater than
my right? Dragged unasked out of the deep sleep of Noth-
ingness, flung down tortured into this torture-chamber of a
universe, this measureless vast of suffering in uncounted
worlds down the unreckonable years what other question
shall I ask? The hour that I forget that question is blasted.
And still they spoke of Jesus, as if that nursery tale, because
it had amused the slow wit or served the cunning hypocrisy
of eighteen hundred years, were an all-heal; until at length
his very name became a symbol of ennui; his religion, an
angry loathing, a triumphant imposture or dull fatuity that,
like the Ptolemaic system of the stars, for eighteen hundred
years had made bestial the European mind. Why had this
dogmatist, Aryan, or Hebrew, robbed me of my birthright,
my spirit's unfettered contemplation of the world, beggared
posterity and made all our thinking, all our faiths accept-
ances or contradictions of his own theorizings and poor
scheme of things? 'Jesus a God?' I could no longer see in
him even an heroic man . . . . "
Count Johann laughed.
"And yet, " Rentzdorf went on in a changed voice, "there
had been a time, there had been a time. . . . My God,
Johann, the very midnight of the world-soul's anguish
seemed to possess my soul when at Gratz I heard in St.
^Egidius the Tenebra. Now when I see those same white-
robed Dominicans I say in my heart These are they who
lie, not unto men, but unto God. Eh bien, that seven years'
struggle terminated only for another to begin. I had re-
jected Christ. But the highest in me still seemed at waf
with itself, God with God. I studied nature and read books,
for months I sacrificed days and nights in solitary medita-
tion, hoping that some vision, some wide principle, would
arise within me or without me ; I admired or argued against
the principles of others; but in vain. Was I, the German
The Making of a Poet 167
who had rejected Christ, to accept the Greek Plato or
the Hindu Gotama? The former's hair-splitting myths,
the latter's renunciation, which is a cheaper death, were
meaningless as Kant's imperative or Spinoza's causa sui.
And what was their mandate to me except 'Submit!
Submit! Christ is the best. Be wise and stick to him.' "
"And believing this," Johann had answered, "think-
ing these thoughts, you yet waste yourself in going to
war against Bonaparte, that more self -confident, brilliant
mediocrity?"
"Believing this, thinking these things, I go to fight against
Bonaparte. Hero or mediocrity, he fights for his own
hand. "
Even to indifferent observers of Rentzdorf's youth, the
deeply religious bias of his nature quickly revealed itself.
"He will never make either a diplomatist or a councillor, "
his uncle had said to Rentzdorf's mother. "He has too
hot a head for affairs. Send him to Gratz. The Jesuit
fathers will at least teach him the ancient languages and the
rudiments of modern theology. Every man in these times
ought to be able to read Zeno and Plato and yet have the
chance of growing up a Christian, if in the long run he pre-
fers Galilee to Athens. "
Rentzdorf's uncle, a man in mid-life, with blue eyes and a
fine full-grown beard, dressing in top-boots and a green
hunting suit, was a professed Epicurean, but cultured and
tolerant, living in tranquil indolence from year's end to
year's end on his domain near Mohacz those acres of heath
and mountain scrub dotted by blast furnaces and copper
mines, and in more fertile spots by farm steadings, across
which Rentzdorf played as a child. Feudalism in such re-
treats had still in Austria its full vigour, unaffected by
Joseph II. 's "reforms."
Two months after this interview Rentzdorf was at Gratz.
Its fortress, dark with memories of the wars of Ferdinand
168 Schonbrunn
II. and Wallenstein, its watchmen telling the hours of the
night in the Styrian dialect, and at dawn saluting the rising
sun with a blare of trumpets and the long roll of the Styrian
drum, made a background of romance to his boyish musings.
At Gratz his intellectual supremacy quickly showed itself.
Every form of study allured him in turn the classical lan-
guages, music, drawing, painting, mathematics, modelling
in clay, verse- writing in French and Italian, as in German.
His imagination already answered to Nature's summons.
Now he would stand rapt before a sunset, now before a
pageantry of feigned experiences vivid as actuality, tri-
umphs, heroic defeats, strange loves; at another time he
would turn from his sketch-book or easel in a frenzy of
despair, staring at a wide and most living landscape whose
twilight mystery he felt in every throbbing vein but could
not fasten to his canvas.
The multiplicity of his gifts wore down his health and ir-
ritated his teachers. His manners puzzled or enraged his
companions; for he was already immoderate in his attach-
ments as in his antipathies, and subject to paroxysms of
jealousy or insight which darkened or vexed his mind irre-
sistibly as a storm the lake.
An affection of the eyes suddenly paralysed all effort and
gave his overstrained mind the repose it needed. Reading
was forbidden; painting had to be abandoned forever;
but he was allowed paper and a pencil. In this crisis the
old power over words, proved by the ease with which he
could imitate in Latin the cadences of Propertius and in
French those of Racine, came as a beneficence from on high.
Poetry became for him the art of arts, superior even to music
and sculpture.
It was the year 1794.
Immured within the Jesuit seminary, Rentzdorf and other
young Austrians knew next to nothing of the true sequence
of events in France. The States General had met; the
The Making of a Poet 169
Bastille had fallen; the first republic had been proclaimed;
a Bourbon king and a Habsburg princess had been guillo-
tined; Danton had spoken his great defiance, Valmy had
been fought, Brunswick and Klerfayt repulsed, Belgium
annexed, and the war begun. But to the Jesuits' pupils
all this had been presented through a coloured and dis-
torting medium.
Gradually something of the truth pierced the ramparts of
calumny or silence. The effect was correspondingly great.
To these young men, whilst they had slept the morning sleep
of youth, a new heaven and a new earth appeared to have
arisen. By the Jesuit fathers the principles of the Encyclo-
pedie and the teachings of Rousseau, Helvetius, Diderot,
and Voltaire, had been branded as those of Antichrist;
but when the victories of Pichegru and Moreau followed
those of Dumouriez, when in the north Belgium and Holland
were overrun and, in the east, the frontiers of France ex-
tended to the Alps, the question flamed up in every generous
heart Can these indeed be the victories of Antichrist?
Can God indeed have laid under His interdict the writings
which have kindled such heroism as this of Marceau, Hoche,
Kleber, and Desaix? Is Liberty indeed the fruit of the tree
of Death? And is it to extend the dominion of Antichrist
that the armies of France are conquering a world?
The date for Rentzdorf to leave the seminary was ap-
proaching; yet for months he looked forward to that date
not with joy but with passionate regret.
Meanwhile, his father had died; his mother and sisters,
though retaining the house in Vienna, had settled in Hun-
gary on a small estate near his uncle's domain. There
Rentzdorf, now a student in Vienna University regularly
spent his vacations, passing long days alone in the woods or
in his boat on the Danube, with a sister to whom he was
attached, often till far into the night, thinking his own
thoughts, dreaming his own dreams, whilst he watched the
170 Schonbrunn
passage of a star from branch to branch as it crossed a rift
of sky.
It was at the University that his friendship with Bolli
and with Count Johann Markowitz began. As Austrians
they were in this dilemma ; they were bound to hate France,
yet in their inner life they found no thought worth thinking
which did not derive its colour and its vivacity from that
nation's literature.
ii
The ideal of knowledge and life here upon the earth and
now had for a period been to Rentzdorf the determining
result of the Revolution.
Later he was to put to this knowledge the question
"What art thou?" and to this rejoicing in the earth here
and now ' ' Why art thou ? And in what and in whom shall
I rejoice?"
But for a time these things were their own end.
To know all, to experience all, to be all to know the
bond attaching this Daedalian world to its Originator, to
know the bond uniting his own heart to the universe and
to its Originator; to rejoice in all in man's wisdom, the
creations of art, woman's living beauty, the mountains,
statues, music, to love all rigid and flowing things, memory-
haunted rocks, palaces, lonely rivers, the forests' pillared
shade "these to me are God," Rentzdorf at that time as-
serted: "I know no other. Yes; I see God most just there
where most you deny God. "
In Vienna, its men and women, Rentzdorf found oppor-
tunities in abundance of testing one article of his creed to
experience all. Europe at that period contained no society
in which the life-desire could so easily or so completely be
realized beautiful, idle, or brilliant women, the froth and
lees of every court and capital in Europe, politicians, diplo-
The Making of a Poet 171
matists, men of science, and men of fashion, poets, painters,
sculptors, musicians.
A miniature at this period portrays Rentzdorf as tall,
slender, dark-haired, dark-eyed; his features already force
the beholder to return to them, speculative. His own social
rank, his youth, the audacities of his wit, the publication of
his first poems, the part he took in the campaign of Marengo,
opened every door.
A woman's passion shattered the torpor invading him,
and tore him from his self-destroying dream of pleasure.
At Mohacz, whilst still a pupil in the seminary, he had
met and in secret loved Irene Apponyi, who was four years
older than himself and the wife of a neighbouring landowner,
a Magyar noble. Indolent, sensuous, and self-indulgent,
she had inflamed the boy's passions and riveted his infatua-
tion; to her he wrote every intimate thought and for her he
composed verses, imaginary scenes, dialogues, sketches of
dramas. But at the end of two months the inexorable day
of the return to Gratz had come ; yet he had never forgotten
that first terrible joy, nor was it, apparently, forgotten by
her. Nevertheless, through the appointment of her hus-
band to the Dresden Court, for five years he had not once
seen her again. Now, in the winter of 1800-1801, she
suddenly confronted him in the ripe splendour of woman-
hood, a leader of one of the most reckless coteries of Vienna.
She was a lady of many adventures; but she spoke in regret
and tenderness of "other days," describing in this veiled
way their first tempestuous meetings; and, by some devil's
art, she managed to adjust this new or this old "friend-
ship."
The caprice of the woman of fashion was to the young
poet an exalted and exalting passion. At first she was
amused by his fervour and his sincerity; and when his dar-
ing made him dangerous, she affected anger and refused him
her house. Misery and a vast fear brought him to the
172 Schonbrunn
verge of madness. She relented ; but when she attempted to
"explain things" and regulate their future, it was in words
that to him, in his ignorance, seemed purposely chosen to
torture or destroy him. Irene's voice was still to him a song;
but as she spoke that night it was as though his skull had
been opened and molten lead were drop by drop let fall
upon his brain.
"Dearest, dearest boy, I am seven and twenty. Why
should it matter so much to you that my lips have been
kissed by others? Or that others before you, as you ex-
press it, should have been pressed to my breast? See!
Is it not enough that you now kiss those lips and that I
press you to this breast, that you call leprous and tainted ?
Is this leprosy, or this? Dear Heinrich, Werther is very
fine as a story; but in real life, he finds another Charlotte
or puts up with Albert. And why do you object to Lothar?
He is my oldest friend. Be reasonable or I will go away
again ; for I cannot yet see how I could have acted otherwise
than I have acted. And certainly I cannot see that I am
doing anything wrong. "
Irene Apponyi's lesson, though in the end it struck home,
and nearly killed the neophyte, her lover and her pupil
in life-experience. In the frightful desolation that rushed
down upon his spirit Rentzdorf had perhaps the first per-
ception of the tremendous if sombre vision which afterwards
dominated his art and all his thought the vision of this
universe as an eternal illusion born of God's eternal suffering,
God's eternal strife to end that anguish and, beyond that
illusion, to find reality and deliverance.
But three weeks later, when he woke from the fever and
through the mists of delirium saw this same Circe, disguised
as a boy-student, seated by his bed, watching him with
haggard, grief-tormented eyes, he had to confront yet
another life-experience, and from her frenzied embraces
and tears school himself to a yet steadier gaze into the
The Making of a Poet 173
riddling perplexities of a woman's heart, and the modern
temperament.
Had her cynicism destroyed itself or was it from the out-
set a feigning? Or had his passion at last kindled her pas-
sion? Certainly she who but a month ago had shut her
doors on him because of a social indiscretion, would not
have run this risk for a caprice, however flattering to her
vanity.
"A madman's dream, this universe. This life is all, yet
this life is nothing, " he told himself during his slow conval-
escence; "but it is, it is Irene Apponyi's mouth. There
is no meaning anywhere; love is a lie; woman's constancy
not only a dream but a bad dream. Truth is meaningless
as God. Let us act that faith, live that creed. "
A fearful liaison then began, born amid blood-lust and
soul-despair, half-wondering, mutual desires and mutual
contempt. It was a chaos, but a chaos above which the
lightnings of their unforgettable first raptures flashed and
glimmered. They passed hours in the same society, in a
noisy or frantic gaiety that was not even pleasure; that at
its best was oblivion, at its worst, the brutalization of every
ennobling sentiment. Alone together afterwards, they
tortured each other, now by venomous allusions to their
mutual infidelities, now by studiedly maladroit confessions
or incriminating silences. Their assignations became a hell
to which each came resolute to torture the other; yet they
met and met ; for, riveted together by some mysterious bond,
those hours were the days' crown, those miseries the only
sanctitudes that this earth reserved for either.
"Life-hate?" Rentzdorf once reflected in a moment of
sinister insight. "Has that become life's goal to me? And
therefore -hatred of her, who is still to me life's fairest, most
consecrate expression. I wonder. I wonder."
All his ancient enthusiasms, all his mystic hopes and ques-
tionings, now became the target of his own or his mistress's
174 Schonbrunn
derision. They laughed together in detestable intimacy at
his first letters. There was no God; or if there had ever
been a God, He had long since destroyed Himself in self-
horror at the hideous abortion, this universe this world in
which not one heart's desire is or can be fulfilled, and not
one soul's question answered.
in
In this conflict of perversity and cynicism it was the
woman who was vanquished.
Outwardly, she did not change her conduct. She even
exaggerated her own crimes; but when she spoke of her
lovers or her admirers it was with icy lips, and a fearful
intentness came into her face when she cross-questioned him
upon the way in which he had passed the hours or the days
of her enforced absences from Vienna.
"What do I want?" she had whispered with set teeth
after a meeting of unusually fierce recrimination, in which
the mask of cynicism was flung off entirely. "What every
woman wants and never obtains; what every woman seeks
and never finds. "
She now began at each meeting to lead their conversa-
tion back to Mohacz, to the scenery of their early friend-
ship, the lake, the woods, to his letters, and their long
strange talks.
"I was at least your first love. In your memory I shall
have that place, Heinrich. Nothing can take that from
me."
Her tears seemed to Rentzdorf the tears of a morbid or
spurious sentiment, yet this became her repeated cry. And
furious that she should have this consolation, or that even
in this detail she should be false to their creed, he deter-
mined to deny even his own past.
"Are you so sure?" he answered the next time she re-
The Making of a Poet 175
peated the assertion. "Every woman thinks she is a boy's
first love. Perhaps. Who can ever tell?"
Stupefied, she raised her head and looked at him; and
ruthless and shameless, he had forged details.
"Perhaps? You say 'perhaps'?" she had breathed like
a person stunned. "Helena Nicholsevna? O my God I
do not wish it to have been her. Tell me; you must be
lying?"
And a horrible terror had come into her wide-open eyes,
making her face rigid and grey like a face carved in grey
stone.
Half an hour later, as she rose to return home, "Well,"
she had said, drawing on her gloves, "I owe to you to-night
the longest, steadiest stare into the abyss I have ever had.
It is health-giving as strong pure air."
Disturbed by her words as by her manner, disturbed
above all by the vileness of his own part in this hideous
incident, Rentzdorf that night had written to her, recanting
his words ; but instantly determining to see her in the morn-
ing, he had burnt the letter. Despite the resolution, he
was unable to sleep. Fear, the unmistakable tragic fear,
was upon him.
"But what fear? And for whom? Not for her. What
greater gift could I, even by a lie, have given her than just
that same steady stare into the abyss? Reality is there."
Yet the meanings of the great tragedies were plain, the
black root in things from which these night-pieces blossom,
and the tragedies actually lived by men and women seemed,
in his half-dream, strangely near to him.
Next day, going to her early, he found her half-dressed
lying on a sofa with her hair down. With a wild cry she
had sprung to her feet and, clinging to him, had confessed
her act. Horror-struck, he had struggled from her clasp.
For the woman whose kisses martyred his lips was a dying
woman. Reckless of everything save her suffering, he
176 Schonbrunn
called her maid; a physician was summoned; the poison
appeared to be counteracted; but five weeks later Irene
Apponyi was dead.
Rentzdorf had to fight two duels, first with her husband,
then with a lover.
Severely wounded in the latter, Rentzdorf had, for the
last week of his mistress's life lain at the point of death
himself, and Irene's dying moments were soothed by a
recrudescence of her childhood's religion and by the belief
that her lover would not survive her.
Rentzdorf on his recovery had left Vienna, and passed
the winter in Italy; then, from Venice, he had abruptly
started for Greece, making the voyage to the Piraeus on a
trader's sloop.
IV
Four and a half years went by.
In Rentzdorf 's life the history of those years is the history
of the process by which he attained that newer vision of God
and of the universe which became for him Time's last word
upon man's destiny and upon Being's drama and Being's
doom.
Hitherto Rentzdorf had been merely abreast of the far-
thest-forward ranging thought of his time. Even in the
rebellious anarchic despair of the Irene Apponyi period he
had co-equals in men like Zacharias Werner and Friedrich
Schlegel. Now, in the daring as well as in the steadiness of
his thought, he outstrips all his contemporaries. His life
becomes the voyage of a soul towards God, or, as he after-
wards described it, the voyage of God in his soul towards
the final consciousness of God's destiny and God's doom.
Rentzdorf passed those years partly in travel, partly in
prolonged visits to Mohacz. "In art, in art and its sereni-
ties, " he told himself as he slowly recovered from the re-
morse and fever into which Irene Apponyi's suicide had
The Making of a Poet 177
plunged him, "there is the peace imperishable; there is the
medicine my spirit needs."
And he gave himself to the sedulous study of poetry and
the perfecting of his craft.
But the quiet of the soul which this task brought was
premature. The pitiless insight of the mystic urged him
beyond this illusion as it had urged him beyond Girondinism
and the illusions of '93, and Kant's religiose philosophy.
If science left answerless every question worth answering ;
if knowledge of the past was pedantry; if thought was
futile and passion a disease, was it not folly to torment his
mind in a search for the perfect verse or the perfect phrase
into which to press the essence of that science, that know-
ledge, that passion, or that thought?
And once more the only life-choice was between a self-
condemned feverous striving and the dull inactivity of
despair.
"You ask too much of life," his uncle said to him. " No
one has ever solved the Sphinx's riddle and no one ever will.
Read the Stoics and Montaigne. Nature too teaches us
calm. The sea still lifts her waves, the mountains their
immovable peaks, and the green returns to the woods."
But to Rentzdorf this "calm" would have meant treason
against himself, and the surrender of the only purpose
that made time endurable. Forbidden too the return to
the blind tumult of Viennese society. Already with Irene
Apponyi he had outlived all that. With her he had scaled
the topmost summits of Rebellion, pursuing passion with
her into its most sacred and secret recesses, living day by
day the accusations and the denials which others feigned.
"But our rebellion," he now said, urged by sympathy or
by some spirit of half -extinguished remorse, "that too was
God O, very God of God ! And for me, so far as woman
is concerned, truth and heroism are buried in her grave.
She has found calm; mine is the anguish still."
178 Schonbrunn
And in this agonia of his own soul he turned, revitalized,
in the pursuit of life's stronger ihterpretings and the newer
vision, the God that is to be.
The memory of Irene's life-despair and reckless candour
had re-kindled his will as once her lips had the power to
re-inflame his desires.
It was the winter of 1803-4.
Napoleon's original and semi-mystic phase had ended.
The prophet to whom in 1800 all men looked as the har-
binger of a new era had become the rival of Trajan, the
imitator alternately of Constantine and of Charlemagne.
Rentzdorf at Mohacz, in the long winter nights of that
year, had with a fresh and tingling zest resorted to study
and to books. His purpose in this effort had become better
defined and more precise. The religions and the philoso-
phies, he argued, were indeed vain. The passionless, pith-
less God of Kant or the acrobatic God of Hegel were as
intolerable as the tribal God of Israel, even when transfigured
by Isaiah and by Jesus into the God of all the earth. Igno-
rance had receded with the centuries. Knowledge had come
no nearer. In the end the failure of metaphysics was com-
plete as the failure of religion. But was despair therefore
inevitable? By a resolute gaze into those boundless spaces,
now flung wide to man's scrutiny, and by an equally resolute
study of the aeons of a dateless past, of the chronicles of the
rocks, and the annals of man, and by a fixed meditation
simple and sincere, upon the spirit itself and its inward
workings, might there not be vouchsafed him, even at this
late hour, some truer, profounder vision of things?
"Others like Kant have gone to Nature and the past in
order to find proofs of a preconceived God and a predeter-
mined moral law. They brought home the treasure they
took with them. Compassless I, I go out into an uncharted
The Making of a Poet 179
darkness, a sea without a star; I know not even if God is
there or if there is a God. I strive but to see what is there
what newer vision of supernal hope, or the eclipse of all
hope, infernal night, and the coming of final despair. "
The writings of D'Alembert and Laplace, of Cuvier and
of Bichat, stimulated his ardour. Days grew to weeks, the
weeks to months. His first quiet studiousness became a
fury of enthusiasm which, without food and without sleep,
hurried his spirit from volume to volume, and urged his
transported mind through one untracked or forbidden arena
of thought after another.
From the astronomer's figures and the anatomist's lec-
ture-room he passed to man's history. Enriched by his
survey he had come back once more to the laboratory and to
the anatomist's plates, devoting himself to each study in
turn with a specialist's care and the prophetic fervour of a
mystic seeking the vision of God. Man was identical with
Nature, yet greater than Nature and in man's soul, there-
fore, not in Nature, were the clearest hieroglyphics of God.
Yet in nature he might find a key by which to approach
these hieroglyphics. There was his first maxim.
But where are those hieroglyphics most accumulated and
most concentrated?
At the university and at Gratz he had worked at the his-
tory of the Middle Ages, Aquinas and Abelard and Dionysios
were not less familiar than Plato and Empedocles. To these
he now added the religions of other races and earlier times
the lost faiths of Mithras and Isiris, the Vedas and the
A vesta, recently made accessible by the researches of An-
quetil-Duperron and Schlegel. He re-traversed in imagina-
tion the leisured spaces of Egypt and the remoter East
visualizing as in a spectral pageantry the kingdoms and half-
fabulous empires that shift and move from the Oxus to the
Tigris, from the Tigris eastward to the Ganges and westward
to the Ionian Sea.
i8o Schonbrunn
If he failed now, he told himself, it would be the last
failure. Vanquished in this final elan of the soul, it would
be forever.
Months passed. The midnight within him and around
him stood black and silent as the midnight above the polar
seas. In history the hideousness of man's annals alter-
nately nauseated or appalled him. In religion the puerility
of the creeds amazed or terrified his reason. What satirist
from another planet could invent so savage an indictment
against the human race as the records of any single reli-
gion, Druidic, Persian, Hindu, Christian, afforded? And in
philosophy the timidity or avarice of the temporizers, the
professional men at the universities, the defeats of the
brave, the martyrs to Truth, added to the gloomy influence
of history and religion.
Could a spirit chained to such a planet, portion of such a
race, ever hope to discover a truth worth knowing? And
the God of that history and this fabric who is He that sits
on high and watches the drama in this blood-dripping am-
phitheatre of a world?
The last horror invaded him. It rose within him at dawn
and by night it closed around him, resistless as a flood tide.
" It is not my own disaster not my own. It is the failure
of man. It is the failure of God. ..."
"If God is against me," cried Mohammed in one of his
blackest depressions, "I will appeal to the djins. " And in
a similar onset of discouragement and defiant despair we
find Rentzdorf writing, "My journey to Damascus? Each
morning that journey recommences. For Saul of Tarsus
in an hour the conflict was ended. He accepted another
man's vision and was at peace. But I ? God's own vision
of God's end that I seek, that only, and now I think the
God within me is blind. From His eyes, not mine, the
scales must fall." But at another time and in another
mood he writes :
The Making of a Poet 181
"I clamour still for an exterior faith, for some hope to
which I can cling, for some creed in which I can believe.
Fool! What hope has God except despair? And in what
credo does the Most High believe? Who has drawn out
into articles His Confession?"
VI
Unannounced, the vision at length broke in Rentzdorf's
mind. His soul's voyage was ended. From the deepest
depths, the all-denier had climbed to the summit, the all-
affirmer. The scales, in his own daring metaphor, fell
from God's eyes, and the universe which but yesterday was
an enginery of unpurposed pain, confused as a madman's
dream, stood out in ordered beauty, a temple lit by a single
all-illumining thought.
This thought which informs his later writings, above all
his Prometheus, Rentzdorf has expressed in various aspects,
ethical and metaphysical; but their unifying conception
is that of an all-suffering, all-striving God der leidende,
strebende Gott. Anguish that is the first trait in the new
portraiture of the world-soul. God is no longer the dreary
Omnipotent of the creeds. In a pain-racked universe a
struggling pain-racked Deity seeks by incessant strife and
by creations of ever-ascending beauty and power to deliver
Himself and nature from the suffering which is Being's
essence, to attain the quiet which is Being's grave.
" Bist du uberwinden ? " says a character in one of Rentz-
dorf's latest books. "Art thou oppressed by the tempests
of pain which in never-ending circles rave round this planet?
God's is that suffering. Is thy spirit made frantic by the
cries of madness-driven hunger and rage which shrill through
the undated eras from the deeps of vanished forests and the
caverns of undiscovered seas? God's is that hunger, and
that rage is God's. And yonder, out yonder in the midnight,
1 82 Schonbrunn
in those star-galaxies which hang like the frost-jewelled
gossamer of the skies, in those rushing suns and their black
and retinued orbs, dost thou surmise the theatres of the
same fury and the same pain? Yea, and in Time's abyss,
where world on world lies sepulchred, and, in the havoc of
the aeons, sunk systems moulder beside their extinguished
suns, doth thy spirit, darkly conjecturing, brood over the
embryons and first-beginnings of universes of anguish and
dark eternities of woe? All is God's. The fury and the
strife are His: and His that inextinguishable anguish and
the woe."
Elsewhere Rentzdorf faces and answers the question of
the Vedas "What moved Prajapati, the High God, out
of the dark sleep of nothingness to create the worlds?"
"Suffering moved Him, suffering which is Being's essence,
andjthe desire to end that suffering and, with it, Being itself.
For this is the tragic character of Being and of Being's God,
that only by destruction can He create and only by creation
attain His own and Being's goal dark Annihilation's
ecstasy."
But if the world is moulded in affliction, if a suffering God
to assuage His suffering created the universe, whence arises
its beauty, its structured grandeur, and the multitudinous
magnificence of its unending pageantry?
The Beauty of the universe, Rentzdorf answers, springs
from the mirage which arises within God's spirit when, in
the agonia of His unending strife, He visions the attainment
of His goal the beginning beyond the end. For as God
approaches nearer to His deliverance from Being, so He
shapes the worlds in higher beauty ever nearer to the pat-
tern of that deliverance. Before great Beauty we long to
die, because our soul is then caught up into God's and dis-
cerns the Reality, His and Nature's end.
For a period Rentzdorf was harassed by doubts. "Is
this thing of God, " he asked, "or is it not of God?"
The Making of a Poet 183
Gradually doubt vanished.
Time had recovered its majesty. Earth was reinvested
in mystery. Man's life recovered its argument; art its
wonder.
The religions of the past Osiris, Jahve, the Buddha, and
the religion of Calvary, the Stoic's creed, Plotinus, the
Tabriz mystic's resuscitation of Islam these and other
faiths are rejected by reason even as religions for this earth,
and what imagination, Rentzdorf asks, can tolerate even
the greatest of them as the religion, not only of this earth,
but of the spheres that out yonder wander undetected
around other suns? Yet in each and all of these faiths he
discovered anticipations, strange foreshado wings, sudden
far-borne illuminings of his own vision, fragments as of a
scattered dream-tragedy.
"And that faith or that vision? In this, in this, " he said
with an awed and shuddering heart, "in this has there not
at last arisen, after the unreckonable seons, populous with
power and beauty, has there not at last arisen a religion
under whose sombre, dread, yet all-alluring dominion the
mind can imagine world on world finding peace? " Already
on this earth dim annunciations from the past were borne to
him, dim yet certain harbingers from every region; already
on this earth race after race as it attained its zenith was for
one instant, if only in dying, vouchsafed the tragic insight,
the power to arraign. Assyria, Hellas, Rome, India, the
Middle Age, each in turn had hovered on the verge of the
Tragic Vision.
"Time's last word?" he muttered. "Indeed, in very
deed, is this God's inmost thought in man's soul enun-
ciated?"
And again, in a second all-transcending hour, the vision
came to him. It was a July midnight. Thunder moaned
in the distance. In the woods round Mohacz the leaves
above the stems, pillars of ebon gloom, shivered with the
184 Schonbrunn
presentiment of the coming storm. Harassed and with
working thought, he had quitted the oppressive rooms of
the chateau for the cool fragrance of the forest. Despair
was on him again, when suddenly, as if the physical storm
had burst, there was all about him and within him a supernal
light. And again he spoke the supreme affirmation. God
of very God, in that night silence and storm anguished in
his anguish, strove in his striving, was victorious in his
victory. Beyond the thunderous canopy he heard the fire-
torrent of the suns roar through the spaces. Then within
his spirit there came a mighty hush. Like a cloud anchored
at evening he saw the total universe hang in iridescent
mystery.
Then thought snapped. Vision was all.
A frightful exultancy and depression marked the follow-
ing days. The artist in him was wrestling with the thinker.
How was his art to compass any expression of his faith?
A singular fear of death assailed him; and, with it, the fear
of leaving his vision unrealized and unstated.
" Fear? What is it that I fear? " he said, rising in sudden
illumination above this mood. "If not by me then by
another this shall be uttered. The God that is to be how
shall He remain hid? If not to me then to another He
would have revealed Himself. Fear? Why should I fear?
There is one thing only a man should fear lest God should
fail!"
Yet as the days passed and quiet replaced exaltation and
reason the fever of the mind, as piece by piece in templed
wonder the system of dynamic pantheism rose before his
imagination, it was the truth, the sincerity, not the excel-
lence or the inspiration of his vision which concerned Rentz-
dorf , examining it, testing it in every fashion, applying it to
ethics, applying it to logic, to metaphysic, to psychology.
No man could have been more impatient of that braggartism
and self-laudation which, in modern times, disfigure the
The Making of a Poet 185
writings of Nietzsche as well as the histrionic egoisms of
Wagner. Rentzdorf had still the good breeding of the
eighteenth century.
From a thousand fluctuant schemes for giving an art-
form to his central thought he at last concentrated his
powers on one. This was the Prometheus myth. Re-
jecting as pedantic and obsolete the form of a trilogy, yet
compelled by the vastness of the subject, the personages
and the material, to paint on a wide canvas, Rentzdorf
divided the drama in two parts Prometheus the Fire-
bringer and Prometheus the Death-bringer. Into the former,
working at white heat, he wove, in inspiration upon inspira-
tion, a picture of earth and man's life as it presented itself
to the highest-erected minds in man's past and in his own
era a word-picture of Time and God, as in the days of his
despair and soul-wrestle Time and God had appeared to
himself. In the Second Part, Prometheus the Death-bringer,
distributed into four colossal Acts, he depicted in terrible
scene on scene the conflict of earth's former gods against the
new vision of God. There, in the breast of Prometheus, the
God that had been was at war with the God that is to be.
The interest of the Second Part centred in the transformation
of Prometheus from the Life-bringer into the Death-bringer,
from the Titan or demi-god who, in antagonism to the
Zeus-God, rapt in cold omnipotence, wishes to re-clothe
earth in joy and peace into the seer or visionary hero who
looks beyond this earth and beyond the universe of Being
to a state higher than Being and the God of Being.
VII
A modern critic, John Halford, has pointed out that
Rentzdorf's Prometheus the Titan might be described as a
world-drama having for its central subject "The Tragedy
of God. " And it is not only the boldest and most original
1 86 Schonbrunn
of Rentzdorf 's own works, but, as Halford in the same essay
affirms, it is perhaps the profoundest work of that era; for
Werner in his speculative dramas ended in mere Romanism,
and Goethe, in the Second Faust, imparts to us no new
vision, but simply blends into a wayward unity the ideals
of Dante and the ideals of a later utilitarian age. Frederick
the Great's activities in his last years anticipate the close
of the Second Faust. But in Rentzdorf 's drama a new por-
traiture of God and of the universe is at least essayed.
Nevertheless, the Prometheus of Rentzdorf has, as Halford
acknowledges, the defects, if it has also the merits, of
/Eschylean tragedy. Its men and women are shifting
masks of God; the motives or passions which impel or
dominate them are flashes of the world-soul's will.
All in the drama is on a huge scale and full of shadowy
magnificence the vocabulary, the style, the verse-forms,
the characters, the scenery. In this respect it suggests in
literature only the Oresteia or Lear; in art, the Medici chapel
or the greater symphonies of Beethoven Rentzdorf's own
friend and in some respects his follower.
The opening scene of Part I presents an immense plain
covered with the havoc of war the ruins of cities and
villages, the smoking debris of palaces and temples. Night
is falling. In the distance the trumpets of a conquering
host ring out joyously in pursuit of a vanquished and re-
treating foe. Gradually they die away into the twilight.
Night deepens and total silence possesses the scene. In the
foreground stands a half-demolished altar and near it a
pillar blackened by fire. Beside this pillar the young war-
rior-poet Kallias, wrapped in a soldier's mantle, looks down
on the dead still sweet face of a boy of fifteen his brother.
Like himself he had risen in revolt against Hybristides, the
tyrant whose distant trumpets a minute ago broke the
twilight silences. The mad blind lust for revenge rages in
Kallias; but all is shadowed by the thought On whom is
The Making of a Poet 187
he to avenge the fallen boy? "Man's misery is complete;
earth cries to earth in anguish. And the Zeus-God, the
creator and affiictor, where in His throne? On the tyrant?
Yesterday by this temple on the forest edge I saw the hawk's
beak rise red from the womb of a hare with young ; the hare
and its brood have peace. The hawk's torment when in
life endures. Let Hybristides live!"
In Kallias and in his courage and in his dream-purposes
Rentzdorf had wrought a study of the youthful Bonaparte,
touched by Hamlet, dulled and unnerved in every act by his
life-hate and life- weariness. But Prometheus enters and
all is resolution, all is burning energy. Prometheus is not
man's foe; he is not even the foe of Hybristides ; he is the
enemy of God, the deathless antagonist of the Zeus-Creator
who, secure of his own eternity and self-centred in his
changeless omnipotence, sees world on world roll on in
agony from the first embryonic throb of being and of pain
to the last protesting cry of blind accusing madness-driven
decay. To destroy the Zeus-God, to re-create on a new
plan earth and all the worlds, to glut Being's rage with
everlasting continuous power and light and joy this is
Prometheus's enterprise, and in the first abrupt trochaics of
his challenge the spectators, Magyar and Austrian alike,
easily discerned the defiant ardour which, in their own era,
had thrilled the great spirits of the Revolution Mirabeau,
Danton, Vergniaud, and the Girondins. Earth's last illu-
sion was not withered.
This First Part of the drama ends in titantic gloom.
Freedom's hosts are everywhere vanquished; Kallias and
Prometheus, the mortal and immortal antagonists of the
Zeus-God, are fallen. Kallias and his companions-in-arms
have been massacred by the mob, hounded on by the priests;
Prometheus, in rage and mad surprise, has sunk, death-
defiant and God-defiant, under the earthquake and the
thunderbolt ; and on this earth and in all the spaces of the
i88 Schonbrunn
worlds it is Night, Night eternal, and the lamentings of
the dying, the moans or accusing grief of the living, rise
round the funeral pyres of the dead.
The midnight and the despair are not the midnight and
the despair of the defeated host only in tragic overthrow;
but the midnight and despair of Time itself and the worlds.
This prodigious gloom, as of worlds in eclipse, still pos-
sesses the stage when the spectators reassemble for the
Second Part. But the tortured cries of the dying, the loud
or muttered grief and rage round the pyres of the dead
have ceased. Yet a voice is heard, low, solitary, but in-
finitely majestic, infinitely sorrowful ; and gradually, as the
eyes become accustomed to the night, a vastness within the
vastness is discerned, a Presence, a shape colossal yet un-
certain in its outlines, aweing the heart in proportion as it
allures it by a sense of unsolved and insoluble mysterious-
ness. It is the Zeus-God. It is the Zeus-God, not in
insulting victory, not the possessor of a frigid unending
omnipotence; but speaking like a god in anguish, suffering
yet unconquered, agonizing yet unbending from his path.
Prometheus, long since buried under the avalanche, is now
storming his way back to the upper air. A new war and
new suffering are near. And not in resentment but in
strange terrible sympathy, held by the awful gloom, the
spectators listen to the Zeus-God's apologia and lament.
"What is thy suffering beside my suffering, and the an-
guish of a million million worlds beside mine? For I am
the inventor of Death, and the discoverer of Life am I.
Yea, to deliver these my universes from their suffering and
my soul from its anguish I created and I create. In me is
fulfilled the tragic purpose of the worlds ; the Doom's begin-
nings and the Doom's ending. The malediction of my
worlds is heavy upon Me; yet the voice wherewith they curse
Me is my voice. For I am the sin of my worlds, and their
redemption am I ....
The Making of a Poet 189
"And for him who yonder has sunk overwhelmed, yea,
for Prometheus, my best-loved, rebel of my rebel-thought,
doom of my tragic doom, what is your compassion beside
my compassion or your wrath beside my wrath? But he
shall rise again. Made strong by my thought, and by the
secrets of the grave instructed, he shall arise. Even now he
is here!"
Lightnings at the word split the shroud of universal
gloom, lightnings that coalesce into a light, into a wide-
streaming, sunny, and beneficent radiance; and steeped in
immortal youth, in wonder and immortal felicity, this earth
is seen, this earth is seen outstretched, clothed in all her
zones in the splendour and everlasting tranquil joy of Pro-
metheus's ideal and Prometheus's dream.
Vanquished, the Titan has accomplished that which,
a victor, he would never have accomplished. But the curse
of transiency still oppresses. To remove this curse Pro-
metheus prepares himself for this last war the war which
is to give eternity and reality to this fair and deceitful
semblance of a vision.
But there is a change in Prometheus. He speaks the old
challenges, the old watchwords; but his strange, troubling
yet fixed and most haunting cadences announce some darker
thought or unresolved doubt, numbing his purpose. His
voice, the spectators discern with a shudder, is nearer to the
voice of the Zeus-God, his dread adversary.
"It is impossible," says Axel Petersen in his critique of
the play which appeared two days later in the Mercure de
Vienne, "to narrate the suspense, the alternations of sur-
prise and questioning wonder and admiration which this
Second Part of the drama created in us. Gradually we un-
ravel Prometheus's secret; we understand his hesitation.
He has discovered that the Zeus-God in seeking to destroy
mankind has acted not in caprice and hate but in compas-
sion and in love; that Kallias, the mortal poet, in the First
190 Schonbrunn
Part of this tremendous work, possessed an insight denied
as yet to the immortal son of Clymene ; that from the high-
est life the extremest death-desire is born ; and that the mark
of the tragic vision and the attainment of Being's consum-
mating glory is the intensity with which the human soul,
in art before a great tragedy, in action before some mighty
passion frustrated, arraigns Being itself and Being's God."
In the last war, more furious and if possible wider in its
destroying rage than the first, Prometheus is again van-
quished, and this time forever. It is Annihilation's vic-
tory. His immortality becomes mortal, and as he sinks in
eternal night, the world-doom and the God-doom, Being's
total ablation, are clearly foreboded ; yet even in that horror-
striking moment, it is upon the Zeus-God that the spec-
tators' hearts are concentrated, and in the chorus which
concludes the entire drama they hear at once the dirge for
Prometheus and the paean and death-song of the Zeus-God,
also, of the Spirit of the Universe itself.
"Behold the courses of the evening, how they gather
above the sunset, squadron behind squadron arrayed in
their glory! What splendour! What brightness! Their
forms outnumber the forest in multitude, and their hues,
the mine crimson and emerald, amethyst and gold. But
the sun goeth down, and their glory is withered. So shall
I sink, so shall I, the everlasting God, sink and go down;
and the cloud-pavilions, my worlds, shall be dispersed and
vanish away. But I know whither I go, voyaging beyond
Being to my timeless rest; yea, I know whither I go.
"Behold, I show you a mystery within a mystery. I
perish and my worlds perish. Their anguish is ended, and
on the pathways of infinitude their dust is no more seen.
But I am the anguish of my worlds, and their dust am I
which has vanished. I am their strivings ; and their death-
agonies am I. Behold, I show you a mystery within a
mystery. The anguish and the dust die not, and the suffer-
The Making of a Poet 191
ing and the victory are not in vain. For, transfigured, I
pass, and the drama of Being is ended and the Tragic Doom
is fulfilled."
"What, in plain prose, is the final impression left on the
mind by this extraordinary work?" says Axel Petersen in
the critique already quoted. "What is the dramatist's
message? What at last is the unifying idea of this play,
astonishing the mind by its myriad-sided suggestiveness,
here startling us by a trait drawn from the Zend Avesta or
the remoter, more mysterious East, there by a phrase that
upcalls the lost religion of Mithras or the better-known
faiths of Judaea, Persia, Egypt, Babylonia, Hellas? Amid
all this dazzling, knowledge-steeped variousness of ideas
and rich and tapestried imaginings, one purpose shines to
give God a newer voice and to give man a newer vision.
And I, for one, welcome the poet-mystic's daring, and praise
his high endeavour; for and here I speak not for myself
only but for many in Vienna and for many in Germany
it is not new governments, but a new vision of God that this
age is now waiting for. Our hearts are sick of dreams and
the irrealizable promises of revolutions; sick too of the
refurbishing of old institutions and the promulgation of new
laws. Prometheus in this tragedy realizes these to the ut-
most; earth and this universe under his brief dominion
leave no Utopian vision and utilitarian hope unfulfilled.
And what at its height is his prayer and the prayer of the
worlds? It is for the earthquake-rent Caucasus. It is for
the lightnings of his God-adversary. To what end has he
raised existence to its height, unless that out of the ecstasy
of Being the darker, mightier ecstasy of Annihiliation may
arise?"
CHAPTER VII
A VIENNESE SUPPER PARTY
OHORTLY before ten o'clock Rentzdorf, unable any
O longer to control his impatience to see his mistress,
quitting the Opera, called a hackney coach.
As he was about to enter it he involuntarily glanced at
the driver.
' ' What ! " he exclaimed. ' ' Caspar ? Is it Caspar ? ' '
"Yes, sir, it is Caspar Karstens. "
Rentzdorf looked with stupefaction at the man and then
at the horse. Its wretched leanness pierced even the un-
clipped coat, thick as a fur. The harness was patched, tied
in places with string, and everywhere rusty and worn. Yet
before the war this man was one of the smartest drivers in
Vienna.
But there was nothing to be said, and both men knew it.
It was war.
"To the Rothenthurm, sir?"
"No; the Palazzo Esterthal."
As they trotted through the narrow streets, here lighted
with oil lamps, there dark, silent, and deserted, a watchman
passed, chanting his refrain
"Horet was ich euch will sagen,
Die Glock' hat zehn geschlagen."
192
A Viennese Supper Party 193
The melancholy sound, heard m childhood, heard in
youth and early manhood, affected Rentzdorf singularly.
His mind had for months been accustomed to the bivouac
silences or turmoil, punctuated at intervals by bugle calls
or the distant movement of troops.
They were now skirting the broad park which lay to the
east of the Hofburg. His thoughts concentrated in sudden
violent passion on his mistress. Distinct as Artemis bathing
on a moonlit night in Thessaly, her figure burned there before
him in pallid, unearthly splendour. It was on such a night
and within those very walls of the old palace of the Habs-
burgs that he had first met her three years and a half ago.
It was in 1806. A series of brilliant festivities celebrated
the new title of "Emperor of Austria" which, forestalling
Napoleon's design, Francis II. had assumed. The disasters
of Ulm and Austerlitz seemed already forgotten. Vienna
had recovered her gaiety and her magnificence. Strellein,
the equerry to the Empress Ludovica, had revived those
quadrilles on horseback which, a generation earlier, Maria
Theresa had made fashionable. Like the other fetes in-
vented by that great sovereign, those quadrilles were
adapted to her own tastes and to her own handsome person,
and they had not outlived her ten years. Their revival by a
foreign princess pleased the Viennese. It gave the gazettes
the opportunity of recalling Austria's victories over Freder-
ick and Prussia's measureless rapacity.
It was on a June night, sultry and still, that Rentzdorf
first saw one of these dances. At Mohacz he had finished an
act of his Prometheus, and, in singular exaltation, he had
come to Vienna to see Johann and Bolli.
His surprise when, in the Rittersaal, he saw the horse-
women arrange themselves for the quadrille, had in a mo-
ment become interest, then delight the flare of the torches,
the music, the rhythmic beat of the hoofs, the youth and
grace of the riders; and, as the dance proceeded, his delight
194 Schonbrunn
had become a fixed dream through which devolved the
images of life's extremes of beauty and of daring, of woman's
beauty and of war; and, every faculty alit, he saw or seemed
to see actualized the very shapes which in the woods at
Mohacz he had been brooding the frieze of the Parthenon,
the temple decorated by Scopas, the forms of tragic myth
and drama. And it was whilst he stood there, bound by the
triple spell of music, woman's grace, and visionary thought,
that, still in this trance-like state, his blood rushed out like
fire towards one of the riders; and in that passage of time,
most like a dream, a passion began in Rentzdorf's spirit
which swept into itself every faculty the senses' thrill, the
imagination's glory, the will's energy, the intellect's soaring
scrutiny.
Love may or may not arise at first sight; but in the rela-
tions of a man to a woman the transition from friendship,
however intimate, to passion, however incipient, is abrupt
and well-defined. Friendship, love, passion Rentzdorf
experienced all for that unknown horsewoman during the
brief space that the dance lasted.
The riders that night were in three groups, fifteen ladies
in all, drawn from the foremost families of Vienna and
Presburg. Five dressed in pale pink rode grey horses, five
in light blue rode black horses, and five in white or ivory
silk rode horses of a deep bay or roan colour.
When in a figure of the dance her horse reared danger-
ously, her eyes under her short veil flashed a smile to Johann
and Toe, beside whom Rentzdorf was standing. Master-
ing her horse, she instantly took her place in the stepping,
curvetting, circling throng. A mist of music environed her.
That was the moment in which friendship became passion.
It was in that moment also that he saw that she was in white,
riding a bay.
The act, swift as lighting, by which she had mastered the
bay had strung her figure to the utmost, outlining every
A Viennese Supper Party 195
contour from stirrup to knee, from hips to shoulders and
wrists. Not in his dreams nor in creative ecstasy of poetry
had Rentzdorf seen a shape more fair.
"Three and a half years ago and a June midnight ....
It was yesterday."
The vision had disappeared. He heard the clatter of his
hackney's hoofs. Around him the darkness of Vienna
streets, and in front there loomed the grim outline of the
Molker bastion and the Molker Thor.
II
The supper-room of the Palazzo Esterthal was, like the
other apartments, furnished in a style of sombre and faded
magnificence candelabra and massive ornaments in bronze,
deep crimson hangings in damask, whilst the panelling,
tables, and chairs were of the dark woods familiar in the
courts of Naples and Madrid. Even the modern paintings,
including one of Amalie herself and one of her husband wear-
ing the uniform of Ferdinand IV.'s Guard, both executed at
Naples by a follower of Ribera, were in the Spanish style.
Rentzdorf reached the palace at about half-past ten.
In the hall, as was the custom in Vienna, he gave his sword
to a servant before entering the supper-room.
The company, amounting still to some fifty or sixty per-
sons, was more numerous than he had expected. At a
glance he took in its character; diplomatists, secretaries, a
minister, and other representatives of various State depart-
ments and their satellites. Except the old Count and two
generals of Joseph II. 's period, not a soldier was present.
Such a company in Amalie's house would have bored
Rentzdorf at any time; to-night it was exasperating to
excess.
"To see her, to be near her," thought he, "bored even
with her boredoms!"
196 Schonbrunn
It was not the rose, but it was at least the rose's shadow.
Rentzdorf walked straight towards Amalie, forcing a
dignitary who was about to kiss her hand to step aside with
a bland, unfriendly smile.
This was Minister von Stiegerling, who in his civic capa-
city had been permitted to remain in Vienna. There was,
the wits alleged, an additional reason. Napoleon delighted
to honour the man to whom he owed the glories of Ulm and
Austerlitz; for Stiegerling it was who, in October, 1805, had
persuaded the shifty Francis II. to make his quarter-master
Mack commander-in-chief, and it was Stiegerling whose
corruption or incapacity was responsible for the condition
of the army in that fatal year not a battery with its equip-
ment of horses, not a regiment or squadron which had more
than two-fifths of its officers with the colours. Disgraced
by Stadion, this man had, in February, 1808, recovered his
prestige, and now, it was rumoured, his was the secret force
behind the sinister and rapid advance of Metternich.
Rentzdorf had always regarded Stiegerling with mistrust
and contempt. To-night he answered his false compli-
ments with cold ceremoniousness ; but the minister, lifting
up his powerful frame and large face simmering with fat,
turned again to Amalie, though still addressing Rentzdorf,
and said in his authoritative but curious tenor voice :
"You will permit me, sir, to finish what I was saying to
her Illustriousness ? For I was observing that what our
gracious Emperor desires is not men imbued with new ideas
and subversionary theories, but men faithful to the tradi-
tions which in the past have made Austria glorious, and,
in the future, shall keep her great. In a word," he said,
dropping suddenly into his famous "homely" manner,
"what Francis II. wants in his subjects are simple loyal
hearts. Mushroom empires depend for their prestige on
newfangled titles and dignities. Austria is old
A sound that was like a groan of ironic assent interrupted
A Viennese Supper Party 197
the reed-like voice. Rentzdorf, glancing in the direction of
the sound, saw Count Johann, Alexis Rasumowski and
Max Dietrich, Lan-Lan's brother, with a bevy of ladies
standing under a full-length portrait of the Archduke Maxi-
milian. All were gazing, with eyes brimming with laughter
or scorn, straight across at Stiegerling.
"It is a company of the Bianchi defying the Neri, "
Amalie said laughingly to Rentzdorf. "And you, Herr von
Stiegerling, you are a finished Corso Donati. "
"Madame," was the answer, "you doubtless praise me
beyond my poor merits; but I am unversed in Florentine
history." And, unperturbed, he continued: "Such, I say,
are the men that our good sovereign needs not the so-
called men of ideas, andfrondeurs," he interjected, with an
adder-like glance from between the black narrow slits of his
heavy-lidded eyes in the direction of Count Johann.
And with an unctuous smile he again took Amalie's hand,
and cited for the hundredth time the courage of the Cister-
cian monk who at Wagram had carried the sacred wafers
in a pyx from one death-haunted spot to another of the
battlefield, administering them to the wounded of both
armies.
He then bowed deeply, and, with a viperish smile to
Rentzdorf, he very slowly quitted the room, turning at the
door to give some instructions to his under-secretary, Ger-
lach, a studious-looking personage in spectacles, with dirty-
ish grey hair and a thin, unhealthy beard, who at one time
had been a professor at Jena. For Stiegerling was a man of
culture ; year by year on the 9th of May he sent a wreath to
Schiller's grave; he had devised in 1807 the visit of August
von Schlegel to Vienna. He had even hoped at one time to
induce Kant to quit Konigsberg for the Austrian capital.
The pressure around Amalie increased; and Rentzdorf
was turning away when immediately on his left he encoun-
tered a slim figure in white, tall, with a pale face, sparkling
198 Schonbrunn
eyes, clustering brown curls, and a voice that trembled a
little.
"Nusschen?" he said questioningly.
Since he had left Vienna the girl had become a woman.
"Yes, it is Nusschen," came a laughing answer; and Toe
stood beside her, the two confronting him. "Will you
dance with us to-night?"
But a masterful hand was laid on Rentzdorf 's arm.
"I must rescue you from these sirens," said Johann.
"You must in any case have something to eat. Even poets
cannot live on your blandishments only, " he said to the two
women.
And sitting down with Rentzdorf at some distance he
poured out his wine, taking it from a servant in the Esterthal
livery.
"Why did you come to this house?" he asked in an under-
tone. "That parasite of Stiegerling's is just the fellow to
pass the word."
Rentzdorf 's dark penetrating eyes rested for a moment on
Count Johann's.
"There is no danger. I cannot be arrested without an
order from Bonaparte, and, by morning, unless this peace
is signed, I shall be on my way to Buda again. "
He spoke in the same low tones as Count Johann; but the
latter, feeling himself observed, said aloud: "You heard
Stiegerling the Magnificent? It is an insult to the Floren-
tine to call those piteous ineptitudes Machiavellian; is it
not so, your Excellency?"
He turned abruptly and faced the man whose shadow he
had felt approaching.
It was the noted jurist, Theodor Maas, an Aulic Council-
lor. His squat, bristly fingers had several rings on them.
Though not fifty, his dry, shrewd, clean-shaven face was
already covered with countless thread-like wrinkles that
ran in circles across his brow and down his cheeks where,
A Viennese Supper Party 199
on either side of his long nose and thin irregular lips, they
met the wrinkles of his chin, and whenever he spoke every
wrinkle darted and moved till the whole face shook. He
spoke habitually in rasping, husky, but very deliberate tones,
and now, ignoring Count Johann's remark and greeting
Rentzdorf with a vinegary effusiveness, he asked shrilly :
"Anything more known of that queer affair at Schon-
brunn? What? Nothing? Not even at the embassy?"
"No," Count Johann said curtly; and to Rentzdorf he
added, " Maas knows more secrets than any man in Vienna,
yet he is always in search of news. "
The councillor grinned complacently, and with a gro-
tesque affectation of frankness, said to Johann:
"Now who will tell me why everything in Austria is done
in this hugger-mugger fashion? Nobody knows whether
we are at peace or war, whether our good Emperor is with-
holding from his children a pleasant surprise until he can
announce it in person in our streets, or whether Bonaparte,
to save appearances, desires to leave Schonbrunn before his
humiliation is known. For example, this evening in the
Leopoldstadt I heard "
"Away with Stadion! The will of Metternich is the
will of God," interjected the same mocking voice that had
interrupted Stiegerling.
"Ah, ah ! " exclaimed Maas, bringing the stubby forefinger
of his right hand vertically down upon the palm of his left,
and he seemed about to say something murderous; but
changing his intention, he strutted from the spot.
Count Johann was the outspoken enemy of the Metter-
nich faction, and he had been the first to satirize Gentz's
fatuous proposal of a new capital. He had denounced not
less indignantly the Metternich policy of a censored theatre,
a gagged press, universal espionage, and the fortress or the
dungeon as the only political arguments worthy of a strong
government.
20O Schonbrunn
"Our good Emperor, " he said, when the Aulic Councillor
was out of hearing, "is withholding from his children not a
pleasant surprise but another damnable surrender. Two
such crows as Maas and Stiegerling would not have croaked
in tune unless they had scented the corpse of Austria's
honour. My bluff was nearer the mark than I knew. We
may know before midnight. But yonder Toe and Nusschen
are making signals of distress. Finish your supper, and I
will bring them to you. The crowd is dispersing. "
In a second or two the Countess Markowitz took the seat
vacated by her brother-in-law.
Rentzdorf turned to her gladly.
The Countess, though a motherly woman, was "literary"
and of advanced tastes, and in her Thursday reunions her
circle regularly discussed Prometheus and the Essays but
they discussed also Werner's Templars and Kotzebue's
Incas. She was a Saxon, and though bearing one of the
greatest names in Austria had the pretension to look down
upon Vienna from the heights of Dresden asstheticism.
To-night this idiosyncrasy appeared almost immediately.
"Does not Daruka, " she said, "add just the touch of
barbaric sumptuousness that one instinctively seeks in a
Vienna salon? This is the fifth dress she has worn to-day,
each gorgeous as this. Nobody has a chance of looking
anything else but dowdy."
Rentzdorf looked in the direction indicated by the Coun-
tess. The dress of Daruka, Princess Ternitchsky, was
certainly "barbaric," but splendid a blood-red tunic em-
broidered in black and gold above a white satin skirt draped
with black lace terminating in a heavy gold fringe; a green
sash, also embroidered and fringed, was knotted about her
waist, and on her left arm a silver serpent spotted with
opals and with eyes of topaz and jet coiled itself, whilst into
her hair, which was black and abundant, two long ropes of
pearls had been twisted, resembling at a distance luminous
A Viennese Supper Party 201
spots of milk thickly sprinkled upon ebony. This was the
Circassian alluded to by Amalie in her talk with Toe that
morning. Prince Ternitchsky, her husband, was said by
some to have bought her as a slave in Tiflis; by others, to
have won her at the gaming-table, her father, a Circassian
chief, having, after excessive losses, staked first his slaves,
then his homestead, then his wife, and last his daughter.
But the tribe by the threats of death or mutilation had com-
pelled Ternitchsky to marry her. Vienna had at first re-
fused to receive her ; but a duel or two had imposed respect
or silence on his friends and Daruka's "savage" naivete and
goodness of heart established her position. From being re-
fused she became the fashion. Her outlandish pronunciation
of the Viennese dialect, her quaint idioms, her appetite for
sweetmeats, her delight in stories of primitive revenge, es-
pecially stories of unfaithful women punished by devilish
tortures eyes torn out, fingers and toes amputated joint
by joint became the rage.
But at that moment Fritz Wollmoden, a nephew of the
plenipotentiary, came forward to introduce to the Countess
Markowitz his newly married wife, a Saxon also, round-
featured, but bursting with youth and health, and lightly
clad as a mountain nymph. Toe and Nusschen meantime
had fallen into the clutches of Alexis Rasumowski and Count
Johann was powerless to rescue them.
Rentzdorf was for some minutes left undisturbed. He
rose and was about to move to another part of the
room, but he sat down again, letting his eyes pass from the
faces around to the portraits of the Spanish school on
the walls, pausing in troubled fixity on that of Amalie. It
showed her as a girl of seventeen, a figure of youthful, up-
springing grace in a simple black mantilla; yet no one could
look on the picture and not ask Who is she ? To be kissed
by those lips has earth or heaven any more entrancing
dream? But Rentzdorf had the curse, if also the reward, of
202 Schonbrunn
imagination; he could never see this picture without also
conjuring up her life in Naples as Esterthal's bride
the licentious court, the theatres, the Cytherean dances,
the moonlight parties on the bay.
From the portrait Rentzdorf looked to Amalie herself.
She was standing with her back to him, but with her face in
profile; for, a second before, she had made a quick move-
ment to answer an importunate guest a movement which
dragged the pale and lustrous softness of her dress into
myriad folds about her waist and knees.
"God!" he muttered involuntarily, "how beautiful!"
He felt the blood congest his temples, then an icy tremor
crept over him; morbidly oppressed in the magic of her
beauty there was something demonic and malign.
"And yet the thoughts I have thought from woman are
the only thoughts that God has thought. The things I
have felt from woman are the only things that God has
felt."
Yes, he told himself, he knew in his mistress to-night the
seduction as well as the terror; he knew the true nature of
the forces latent in woman's soul and in woman's body the
resources of nature garnered there, fulfilling the world-soul's
plan, stronger than lightning because they are born of the
lightning, or than war. What shall resist them?
Twice in his life he had experienced war in its most daunt-
ing and harrowing shape; he had seen the frozen hillsides
and valleys of Austerlitz, and the wheat-fields of Wagram
in which, as evening fell, not the corncrake's call, but the
maledictions of tortured men made frightful the twilight.
He had heard on the puszta or sun-baked steppes of Hun-
gary the thunder making of the elements a mimicry of
devastation and war. But in the breathing calm of that
woman's figure he divined forces dread and sublime as the
elemental forces of tempest and revolution; for in her loveli-
ness, pale and erect, was the very end, the goal, whither
,A Viennese Supper Party 203
across aeons of terror and elemental fury nature had
striven.
in
It was eleven o'clock, but some twenty people were still
present.
The departure of the Ternitchskys had been followed by
the inevitable chatter about that interesting manage. Was
it true that in Rome Prince Ternitchsky, to save the life of
the enamoured Canova, had "lent" Daruka to the sculptor,
exactly as Alexander had "lent" Campaspe to Appeles?
"Where does Daruka get those perfumes?" Madame
Wollmoden asked in her fresh girlish voice, fanning herself
aggressively. "It makes my head ache to be near her."
"We shall teach you those mysteries in Vienna," Coun-
tess Markowitz said indulgently. "I too had headaches
when I first came from Dresden."
Max Dietrich narrated Daruka's retort to Radetsky at a
boar hunt, and her naive impressions of Bonaparte "Dat
your world-conqueror? Dat little toad? You should see
my father." The words had become a caricature, then a
joyous song.
Young Wollmoden, anxious to distinguish himself, inter-
vened. "They say at Rome that Bonaparte's mother ex-
hibits herself to British tourists for three gulden a head. "
"Bonaparte's mother?" Rasumowski murmured to a
lady with a sleepy voice displaying a well-fleshed forearm by
doubling back her elbow. "If it were his sister Pauline ' '
Count Johann, unable to master his anger, said with
harsh deriding emphasis, "Our motherland exhibits her
dotage to all Europe. Who pays her?"
He rose, and as he parted with Rentzdorf said in the same
voice.
"This is Vienna in a nutshell. You know it again?"
"I shall see you later?" Rentzdorf asked.
204 Schonbrunn
' ' At the Rittersaal ? Yes. ' '
The talk streamed on, gossip and anecdote, anecdote and
gossip.
"Bonaparte himself, I am told, bores women," the lady
with the drowsy voice remarked.
"No wonder," Rasumowski retorted quickly; "he buries
so many men. " And overjoyed at his own mot, he repeated
it, stressing the innuendo.
His yellowish brown complexion, broad face, wide-set
eyes, shining like the back of a beetle, revealed the Tartar
peasant original of his house ; but his infectious good-humour
was irresistible, and Rentzdorf laughed right out when
Rasumowski, determined not to be ignored by the poet,
said straight to him
"What is it like to be under grape-shot for thirty-five
minutes, eh?" (Rentzdorf 's regiment had had to face this
ordeal at Eckmiihl.) " Is it as bad as a thunderstorm ? We
had an awful one in Vienna the night before Wagram. It
lasted seven hours. I slept through it all, but nobody made
me a general for my coolness. Hard, I call it, eh? It's
always the way in Austria. Intrepidity is unrecognized
except in the ranks of our enemies. See? Eh?"
But Toe now turned with decision to Rentzdorf.
"Sit here," she said, pointing to a canape", "and talk to
Nusschen and me. You have not said a word to us yet.
And yonder comes Amalie!"
Toe's eyes were radiant; her cheeks flushed. Rentzdorf
had noticed that she appeared to have an understanding
with Count Johann. Was it marriage at last?
At a distance the rumbling bass voice of Count Marko-
witz was heard intoning.
"That which makes a great strategist," he was saying,
"is not courage; it is the power to form decision after deci-
sion amid the firing of guns and muskets, amid the cries of
mortally wounded men and horses, and to make those de-
A Viennese Supper Party 205
cisions securely and collectedly as a mathematician seated
before a problem in his study. The Archduke Charles ' '
rv
A quarter of an hour later Count Estherthal was sitting
at the foot of the chief table fast asleep. Markowitz's
rumbling voice and somnolent aphorisms had produced this
effect. The old Count had, with stubborn courtesy, re-
sisted the drowsiness invading him; he had closed first the
right eye, then the left, in the hope of relieving the strain
but the platitudes unwound themselves endlessly, and he
had at last closed both eyes simultaneously, and, to Toe's
infinite amusement, fallen fast asleep.
"Now we can escape," she whispered to Nusschen, and
taking the girl's arm she slipped behind Markowitz's chair,
noting with comic dismay the resemblance of his square
shoulders to his brother Johann's, and said to him with
gravity
"Padrino needs rest. He has to act as Amalie's escort
later."
Count Markowitz rose reluctantly and was followed by
the three or four other guests who still lingered.
Toe's manoeuvre left Rentzdorf and Amalie to themselves.
The latter got up and put out the candles nearest to them,
thus surrounding their end of the table with a zone of
obscurity.
" Now we are alone. Dearest, dearest. ..."
Rentzdorf did not answer. A remark of Toe's had dis-
covered to him that Count Ferdinand, Amalie's husband,
had, less than six weeks ago, passed a fortnight in Vienna
and in this house. Amalie at the time was writing to him
every second day; but of her husband's visit she had said
not a word. Why? He had striven to throttle the foul
suspicion, but it had returned and re-returned, and now,
fanned by a tyrannous imagination, possessed him utterly.
206 Schonbrunn
An hour ago there was not on earth a more radiant glory
than the glory which environed his life; now a pit in Male-
bolge was not more loathesome and dark. An abominable
toast given at a mess after the campaign kept rattling in his
brain "To the husbands of our fair ones in Vienna ! May
they enjoy the repose our fatigues have granted them."
"To the husbands of our fair ones!" a voice had shouted
in drunken hilarity. "They have a better time than we
lovers ever imagine. Crede experto. "
"To-night, to-night!" Rentzdorf muttered to himself in
desperate misery. " Oh, the irony of it . . . . To-night!"
And yet, he asked himself in an outburst of cynicism, what
was it that he had expected in Vienna, and what was it that
he had found? One of the most beautiful women in Austria
sat waiting for him to make love to her. What more could
the heart of man desire ? True, five weeks ago this lady had
received her husband under this roof and into her bed.
What was more natural? True again, it proved that for
three years she had day by day been lying to him. Again,
what was more natural? All women are liars. It is a
commonplace. There was not a man or woman of the court
circle in Vienna or Naples who would not have stood aghast
with indignation or derision that he should in such a mistress
have expected any other conduct.
And murder, the authentic blood-lust, was on him. The
torrent of insults which in crimes of jealousy are the prelude
to violence was suffocating him.
Suddenly he burst into words "Is it not singular? This
earth and all modern life are gangrened with falsehood ; but
in Vienna no one lies. Society is infamy's sojourn, but in
Vienna there are only pure women and brave men not a
single liar anywhere. You and I, Amalie, liars both; how
can we live in such a city of righteousness, and how can we
look in each other's eyes and see the lies curling and en-
gendering there?"
A Viennese Supper Party 207
It did not seem his own judgment that framed nor his
own voice that spoke the hideous words, but the judgment
and the voice from the Irene Apponyi period.
But seeing the misery in her lover's eyes, hearing it in his
voice, Amalie was resolved to be very patient.
"If I were the thing you suspect, Heinrich, " she said,
forcing down her emotion, "could I have met you thus
to-night? Or if I imagined you believed in your own sus-
picions, do you suppose I should sit here a second longer?
False to everyone else, these three years to you, to you
alone I have never spoken a word save the truth. Why
should I begin to lie to you to-night?"
And in a gentler voice she continued
" If I did not tell you myself, it was because in my happi-
ness I had forgotten. I wished to write to you at the time ;
but even in a cipher how was I to risk betraying him? His
life might have paid for my rashness. There was daily a
talk of war. I was distracted by my own anxiety."
"Why did he run that risk ? " Rentzdorf broke in. " For
what and for whom?"
Amalie looked at her lover.
"Not for me, " she answered in tones through which there
shot a gleam of laughter. Yet the next instant she was
trembling and a vivid blush swept over her pale cheeks.
"It was for Adelheid Ortski," she said in a low con-
strained voice.
Even now Amalie von Esterthal could not speak the name
of her husband's mistress, simply, as she would have spoken
another woman's name.
Dumbfounded, Rentzdorf sprang to his feet. It was not
difficult for him to divine the humiliation it must have cost
her to speak these words.
"Chichitza?" he exclaimed involuntarily. "Where was
my Lord Paget?"
She made a vague gesture.
208 Schonbrunn
"At Troppau, trying, in prospect of a renewal of the war,
to arrange a rapprochement between England and Prussia.
Chichitza's own indiscretion had brought her into danger.
You had not heard?"
"I have heard nothing."
She told him in a rapid imperfect manner the exploit
against Napoleon of which Lord Paget's mistress had been
the heroine; the theatrical purchase of a dagger in the Gra-
ben, "destined for the tyrant's heart," and of Bonaparte's
famous comment, "The lady confounds the parts of Judith
and Rahab. "
Rentzdorf listened like a man who issues from a cavern
full of the uncouth shapes of darkness and the hovering of
obscene wings and suddenly stands under the sun-steeped
azure and sees around and in front of him the sands and the
myriad-twinkling waters of the sea. But even whilst joy
struggled with remorse in his heart, his imagination had
swept on to the root cause of to-night's painful scene, and
of the mutual uneasiness or suspicion which had disfigured
other days and other nights. It was their sundered lives he
living in his rooms, she in this palace as Esterthal's wife,
compelled on state occasions to preside at his table, her
goings out and her comings in, her daily actions, the very
dresses she wore, exposed to his arbitrament. This too
added a morbid element to the misery of each parting, deep
enough in itself. For all this there was one remedy to
leave Vienna together! And in the vortex of their great
passion, greeting the sun each day together, what a glory
transcending glory awaited them!
He turned to her. His words of adoration and the pic-
tures of their love-life together which her own imagination
conjured overwhelmed her.
She sat with bent head.
"Heinrich! You hurt me. To-night! How I have
waited for to-night, and now it harrows my very soul ....
A Viennese Supper Party 209
To be together? Ah God, as if you did not know my heart's
cry. I lie down at night. I never sleep till in imagination
you take me into your arms. Never a morning I wake but
I wish you beside me, long for you, stretch out my arms
for you with a delicious horrible craving. For ever, for
ever. But that is the heaven which you and I shall never
reach. "
She broke off with a cry of abrupt stifled anguish. Then,
more calm, she resumed "For how is it to be done? I ask
myself this a thousand times ; but there is never an answer.
Besides, if you cannot trust me now, how could you trust
me then? Would marriage keep me faithful?"
It was a flash of resentment ; it was a flash also of the dis-
concerting candour and humour which marked Amalie von
Esterthal the candour, for instance, which had edged her
replies to Toe that morning. Suddenly the resentment
vanished and her voice became dolorous in its appeal as the
slow dropping of tears. It was vain, she pointed out, for
Rentzdorf and her to speak of marriage. To them that was
for ever denied. Her husband had all the superstitions as
well as the courage of his caste. He was cruel, profligate,
treacherous, and proud; but in his religion bigoted as a
Dominican or a Carthusian friar.
" To go away together," she concluded, "that is not for us.
We may die together Ah!" she said with a sudden inspira-
tion, "it came to us a year ago. In the Sporelberg do you
remember ? If we had but obeyed, if we had but taken that
path then "
Her voice had sunk to a whisper.
And suddenly in thought Rentzdorf was standing beside
her on a ledge amongst the tormented basalt crags of the
Sporelberg. The last hour of their last afternoon together
had come, for there in a chalet in the Styrian Alps they had
passed three weeks in a continuous bliss which seemed less
like that of mistress and mortal lover than that of spirits in
14
210 Schonbrunn
ecstasy. Together they had lived Rentzdorfs faith; they
had lived the vision of his Prometheus, day transcending
successive day; but that afternoon, confronted with the
return, he to the army, she to the social routine of Vienna,
a reaction and an immense sadness possessed them.
"Life's meaning? God's meaning?" Rentzdorf had said
in vehement gloom. "Nor life nor God has any meaning
save this; Fame, la gloire, we can leave to Bonaparte; and
yet, you and I, if all this instant were to end, would not be
forgotten utterly. Earth would remember us; earth in her
deep centre would remember us, Amalie, for the things that
you and I have felt together and the thoughts that you and
I have thought together."
Startled, she had stood for some seconds with down-bent
head and with intent face, as though listening to some inward
summoner.
"Yes," she had answered at length, "if it were to end
now? And why should it not end now? "
In an instant the death-impulse was on both. Speech-
less yet panting, as in some fearful conflict in their sleep
they clung together, each terrorstruck for the other's safety,
yet each in desire seeking the other's destruction. The
odours of her hair and of her neck maddened him by their
seduction; he clasped her closer to his breast, and thus they
stood on the dizzy edge. Uncounted fathoms below them,
a thread of falling azure, raved the torrent of the Aar.
The crisis had not lasted many minutes, perhaps not even
seconds; but every detail of that wide landscape had particu-
larized itself upon their memories upon hers, a piece of
schist about two inches from the brink, that seemed to
crackle in the sun, and far below a lake that looked no bigger
than a tent-roof; upon his, the chaos of tumbled rocks and
mountain summits and overhead the lazy hovering of a
vulture on the watch. Not a quarter of an hour ago he had
laughed her into "for peace' sake," the assertion that she
A Viennese Supper Party 211
saw that same vulture; for her eyes, despite their dark and
luminous beauty, were short-sighted.
"Is it for us, " he had thought, "that this sentinel vulture
waits, he and his invisible companions?"
And, agonized, he had struggled to see her face, that was
to be the vulture's prey. But surprised, blind, struggling,
she had resisted. In her the death-desire raged on; and, to
his horror, he had felt it again on himself once more. To the
seduction of the precipice was added the seduction of her
embrace; her entwining arms dragged him to the edge; her
lips, ice and fire, clung to his; and to his single cry, her
name "Amalie?" she had whispered the answer "It is
now, beloved. Death; it is now. "
Her voice in the ecstasy of that death yearning had been
her voice in the ecstasy of love yearning.
Five heart-beats this lasted; the next, as though some
noxious vapour infecting his brain had dissolved, he
wrenched her back from within a foot of the edge, and
mortally pale, stood beside her, noting even then the fixed
flush on her brow, the surprise and angry darkness in her
eyes.
"Reaction from passion's excess, or this vision's exult-
ancy," Rentzdorf reflected, "she had willed death that
afternoon, there on the ledge of the Sporelberg. To-night
in Vienna, here in this palace, she wills it again. But that
other way why does she not will that other way? Ah,
my God, do I myself will it ? Do I myself will it? Or is all
this but one of the shifting masks that the ultimate anguish
in things wears to-night?"
The tenderest or the most passionate love never brings a
man and a woman nearer than two streams each of which
between its own banks seeks by its own path the sea.
212 Schonbrunn
Rentzdorf and Amalie von Esterthal were sincere; yet
to-night neither had spoken all the truth to each other.
She, on her side, left unexpressed a throng of half-uncon-
scious wishes or fears the wish to retain her rank, and,
above all, her personal independence. The right to visit
and be visited by "the world" she despised because she
possessed that right it was an encumbrance and a bore,
but she feared lest, if she lost it, its value should assume giant
proportions. Then there was padrino. She liked him in
himself, the stubborn unyielding representative of a caste.
She liked him also for his chivalrous cult for her dead mother.
Tacitly too she dreaded lest, if they fled together, her lover
should weary of a bond which, in its exacting violence, is
more testing than marriage. On the other hand she ex-
perienced, in bad moments, the married woman's distressing
jealousy of the unmarried lover. This very night Nus-
schen's girlish enthusiasm for Rentzdorf had surprised,
pleased, then disturbed her. Rentzdorf, on his side, equally
dissimulated the inmost sources of his impatience or his
misery. He idolized her with a passion too extreme or not
extreme enough.
"For that is the passion consummate," he told himself
savagely, "when the delights of the woman we love, even
if they ought to be our Hell, are our Heaven. But that is
the impossible, that is the unseizable. "
He turned to her, mastered by a fiercer yearning, the life
yearning, the death yearning. All the suppressed passion
of the day scorched in his blood. Never had the beauty of
her person been more enthralling. The earth her body
pressed would have turned to roses in his lips.
"Amalie!"
But she sprang back.
"Hush!" she whispered. "Be careful."
He followed her glance to the distant table where the old
Count still sat. He had stirred in his sleep.
A Viennese Supper Party 213
"Padrino?" Amalie called out softly. "Padrino?"
There was no answer. The quiet breathing continued.
The sleeper's posture had not changed. He sat with droop-
ing head, his chin on his breast, his hands laid along the
arms of his chair. The sleeping figure of the old warrior
and diplomat affected Rentzdforf . It had the pathos of all
helpless suffering things; but something in the patrician
features suggested his son, Amalie's husband, and the spell
was broken.
His mistress had risen.
Laying her finger on her lips, she glided to a curtained
recess which opened out of this room. This recess or room,
which looked on the cedar avenue, was richly furnished, but
in a more modern taste. On state occasions, when the
Archduke dined with Count Ferdinand, the curtains were
removed and the host and his imperial guest, and perhaps
two other guests of princely rank, sat here together, sepa-
rated from yet one with the company in the supper room.
It was the Habsburg tradition. Charles V. at Innsbruck
had often sat thus with Titian.
Rentzdorf sprang forward to where she waited, a glitter-
ing sorcery with her white arm outstretched, holding back
the curtain.
Twilight shrouded the recess. Through the window on
the right they could see the cedars and the steep gloom of the
night sky. Amalie drew her lover to a sofa that stood under
a fresco in Guide's manner on the further wall.
"Our voices will not disturb him here. Beloved, my
beloved. . . . "
He shuddered at her caress. The passion in her blood
shot like a fluid magnetism tingling into his own.
"We will talk of the future to-morrow," she whispered.
"To-morrow I will give you my answer. To-night oh
let me kiss you."
He drew her to his breast.
214 Schonbrunn
"I am answered already, Amalie. There is neither past
nor future. This is the everlasting Now of God's desire
and God's dream, in you, in me. The rest is nothingness. "
"Dearest, dearest," she murmured, looking up at him.
"What hours we have lost days and weeks and months
torn from us; and if we had them all that all would be so
little. It has been like death. This morning for the first
time I saw the autumn woods. And look at my hands; I
have forgotten to care for them or for anything."
He kissed her finger tips one by one, lingering over the
exquisitely set nails. He kissed her wrists; he kissed her
arms to the hollow of the elbows.
"Beloved, " she said, "oh, my beloved, this is very heaven
of heaven, merely to breathe, merely to feel your touch; but
when you are not there I am no better than the sea-shell
that lies on the shore and waits for the tide to fill all its
winding and secret recesses. I am the shell; your coming
is the tide. . . . "
He interrupted her.
"No, no; let me speak," she pleaded. "When you are
not with me I have neither thoughts to utter nor feelings
to cry out, except suffering and ennui. Do you remember
that night at Semmering in the gardens?"
She alluded to one of those assignations when to their
rapt thought time was interrupted, and together they felt
the river of the worlds sweep through their trances. But the
river was God; and the sea towards which it hastened was
Being's annihilation. Her words were the utterance of a
woman's passions, but they were also the enfevered grati-
tude of a woman driven desperate by scepticism to her
deliverer, to the poet-visionary who had revealed to her a
new God a God in herself as in the worlds.
Her words, her accent, her burning caresses, were a trans-
port unendurable. This woman who bent over him, in-
toxicating him by the mist of odours from her hair, her
A Viennese Supper Party 215
shoulders, her total person, this was no longer woman, but a
diviner, more ethereal substance, assuaging the world-soul's
thirst raging in his blood. Beauty herself in all its radiance
supernal was at this moment unmasked to his senses and to
his soul.
VI
A heavy sound broke in on their bliss-steeped dream. It
was like the fall of armour. Both started to their feet and
stood listening.
The sound was not repeated.
"It is nothing," Amalie said. "A servant closing a
door."
She drew him to her side again.
"Ah," she said hoarsely, "it was death, that moment;
living God's death, dying God's life. ..."
Her eyes smouldered. She locked and unlocked her
fingers into his.
" I cannot let you go, " she said again. " My whole being
thrills to you; every fibre aches for you. I cannot let you
go; every vein tingles for you. I cannot let you go. O
God, Heinrich, Heinrich. ..."
She flung herself down in prostrate abandonment. She
lay thus for many seconds. Then a frightful weeping con-
vulsed her. It was the everlasting parting. He knew it;
and in his own sombre brooding her grief was his God's
anguish for the beauty which He forever creates and for-
ever destroys.
" It must be past midnight, " he said at length. "When
ought you to be at the Rittersaal?"
His own emotion pierced through the quiet words. He
looked at the beautiful woman in self-abandoning grief and
passion; but in such intervals the soul which is most pros-
trate is the most exalted, highest, holiest.
2i6 Schonbrunn
"I need not go at all."
There was a feverous energy in her voice, on her brow,
in her eyes the working of restless thought scheming the
prolongation of this spiritual anguish and bliss.
"Listen," she said eagerly, and she raised her head; but,
at the sight of his face, with a happy tormented sighing she
pressed her mouth repeatedly to his, speaking amid kisses
as amid falling roses. "There is a way. Yes; yes. For at
least two hours I need not be at the Rittersaal. The ball
will go on till five. Listen. Go into the hall, put on your
sword, and send Schwartz to order the carriage for one or
half past one. Then go to my room as though to fetch my
domino; but, by accident, leave your sword in my room.
You will then say good-night to padrino and to me; and,
closing the hall door loudly, go back to my room and wait
there."
She sprang to her feet.
"You wonder!" he muttered. But on her account not
quite at ease in his mind, he asked. "Who is the servant on
duty after midnight?"
" Patzsch's son. Fritz is still with the Landwehr. As for
the others. . . ."
A shrug completed her meaning.
The necessity for these precautions was at times humiliat-
ing; but, at that period, the caste system, more rigid in
Vienna than in any other city of Europe, made a man-ser-
vant hardly a man, and a woman a scarce emancipated
slave.
"Go! "she entreated. "Go!"
CHAPTER VIII
NAPOLEON'S DREAM
IT was past midnight.
Not a breath stirred the trees in the gardens behind
Schonbrunn. The palace was in darkness. In front, to-
wards the left, the woods rose in black and winding masses,
motionless, profound. In the huge square a fountain flung
up the ghostly pallor of its waters, and even that fretful
sound, though low, appeared an intrusion in the stupendous
silence. The bivouac fires which twinkled at irregular in-
tervals north, east, south, and west, burned fitfully as dis-
tant sinking tapers, and, like the fountain, made intenser
this impression of the intrusiveness and transitoriness of
any motion, of any life.
Universal nature seemed entombed in her own first
thought.
Motionlessness, darkness, silence, immensity and away
to the eastward the glimmering flats of the Marchfeld,
where, amid the ruins of Austrian villages and homesteads,
the dust of those who had fallen at Aspern mingled with the
dust of those who, centuries ago, fell with Ottocar and with
Rudolf, with Kara Mustapha and Stahrenberg.
Seven or eight guests had dined with Napoleon. The
murderous attempt of that morning was by tacit consent
ignored. The Emperor was silent and preoccupied. Now
217
218 Schonbrunn
and then, as a mark of regret or reconciliation, he pressed a
dish upon the Prince de Neuchatel. Once the conversation
fell on the incidents of the ride and on the encounter with the
two Greek priests. Rousing himself, the Emperor con-
demned the Austrian recruiting system, which, with a blunt
astuteness "thoroughly Austrian, " tore the blacksmith and
the carpenter rather than the ploughman and the labourer
from village and town. "And the folly of it! A Black-
smith can till a field or hold a plough but no labourer can
at once replace the carpenter at his bench or the blacksmith
at his forge. " On the other hand, he praised the Austrian
soldiers "the best in the world if they had leaders."
Rapp, with a touch of the bluff frankness which had ruined
his advancement, observed that the Emperor had already
said this of the Russians.
"You are always thinking of the Russians," Napoleon
said tartly. "You have never forgotten Austerlitz and the
Prince Repnin. "
No courier had arrived from Totis. Champagny in
Vienna was still closeted with Liechtenstein; and as the
evening proceeded the Emperor's uneasiness and irritability
increased, and his uneasiness communicated itself to his
immediate entourage and in some inscrutable way to the
entire household. Men who remembered the infernal ma-
chine and the conspiracy of Cadoudal averred that in those
days Napoleon had been calmer in 'a much more trying
ordeal.
"Not one of us is the man he was before this accursed
campaign," Hulin said that evening to Rapp. "Where is
it to end, and how? Every bayonet with a point is beyond
the Pyrenees. We have had to fight this entire campaign
with the guns. And Spain is Hell. Death, disease or cap-
ture is the choice, and always in the end death." And
continuing with a touch of Rousseauism common in the
Republican and Napoleonic armies, "We are hated in
Napoleon's Dream 219
Vienna. Andre*ossy admits it. And we are hated in Ger-
many, and in Europe. What an unhappy fate for France!
Yesterday the Christ of nations; to-day the Judas; yester-
day the world's forlorn hope; to-day the world's execration.
You are a Frenchman as I am, Rapp. Was it for this the
Girondins walked to the Scaffold like hero-martyrs? Was
it for this we fought Valmy and Jemappes?"
At about half past eight before setting out for the Schloss
Theatre, Napoleon had again sent for Corvisart and for
Savary and questioned them separately and in private upon
their visits to the young Thuringian.
"I have broached many subjects with him," Corvisart
assured the Emperor, "but I can find no grounds for de-
claring him insane. He seems a lad of unusual culture and
earnestness. Upon every subject except one he converses
most reasonably."
"And that is?"
"His divine mission to kill yourself, Sire."
Napoleon looked intently at the shrewd grey features of
his physician. But again they betrayed nothing.
With Savary the interview had lasted longer.
Rough-mannered to his equals, overbearing or churlishly
condescending to his inferiors, taciturn in general society,
unable, it was said, to forget even in the most brilliant
assembly the haunting eyes of his victims, the Due de Ro-
vigo was, in his master's presence, invariably awkward, too
brusque or too subservient, using, or omitting to use, the
words "Sire" and "Majesty" with the maladroitness of a
man afraid of being suspected of republicanism, yet deter-
mined not to set an example of cringing.
" Does the assassin express no sorrow at leaving his family,
his friends, his sweetheart for ever? None for his own fate? "
Napoleon had enquired in a detached indifferent tone.
"He repents of nothing, regrets nothing," had been the
sullen answer.
220 Schonbrunn
"He is young to die."
"He is old in his readiness, Sire."
"Yes, yes. I know these hotheads. A fast will tame his
spirit and bring him to his senses. Give him nothing for
twenty-four hours."
"Sire, he refuses to eat. "
"How? What do you say?"
"Your Majesty, he refuses most constantly, alleging
that he has eaten enough before he dies."
"It is a Roman answer, " Napoleon exclaimed after some
seconds' meditation; and with the word this interview too
had terminated. Attended by his suite, the Emperor had
then started for the theatre.
The piece, set up by Denon at the last moment, was Zin-
garelli's Romeo and Juliet. Originally, to celebrate the
peace that it was confidently expected would be signed that
morning, the Emperor had selected his old favourite, The
Triumph of Trajan, and Luce de Lanival's new piece, The
Death of Hector, which, though ridiculed as "a head-
quarters drama," he had himself rewarded, on its first
representation ten months ago, by a pension of ten thou-
sand livres. But the protracted negotiations had now
made both pieces appear inopportune; and after rejecting
all Denon's suggestions Napoleon had at last consented
to permit a Piedmontese singer recommended by Eugene
Beauharnais, the Viceroy of Italy, to appear before him as
Romeo.
When the curtain rose the Emperor had called Berthier's
attention to the small number of Viennese present.
"Are they in hiding? Or are they preparing another
coup, since the Thuringian's has failed?"
"No," the Prince de NeucMtel had answered. "It is
only the changed bill. The Viennese are exigent. They
cannot endure a debutant in a familiar piece. "
The young tenor, excited by the presence of Napoleon and
Napoleon's Dream 221
his staff, had sung the part as though he were never to sing
again. Napoleon, though bored at first and apparently
asleep, had gradually begun to listen with a kind of painful
attention. Romeo's slim figure recalled Friedrich Staps's;
his voice in the duel with Tybalt had the same angry pathos
and the same ringing energy ; death was in that voice, death
yet unconquerable will. The famous lament by the tomb of
Juliet, one of Zingarelli's few inspirations, had moved him.
Had not a miniature been found on the youthful assassin?
Had not he too a mistress?
On his return from the theatre the Emperor had worked
for an hour and a half with MeneVal, dictating along with
other letters a private despatch, to start before midnight,
to Pouche", his minister of Police at Paris. It was the letter
in which, after altering the date from the i$th to the I2th
October, he insinuates Staps's madness, but in a postscript
as well as in the letter itself charges Fouch with the utmost
secrecy. An article in the Moniieur which gave an account
of the parade on the I3th was framed upon the instructions
that filled the remainder of the letter. The Emperor in that
article was said to be in exceptional health ; his long ride was
described and his conversation with the two Greek priests
narrated at length. The article was in the Due d'Otrante's
best style. It concluded:
" May all Frenchmen take advantage of the wisdom of our
gracious sovereign who, amid the dangers of a campaign,
has leisure to direct his mighty mind to the tobacco plan-
tations of England and the potato-cultivation of Lower
Austria."
If Staps had hoped by the price of his own blood to
purchase a glory like that of a Brutus or a Charlotte
Corday he would, Napoleon had resolved, be most cruelly
undeceived.
One of Napoleon's swiftest couriers had started with this
letter at about eleven.
222 Schonbrunn
ii
Midnight had struck before Napoleon dismissed his secre-
tary and retired.
Alone in his room a reaction, sudden as that which as-
sailed him on the night of Ebersdorf, at once set in, and,
shattered as his nerves were by the events of the afternoon,
he had the less power to resist the onset. He was irritated
and astonished, for on retiring he had had no thought but of
sleep. He had been accustomed to treat sleep as if it were
one of his aides-de-camp, ready to obey orders; and sleep
had been a faithful satellite. On the 6th of July, at the bat-
tle of Wagram, Rustum had spread a bearskin on the ground
and he had snatched seventeen minutes profound slumber,
and risen with a joyous exultancy to give the order for
Macdonald's stupendous charge.
"To-night why the devil cannot I sleep to-night? Ah,
Liechtenstein, and no answer from Totis, and it is nine
hours since Nicas started. "
Instead of undressing, he flung himself down on a sofa
and began to think.
"The ambassadors will find me with my boots on," he
reflected grimly, and a momentary appeasement swept over
him.
The room, decorated in white and gold and pale blue, was,
except the adjoining cabinet, the only room in Schonbrunn
which had a fireplace. The others were heated with the
unsightly stoves universal in Austria. A small table had
been placed beside the sofa where Napoleon sat, and at
intervals he tapped on it with his fingers, nervously, yet in
rhythm, in a kind of tune.
But suddenly he got up, and with his hands behind his
back and his head sunk between his powerful shoulders be-
gan to walk up and down. He wore the same coat that he
had worn in the afternoon, but, instead of the star, the red
Napoleon's Dream 223
ribbon of the Legion of Honour. He seemed lost in thought
yet every now and then he stopped and looked at some ob-
ject in the room, now at a medallion portrait of Maria
Theresa, now at a pastoral in the style of Fragonard, now
at a portrait of the Duke of Lorraine, Maria Theresa's big,
honest, good-natured, stupid consort, and close to it the
ironic countenance of Maximilian in Durer's marvellous
sketch; now at other pictures, or at other ornaments of
elegance or price.
"It is the Tugendbund, " he muttered brusquely.
The words expressed the net product of his aimless prowl-
ings about the room. For everything that he had ascer-
tained from Savary or from Corvisart of the young fanatic's
history his birth, his education, his ambitions, and the
scenes amid which he had lived went to confirm this one
theory beyond all the others that had hovered before
Napoleon's imagination during the interrogatory of that
afternoon. It was the Konigsberg patriots, not the Jesuits,
who this time had placed a dagger in the hands of this
youthful Ravaillac.
Always profoundly interested in history and in the effects
of the past upon the present, Napoleon had listened atten-
tively amidst his pomp and festivities at Erfurt to the
legends and facts of the region around. Thuringia was a
coagulated mass of German legend and German sentiment.
"How practical!" he exclaimed, fired into admiration of
an enemy. "How possible!"
For here in this Bond of Valour and sentiment of nation-
ality was the authentic antagonist of his own world-policy.
He strove to disintegrate nationality where it was strongest
in Germany in Prussia, for instance, in Suabia, in the
Rhine country and by the Elbe. The Tugendbund, on the
other hand, by its appeals to the heroic past, to Charle-
magne and Arminius, to the Ottonides and the Hohenstau-
fen, to Maximilian, to Luther, even to Wallenstein and to
224 Schonbrunn
Frederick, strove to create national sentiment where no
national sentiment existed; to transform local patriotism
mto German patriotism by violent and instant action cal-
culated to strike the imagination, such as that of Schill,
Brunswick, Katt, and recently that of the Tyrolese.
"Brunswick and Schill have failed; I have the Tyrolese
in my grip," Napoleon reasoned, "but now the patriots
play a more desperate card. Do they seek in their madness
to give their cause a martyr? I will baulk them. "
Nevertheless he did not see very clearly how this "baulk-
ing" was to be done. Staps's retort, blurred at the time by
Bonaparte's preconceptions about England, stood out in
menacing significance, "If I fall, there are ten thousand
behind me to take my place."
The history of Corsica is the history of conspiracies, and
the theory that Staps had acted alone, that his appeal to
those behind him might merely spring from the boy's faith
that the ardour of others was like his own ardour, Napoleon
did not consider worth investigation.
"No; it is the Tugendbund."
An incident of the preceding winter now occurred to
Napoleon in corroboration of his own hypothesis.
"Why has a Jena succeeded a Rossbach?" ran one of the
pamphlets which in November Fouche had placed under his
eyes just as he was about to start for Spain. "Because the
army of Frederick has ceased to be a national army. French
patriotism can only be vanquished by German patriotism.
When we speak of love of country we must once more
accustom ourselves to the ideas of sacrifices and of death."
And the pamphlet had proceeded to comment indignantly
on the decay of German national sentiment. It derided
the cosmopolitanism of which German writers boasted.
Against the famous "cosmopolitans," Lessing, Herder,
Jacobi, and Goethe, it quoted from their own writings the
most dishonouring and dishonourable maxims, such as,
Napoleon's Dream 225
"Of all forms of pride national pride is the most absurd."
Alcibiades' cynical apologia had, it alleged, been cited with
approbation by Lessing, "That is my country where it is
well with me." Euripides's nobler sentiment, lauded by
Jacobi, was also held up to mockery,
S.TTO.S fjxv aijj a-itrtf irepas
aTracra 5e yQuv avdpi yevvattp irarat
"To the eagle the universal air is open;
And to the freeman, the universal earth."
The pamphlet had concluded with a virulent diatribe against
Napoleon in person, "The betrayer of the princes in the
Confederation of the Rhine, the betrayer of Prussia; but,
indeed, whom has Napoleon not betrayed? What pledge
the most solemn did the Consul Bonaparte not violate?
What promise the most sacred has the Emperor Napoleon
ever fulfilled? Sardinia, Venice, Rome, Spain, victims in
turn of his black treachery these are the witnesses, these
are the accusers! In France itself Bonaparte has sworn
fidelity to every constitution and broken every oath thus
sworn. He has conspired against every constitution of his
country in turn and now conspires against the human race
itself, and, hell in his heart and chaos in his head, he rushes
on blindly to his own destruction or the havoc of a world.
Distrusting Fouche, Napoleon had caused an independent
translation to be made; he had discovered in Fouche"'s
version several discrepancies. Nothing had been inserted,
nothing omitted, but several phrases in the paragraphs
against himself had been envenomed. Here a word had
been transferred, there point had been given to an epithet
and epigrammatic force to the straggling German periods
of the original. This he attributed to Talleyrand, for
Fouche"'s own style was cloudy and prolix.
In Germany, the response to the fiery summons had been
instantaneous. The thrill, the expectancy of a new life, a
is
226 Schonbrunn
new future, had passed from end to end of the Fatherland.
The old, the young, all that was free, all that was noble, had
uprisen around Schill or followed his enterprise with beating
hearts. Women had caught the infection. At Magdeburg
they had exchanged their trinkets of gold and silver for
those of iron and steel. Amongst the dead after Schill 's
last stand lay a young trooper; but when the helmet was
removed a mass of tresses had rolled out covering the dead
warrior's shoulders. It was a woman. The centuries were
grey, but in 1809, when all literary Germany was studying
the recently discovered Nibelungenlied, the heroines of Ari-
osto and Tasso were being imitated beside the Elbe.
Such was the pamphlet, such the ideas, the memories,
the voices that to-night at Schonbrunn in the palace of the
Habsburgs assailed Napoleon ; and as the testimony of their
import, the dagger of that morning lay in a cabinet against
the wall.
"Restoration of religion?" he reflected savagely. "The
league of virtue ... a nation's bond of valour . . .
by my murder? En verite, a nation of ideologues, madmen,
and dreamers, these Germans!" And half aloud in his
excitement he cried, "If Davout had but caught Stein at
Brunn! But, general or marshal, they are always late."
At Brunn, sixty miles north of Vienna, the great exile,
crossing the snowy ravines of the Riesengebirge in a sledge
in the wintry darkness, had in the beginning of the year,
found refuge. There, in frequent communication with
Stadion and the Emperor Francis, he had lived during the
campaign so fatal to Austria and to the nascent hopes of
German patriotism and German nationality. In July, the
Third Corps under Davout was on him; but, warned of
danger, the exile had escaped to Troppau just in time ; for
had Davout found him at Brxinn his fate would have been
the fate of Schill and of Palm.
But Napoleon never wasted mind-force upon what might
Napoleon's Dream 227
have been. The "is" was absorbing enough. He stopped
by a window, and stood staring into the blackness. The
panes, backed by the inky darkness of the moonless night,
reflected his own face like a mirror of polished ebony.
"To-morrow it is peace or war, and to-morrow is already
to-day. "
With lightning rapidity he ran over in imagination the
armies at his command at Gratz, Linz, Brunn, around
Vienna itself, and in his rear, stretching from the mouth of
the Scheldt to the headwaters of the Danube and the Rhine.
"They date my greatness from Toulon. Bah, I have to
recommence my fate every hour. Every day is with me an
1 8th Brumaire. But I shall set out for Paris to-morrow
night."
He yawned; he felt sleep invading him now; but instead of
undressing, he once more threw himself on the sofa.
A singular lucidity was all about his mind. The body
seemed to rest only to permit the intellect to perform its
functions the more perfectly. He did not close his eyes,
knowing from experience how useless in such moments of
insomnia that device had proved. Annoyed at last by the
light in the room, he got up and walked rapidly to the door.
Rustum was on guard, but sound asleep. Napoleon looked at
the round fat features of the Mameluke. They had a cer-
tain resemblance to his own as seen in the hollow of a spoon,
and expressed so thorough a self-content that it became con-
tagious and he smiled.
"Yet what a life has been Rustum's. Well-born, yet a
slave since childhood; his mother, his sisters, made slaves
also by the same evil chance there he lies, the happiest man,
the soundest sleeper in my army, enjoying everything, dis-
turbed by nothing. "
He dropped the portiere, and attempted himself to reach
the candelabra. It was too high for his short legs, but get-
ting on a chair he blew out three of the lights, leaving only
228 Sch6nbrunn
one burning. As he got down the branch of the candelabra
by which he had steadied himself snapped in his hand.
Napoleon nearly lost his balance and might have had a
bad fall. Enraged at the contretemps, he was about to
smash the candelabra; but he turned away with a shrug.
"False," he muttered, "a sham, like everything else in
Vienna and like everything else in Germany sham patriot-
ism, sham agriculture, sham fortifications."
The bedroom had in the preceding summer been occupied
by one of the archduchesses, and had been refurnished in
the French style, but instead of the real bronzes of Versailles
an imitation inwood had been substituted, to save expense
and perhaps- also to encourage the Viennese world by royal
example to patronize the Tyrol, where the peasants of the
Grunerwald manufactured those imitations with amazing
skill from the wood of the Siberian pine, a tree that grows
only on the edge of the glacier.
The accident gave a new direction to Napoleon's thoughts.
The owner of four magnificent and richly upholstered pal-
aces, full of priceless works of art, the plunder of three
nations, he experienced for this grandiose poverty of Schon-
brunn a plutocratic contempt almost like that of a wealthy
visitor who has broken a gim-crack ornament in a sea-side
lodging. The rooms were multitudinous but small; the
rococo and Chinese decorations faded; the pictures bad; and
then, the incredible barbarity of those statues used to heat
the grand staircase !
"It is I, the successor of Charlemagne, it is I who have to
show even kings how to be kings, and emperors how to keep
house."
But to-night he could not keep up his blague. To-night
Schonbrunn seemed haunted. The very name " The Gru-
nerwald " had an ominous sound. There in February last a
French division under Lefebvre had laid down its arms to the
Tyrolese. And now in the stillness of this dreary hour he
Napoleon's Dream 229
seemed to hear voices about him and the sound as of ghostly
laughter. He could distinguish the very voices Met-
ternich, Bubna, Schwartzenberg, Liechtenstein, Stadion,
Francis himself:
"Bonaparte the successor of Charlemagne? Ha! Ha!
Ha! Bonaparte to instruct the Habsburg princes in elegance!
Bonaparte! Ha! Ha! Ha!"
It was fancy, but it was a singular and disconcerting
fancy, for it compelled him, here in the palace of the Habs-
burgs, to remember the line of provincial attorneys or
poverty-stricken officials from whom he himself was sprung.
" Men are ruled by toys ! I would not say that before the
mob, but in a council of wise men one may speak the truth."
It was his own voice speaking in the Council, defending
his creation of dues, comtes, peers, the Legion of Honour
and the memory tranquillized him.
"Bah, " he reflected, "if birth gave men brains or women
beauty . . . but though the Habsburgs are fertile as
rabbits, they have produced in three hundred years only
one woman of sovereign beauty and only two men above
mediocrity Charles V. and the Archduke, my rival."
He stretched himself on the sofa, and putting one foot
on a brocaded chair of grey and gold, he closed his eyes and
deliberately composed himself to sleep.
The fire was sinking. The ashes of the huge log rustled.
The unburnt remainder would smoulder on for an hour or
two, he thought, and of their own accord his eyes now
closed. In his favourite phrase, "he had shut all the
drawers of the cabinet of his thoughts. "
Nevertheless, he was conscious of the tremendous silence
and of the objects in the room, amid which the high-bred
ironic features of the great Maximilian loomed portentous.
Once he opened his eyes, but with a frown that left a fold
above his eyebrows, he instantly closed them again.
It was sleep at last, profound, dreamless as the sleep that
230 Schonbrunn
he had known amid the cannonade of Wagram. He lost
all .sense of time. Hours might have passed or days or
merely seconds.
in
All at once he was wide awake, or seemed to be awake
and it was a ghastly awakening. His heart was beating
faintly as though each throb were to be its last, and from
head to foot he felt torpid, icy cold, and oppressed by an
immense dread.
Yet for several seconds he did not stir, endeavouring to
find the causes of these sensations. Had he eaten to ex-
cess? He had eaten his usual dinner, drunk the single
glass of wine that he permitted himself daily, and to conquer
his fatigue before setting out for the theatre he had drunk
a cup of coffee.
"Ah, it is that seizure this afternoon tha same effects
as in August"; he concluded. "I might have anticipated
this. "
He struggled to get up, but almost instantly an exclama-
tion of surprise escaped him. Right in front between him
and the wall to the right of the fireplace, though he could not
explain how a human body could stand thus and stand there,
he saw the figure of a boy, blonde-haired and blue-eyed,
with a face of great softness and charm. It was his would-
be assassin, Friedrich Staps, now sleeping his last sleep,
if he slept, in the Leopold Bastion hard by the arsenal.
Napoleon surveyed his visitor with curiosity, attracted, as
always, by intrepedity.
"For what has he come here?"
He felt none of the horror, at least consciously, that Staps
had evoked in him that afternoon.
But a second visitor now stood beside the first not less
boyish in appearance, and dressed in much the same fashion ;
but in every other respect widely different; for this was a
Napoleon's Dream 231
dark-complexioned youth, the face a long oval, the eye dis-
turbing in its restless hawk-like scrutiny, the figure erect,
and face and figure alike fascinating and troubling in the
extreme.
As the two boys, their hands clasped in friendship, thus
stood confronting him, Napoleon's attention fixed itself
upon the second.
"Tiens!" he said suddenly. "How curious! It is my-
self as I was, long ago. What the devil am I doing here? "
It was grotesquely impossible.
But in an instant he was in Corsica. It was summer.
The exquisite fragrance of the wild flowers, abundant in the
valleys and even in the gorges, was all about him, a fra-
grance he had never forgotten and on Sainte He*lene was
still to remember.
" Ah, I recollect. Stay a moment, ' ' he said to his visitors.
"We should understand each other stay."
He walked rapidly to an escritoire and unlocking a drawer,
then a secret inner drawer, took out a small thin book. In
places it was interleaved. The margins also were covered
with his own handwriting, a very marked but still legible
hand, with rapid and frequent changes, as though it varied
with the tension or relaxation of his mind. He turned the
pages hurriedly and stopped at the following words:
"What a frightful hour is this in my country's history!
A nation of twenty-five millions pours itself in a torrent of
ruin on its smiling shores. France! Woe to thee, France,
thou nation of slaves and despots! Ah, if the oppressors of
my land had but one breast, with what joy, with what ar-
dour would not I plunge my dagger into that bosom. ..."
Yes, he himself, he himself at eighteen, exactly as he now
stood there hand in hand with Friedrich Staps, he had writ-
ten those words, and in every tingling nerve he had felt the
resolution which still burned in those words.
He turned joyously to the two figures ; the dazzling wine
232 Schdnbrunn
of youth and the fervour of his own heroic enthusiasms leapt
and glowed in his veins.
"What? It is for this you have come? I remember!
That dream of liberty! A dead tyrant is the noblest sacri-
fice we can offer to the gods! Let us sit down and talk
together, you and I. Soyons amis, Cinna!"
In the bizarre chaos of a dream Bonaparte had mixed his
manhood's favourite passage from Corneille with his naive
delight at meeting his own boyhood again. And embracing
in his invitation the Habsburg portraits on the wall :
"Tyrants and tyrannicides, let us sit and confer together."
But as if in anger at this levity, or as if their mission were
fulfilled, the two spectral visitants seemed to recede and
to dissolve before his eyes, and in a second a kind of spectral
light alone was left to betray where they had stood.
A profound dejection seized Napoleon; and with a sicken-
ing presage about the heart he turned to the pages in his
hand and not in joy now but like one who longs yet fears to
disturb the sanctuaried majesty of death, he read on. And
on an interleaved fragment the words sprang up before him,
"Man, man, enslaved howthou art degraded; but how
noble when fired by the ardour for freedom! Forgive me,
forgive me, O God, but everywhere on this earth suffering
and sorrow are the lot of the just man ; yet the just man is
Thy image. "
It was his prayer at nineteen, his, there in Corsica, there
in his native land, not twenty years ago. To-night that
same prayer must have been this young Thuringian's
before he stretched himself on his plank bed for his last
sleep. And on the same page, aureoled in glory as he him-
self had written them then and as his prisoner had spoken
them that afternoon, he saw the names of Tell, Brutus,
Miltiades, Regulus.
"Prodigious contradiction! Then and now! What a
tragedy! " he said, without knowing exactly what he meant.
Napoleon's Dream 233
And swift as falling leaves other passages in his own
hand-writing confronted him portraits of tyrants side
by side with portraits of traitors. Now it was his terrible
denunciation of Buttafuoco, the betrayer of Paoli. "From
Bonifacio to the Corsican cape, from Ajaccio to Bastia,
there is but one voice and that voice is raised to curse your
name. Your friends conceal themselves; your kindred dis-
own you; in this hour even the prudent man is swept on
headlong in this torrent of indignation. What are your
crimes? Let me unfold them to you. ..."
The sentences which followed were sometimes awkward
but it was the awkwardness of the young gerfalcon which
has not yet felt the azure. The sentiment was audacious or
inflated, but its burning sincerity could not be questioned,
and Napoleon felt the perspiration burst on his brow as he
read on, and guaged the emotion raging in Staps and in
thousands of young Germans by the emotion which had
raged in himself when he wrote, "I see but the phantom
dagger: I hear in my sleep but the tyrant's death-cry."
For Corsica substitute Europe, for a rock flung like a
torn spear-head far into the Mediterranean substitute a
continent, and was not this the wrath and hate and
scorn which he himself inspired in every breast still cap-
able of the love of country, still capable of the love of
freedom?
He in his youth must have been obsessed with this ardour
and with this despair. "Will no one," ran one passage,
"be found with valour enough to leave his poignard in the
heart of the oppressor?" "The gods spare the tyrant,"
ran another, "Heaven's lightning does not smite him, but
it is to leave him to the sword of the just man." "A ty-
rant," he read again, "is the noblest sacrifice we can offer
on the altar of freedom. " And the portrait of the tyrant
thus delineated by himself at eighteen was the portrait of
himself at forty, that portrait as it was now outlined,
234 Schonbrunn
clumsily or incisively, in every pamphlet or brochure of the
Tugendbund.
' Napoleon read no more; but thrusting aside the book he
turned as though about to address his phantom visitors;
but there was not a trace of their presence. Even the
spectral radiance had vanished and the only light in the room
was that of the solitary guttering candle in the candelabra.
"Yes, yes, " he mused. "It was so. It was so. In my
youth I thought these things."
A horrible strangling emotion came over him, grief the
lost enthusiasms of youth, man's hopes an emotion that
should have been tears but was only a sterile attempt at
tears, a sorrow profound, immense, and tender as that which
still invaded him when in the distance he heard in the twi-
light the bells for vespers and thought of Corsica.
Suddenly he was speaking to Josephine, then to Berthier,
then to Corvisart, then to Duroc in clamorous, earnest
protest, and a paralysing, a conscious horror had gripped
him by the brain, had gripped him by the heart. It was the
terror which he had felt after he had pointed to the star
that afternoon. It was the terror of madness, and with
it the distinct ghastly certainty that if he remained alone
for ten seconds longer his brain would burst and he would
drop to the floor a gibbering maniac.
Decisive always, Napoleon, by a frightful effort of will,
broke through his torpor and stood on his feet. The dream-
reality and the real dream had alike vanished. He was
broad awake now, but his hands still trembled and the icy
horror lay all about his heart. Rushing to the portiere, he
stood for a second over his sleeping valet.
" Rustum ! " he called out sharply in an unnatural, strained
voice, high-pitched and shrill. "Rustum!"
The Mameluke slept the sleep of the camel-driver, who in
Syria can only be roused by thumping his head on a stone.
And Napoleon raised his spurred heel as though to waken
Napoleon's Dream 235
him in that savage fashion, conspicuously kind though he
always was to his servants. The Mameluke, however,
opening his eyes, stood up smiling, confronting his master.
But at the fearful expression on Napoleon's countenance
the smile was struck dead.
"Call Corvisart. No, stay, call the due de Friuli. But
light more candles. Quick, you imbecile! What do you
stand staring at?"
"Me sleep, your Majesty," Rustum said in a frightened
voice, as he passed with a taper from sconce to sconce.
"To whom do you tell that? Do I not know it? No;
not Corvisart. Send the due de Friuli here."
He examined the escritoire. The key had not been in the
lock. He glanced at the fireplace. The log had tilted for-
ward a little, but from the shape of the embers the whole
occurrence could not have lasted many minutes.
IV
Some minutes later, when Duroc in the uniform of the
cuirassiers of the Guard entered, Napoleon was walking
from corner to corner of the room, now gesticulating, now
muttering to himself, now taking pinches of snuff one after
the other, and sneezing violently and repeatedly.
Duroc was a good-looking man of seven and thirty. His
manner was grave; his distinction of bearing very marked.
Like Davout, he sprang from the noblesse; but the latter,
a Burgundian, affected a harsh and surly bearing, whilst
an Auvergnat, expressed in his voice and in his gestures a
conscious refinement and polish. But, courtier or con-
fident, Duroc had never ceased to be a soldier, and at this
moment he looked a soldier every inch of him, for he had
interpreted the summons as a summons to a council of war,
assembled at this untimely hour to deliberate upon Aus-
tria's rejection of the ultimatum.
236 Schonbrunn
The first glance at Napoleon undeceived him. It filled
him, however, with anxieties of another sort; for his affec-
tion for the Emperor, as we have seen, was deep and
personal, and Corvisart after the Opera had spoken to him
in private of the seizure of that afternoon and its possible
consequences.
"The Emperor must have a change, and that quickly,"
the physician had declared, "and he ought to have plenty
of sleep. He should not have gone to the theatre to-night
nor worked with Me'ne'val afterwards. He laughs at my
warnings; he may listen to you."
And Corvisart had stated his diagnosis of the Emperor's
condition, using the terminology of the period, the psychol-
ogy of Condillac which divides the body into separate
temperaments nerveux, bilieux, etc.; and the mind into
separate faculties will, imagination, judgment, feeling,
appetites, etc.
"Until now the Emperor's imagination has been con-
trolled by his will; but if once his imagination throws
off that will, mighty as it is well, you saw him this
afternoon."
It was, therefore, with a sickening sense of alarm that
Duroc found the Emperor still fully dressed and evidently
in a state of febrile agitation. The cause he could not
even surmise, and Napoleon left him scant leisure for
conjecturings.
"I am making the world better," he said, sweeping Duroc
at once into the vortex of his ideas. "I am making the
world better," he repeated, as though to drive a text into
the mind of an auditor. "How could I toil thus, or live an
hour of such a life as mine, if I had not that belief? Think
of my work ! In France I put down the Terror, the greatest
act of vengeance and beneficent justice ever carried out by a
single mind. This even my enemies admit. I restored
religion. I made Paris the capital of a new civilization.
Napoleon's Dream 237
adorned her with magnificent buildings, rilled her with
treasures and works of art. Commerce thrives, and after
giving France the greatest law system since Justinian's, I
have this very year thrown the Sorbonne's lumber of medi-
aevalism into the dust-heap and given France the Univer-
sity. But they complain I have made France a barracks,
gagged the press, and silenced the tribune. Ringed in by
sleepless hate, mined in every province by conspiracy, how
else was France to be saved ? And by my creation of a new
military State I have re-vitalized the discredited ideas of
authority, kingship, and empire. Thus I have saved the
Revolution and imposed respect upon its adversaries.
And for Europe what designs I had, what plans! In
Spain I have abolished torture and put down the Inquisi-
tion, and made hordes of lazy friars tillers of the ground.
In Italy Milan is free and Florence is rising from her ashes.
At Campo Formio I lanced the abscess of which Venice was
dying. I have exterminated the brigands of the Campagna
and Calabria. I united Sicily to Naples, its geographical
and historical complement. But the Papacy? The Pa-
pacy is still as in the days of the Borgias, the stone thrust
into Italy's side to keep the wound open; but I am deter-
mined to pluck out that stone. If Pius VII. will not act
like a man of sense he must be treated like any other danger-
ous fool. But what a task is Rome itself! I can drain the
Pontine marshes, but to give an heroic or even a reasonable
soul to that Roman rabble that I cannot do. ... Ger-
many owes me not less than Sicily, Italy, and Spain owe me.
You talk, you others, of the fall of the Bastille. ..."
Napoleon seemed to be addressing Hulin, Augereau, and
the Jacobins, and he waited for three seconds as though
expecting some answer from these invisible listeners. He
went on with a rush:
"The fall of the Bastille? Germany was covered with
Bastilles. I gave Germany my Code, and on the day I flung
238 Schonbrunn
open her law-courts a thousand Bastilles fell. I would have
done as much for England. There I would have established
a republic; given Ireland a constitution, Scotland her
ancient kings, and revivified English jurisprudence by my
Code."
Duroc did not blench. His ignorance of England, of
English history and institutions was colossal as his master's.
"And yet they seek to murder me!" Napoleon ex-
claimed. "England, Rome, Italy, Austria, Prussia, five
leagued assassins, hunt me down! Ah, Duroc, if my murder
could but set Europe free or realize the benefits I would have
bestowed on mankind, how willingly would not I offer my
breast to their poignards! And had that dagger reached
my heart this morning, dying, I could without blasphemy
have uttered the prayer of Jesus, 'Father, forgive them,
for they know not what they do. ' "
The sentiment did not strike Duroc as either forced or
false. He was accustomed to sudden displayals of this
trait in Napoleon's character. He was puzzled, however,
to account for the manifestations of such feeling to-night
and at this hour for, on retiring, the Emperor had shown
not a trace of such a frame of mind.
"Your enemies," he said rather formally, "will have to
force a way through many devoted breasts before their
daggers reach yours, Sire."
Napoleon seized the word.
"My enemies? But who are now my enemies? It is
the peoples; it is the oppressed whose miseries I wished
to alleviate. It is the down-trodden whom I wish to up-
raise. Everywhere it is the same story in the Tyrol, in
Catalonia, in the Illyrian provinces, and in Portugal, Hun-
gary, and Poland, and throughout Germany from the
Oder to the Rhine, the slaves I would have set free lift
their manacled hands and with a curse dash them in the
face of their liberator. And why, mon Dieu, and why?
Napoleon's Dream 239
The coalized kings I could have resisted, their allied govern-
ments I could one by one have subdued; but the coalized
peoples how am I, how is France to make war upon the
peoples? And that boy this morning, Duroc, that miserable,
that fanatic, he came as their emissary, blind, armed with a
blinded people's mandate!"
"Your Majesty ..." Duroc expostulated; but with a
gesture of denunciatory fury Napoleon went from the event
straight to its cause.
' ' And the perverters 01 the peoples ? They are the priests
forged with English gold, and amongst the peoples them-
selves, it is superstition, bigotry, it is ignorance fed year by
year with English lies. And how successful! In Spain, in
the streets, by yelling monks and priests, and in the hiding
places of the guerillas by countless pamphlets, I am pro-
claimed as Anti-christ, Satanias. They make puns on my
name, Napoleon, Appolyon, Hell's agent. The deluded
rabble believe, and with such priests and such peasantry do
your noble English fight side by side! In the Tyrol, the
emigre* Chastelar, on whose estates men ate grass, is a hero,
and the capuchin Haspinger and the innkeeper Hofer
complete the triumvirate; and, by God, not three weeks
ago, this noble peasant and this exemplary priest would
have shot dead my envoy, violating the most rudimentary
principles of war, had not a train of artillery hovered into
sight with matches lighted!"
"Chastelar, not Hofer, was the instigator," Duroc said
reassuringly. "Your Majesty rewarded his intended
victim."
Napoleon made a gesture of impatience.
"And of what is it they complain, these Tyrolese? What
is it to those herdsmen, farmers, wood-carvers, and shop-
keepers, whether they pay their taxes at Munich or Vienna ?
I rescue them as I rescued Pavia, Verona, Milan, and Padua
from the Austrian bureaucrats ; I take them into my system ;
240 Schonbrunn
they are permitted to serve in my armies ; I give them laws,
religious tolerance, enlightenment ; they share the glories of
the French arms, and merit this, for they are brave. Yet
they rise up against me, preferring to my freedom their
hereditary bondage to Austria!"
With a sudden gleam in his eyes, as though aware of the
irony implicit in the concluding phrase, Napoleon turned
aside with the sardonic comment:
" It is encouraging, all this, is it not, and gratifying to the
world-emancipator? Men talk of the wrongs of the op-
pressed; let us talk a little of the wrongs of the tyrant, if I
am a type of the oppressor! But I have aimed too high.
To a superstitious race, you can bring enlightenment;
and to a misgoverned people, justice ; but freedom, national
independence! That is the one gift you never can bestow
upon a nation. That can be won only where Leonidas and
Themistocles won it the field of glory. The greatest
wrong I could do to the Tyrolese, the greatest wrong I could
do the Spaniards, would be to withdraw my armies. "
He offered Duroc his snuff box, and when the latter
coughed for the passages in Schonbrunn are cold and
Duroc had just risen from a comfortable bed Napoleon
made him stand by the fire, whilst he himself, his hands
twisting and untwisting behind his back, resumed his
monotonous pacing of the floor.
His next words came from a region of ideas into which
Duroc could not penetrate.
"Why do men trust so confidently," Napoleon began in
a low and melancholy voice, "that posterity in its judg-
ments will be wiser than our contemporaries? History can
only be corrected by itself, and history, most of it, is ca-
lumny, voluntary or involuntary. More lies are told hourly
Napoleon's Dream 241
from want of intelligence than from deceit. How few have
the seeing eye, the understanding heart ! Look at the story
of the Caesars. How do we know that Tacitus was not a
pedant, a cuistre, and Tiberius a magnanimous ruler? The
latter's countenance is a countenance worn by much anger
and pain. Yet who seeks to pierce behind the paragraphs
of the Annals ? And in modern times what murderous
facilities for calumny has not man invented! And these,
these my enemies have employed against me. What have
they not said? What have they not made the peoples
believe of me? This morning was a proof of their success.
What did that hot-head say? Ten thousand daggers in the
hands of ten thousand fanatics like himself all pointed
against one man's breast!"
The mask of calm was preserved; but as Napoleon pro-
ceeded the concentrated trembling intensity of his words
seemed to shake the walls and, vibrating in the nocturnal
stillnesses, to die away only in the most distant rooms of the
palace.
"Never a day's, never an instant's respite in the war of
lies, besmirching my government, my ministers, my mar-
shals, my soldiers, my family, my brothers, my wife, my
sisters. The lie! It is still the' instinctive weapon of the
vile, and it has still been England's weapon against me! I
am at her mercy. Her putrid eyes have discovered my
weakness; for I and my government are one. Who strikes
at me strikes at France. She herself is immune, and,
coward-like, how the hypocrite nation has used her advan-
tages: Ten years since Egypt ten years of truceless
obloquy, lies and still more lies ! Not a day on which they
have not gone forth from England like flies from a carrion
by the road, accusing me of secret murders, unnameable
actions, incests, perjuries, fratricidal rage yes, great God,
if I were a spirit from the foulest stye in Hell it would
dishonour for ages the greatest nation on earth to say of me
16
242 Schonbrunn
the things that England says ! Why, to-night, at this dead
hour, you can almost hear her printing-presses groaning
in labour with the hell-brood that to-morrow shall be
scattered to every capital in Europe Paris, Berlin, Peters-
burg, Stockholm, Dresden, Rome, Seville, Madrid and here
in Vienna itself ; yes, here in Schonbrunn."
There now came a sudden look of devilry into Napoleon's
face, a glint as of lightning into his eyes, and on his lips
quivered a fugitive mocking smile.
"And at Schonbrunn, Duroc? My servants are loyal,
tried, faithful; how comes it that every act I perform and
every word I say is known in London ten hours afterwards ?
Tell me, Monsieur le due de Friuli. "
But before Duroc could formulate a syllable, a thunderous
look replaced the smile, and making his spurred heel ring
on the floor Bonaparte exclaimed with extraordinary
energy :
"Make peace with England? I will never make peace
with England until I have brought on her a humiliation
greater than the humiliation of Prussia, or until I myself
am dead in battle or like Bajazet, chained not in a Mongol
cage but in a fouler dungeon an English prison-ship!"
Then, with marvellous skill, adapting to his mood the in-
cidents of his dream, at once justifying himself and pillory-
ing his enemy, he said in a singular voice:
"I began my life as a hater of tyranny. The death of
tyrants was the meditation of my boyhood. I have lived
and shall die a hater of tyranny; but the tyranny against
which in my manhood I wage ruthless war is more repulsive
than any which seared my youth. It is the world-tyrant,
England that nightmare power which throttles genius or
superior thought wherever it dares lift its head. 'England ! '
the name is wormwood to me!"
He stood with working brow, silent.
"This globe is the fief of England! It corrodes my very
Napoleon's Dream 243
soul, Duroc. Men do not think; they will not understand.
Assyria's harryings of her subject provinces, Rome's calcu-
lated cruelties, are less abhorrent than this hypocrite empire.
Where is it to end? In a little while on this planet itself,
no freeman will have an inch of earth on which he can stand
without asking permission in English ! I tell you, it cor-
rodes my very soul. If I fall, I shall fall in one of the
greatest causes humanity has undertaken, earth's last stand,
this earth's supreme effort to bring England down! 1 '
Duroc, uncertain whether he was listening to the outlines
of a new war, of a resumption of the Boulogne enterprise
now that peace with Austria was secure, or whether it was
merely Napoleon's exasperation, seeing England behind
the Tugendbund and the dagger of Staps as he saw England
behind the revolt in Spain and the Tyrol, became infected
by Napoleon's emotion.
"Bring England down, Sire! Your Majesty is on the
very brink of success! Your blockade is already sapping
her strength; wages have everywhere fallen, prices every-
where risen ; already her rich men are discontented, the mid-
dle sort impoverished, the poor starving ; and discontented,
starving, and impoverished men are ever ready to rebel.
Why, your Majesty, there are already reports of rioting in
Lancashire ! Seven English banks have failed since August ;
her navy is mutinous; she has had to open her prisons to
get volunteers for the Peninsula, yet this year's harvests
rot in the fields!"
Duroc stopped, waiting to see the effect of his words.
But a change had taken place in Napoleon. The mag-
netic energy had forsaken him. Plunged in gloomy abstrac-
tion he seemed to listen yet not to hear. And indeed his
minister's arguments were calculated to depress rather than
to inflate the Emperor's pride. Napoleon had an instinct
for fact. He had gauged the resources of England. The
"starvation" war, le blocus, had lasted three years and in
244 Schonbrunn
the English line he perceived not a trace of yieldingness.
Duroc's picture of impoverishment and discontent might or
might not be accurate of the British Isles; it was irrefutably
and damnably true of France. Twice a day his courier
from Paris added fresh hues to that picture.
"England on her knees ! " It was an insult to his reason ;
nevertheless he did not contradict his minister. Faith is
power, and faith is contagious ; Duroc's might communicate
itself to others.
' ' My right wing from the Scheldt to the Oder and along the
Baltic to the Neva is now secure, solid as adamant. Prus-
sia and the Czar are my firm allies. To Spain, my left wing,
I will send Massena to-morrow to hold Wellington in check
or overwhelm him at Lisbon; whilst I in Paris, my centre,
control the whole. This is my war of Europe against the
islanders. And yet," Napoleon said suddenly, sitting down
and resuming his pensive tone, "and yet something within
me tells me that I shall fall in that war. On such nights
as this and in such hours I forefeel the future. My end is
fixed, and that end is disaster. I have ceased to augur of
success or failure. I ask only When will it come? How
and in what shape? The bullet which struck me at Ratis-
bon is one way; that dagger this morning "
It was Duroc in his amazement or affection who in-
terrupted the Emperor.
"He was a mere fanatic, Sire; a schoolboy made crazy
by reading ..."
"A schoolboy!" Napoleon exclaimed, casting off the
momentary prostration, "I tell you, Duroc, that dagger is
the preliminary flash announcing a storm in which you, I,
and France itself shall be overwhelmed!"
It was genuine prophetic insight ; for behind the enthusi-
asm of the Tugendbund and the resolution of Scharnhorst
and Gneisenau was the rising of Germany; Leipzig, Hanau,
the passage of the Rhine, Laon, and Montmirail, then Elba
Napoleon's Dream 245
and Sainte Helene; but, as often in Bonaparte's history,
prodigal of such instances, its significance was obscured to
himself as to others by the scepticism of the period. Yet at
this moment he seemed indeed to discern the future there
palpable in front of him, actual as the present or the past,
and his mind grappled for an instant with the eternal
problem Is the future in very deed actual as the past?
Bonaparte had little patience for such problems, though
to-night, mixed with the omens and events of the day and
his dream or vision of a few minutes ago, it left a singular
expression in his eyes.
"Sire, you need rest," Duroc now pleaded; "Austria's
reply may be here at any moment. This day has tried you.
You need sleep."
' ' Rest ? ' ' Napoleon answered. ' ' I sleep, but I never rest.
Alone or in company, eating, walking, riding, driving, I am
always at work, forging my way through plans and problems
to solutions and decisions. You, Duroc, Corvisart, Ber-
thier and the others I know what was in your thoughts
to-night; but you are all wrong. I shall never go mad.
My brain is of iron. For ten years I have governed France
and Europe; and for ten years I have been my own finance
minister, my own war minister. My home and foreign
ministers simply expressed my will. Yet whatever I have
done myself has been well done, whatever I have entrusted
to others has been bungled. My budgets are miracles of
success. I could not be my own admiral, and at sea I
have a Trafalgar to remember. No ; the limitations to my
power of sight or hearing I have experienced; but never
the limitations to my power of work; not until now ..."
he said to himself. "But now I seem doomed to experience
every humiliation . . . Well!" he cried suddenly in
an indescribable voice, "Destiny turns against me; I will
turn against Destiny! Yes, I will be the antagonist of
Destiny!"
246 Schonbrunn
The Corsican accent had returned to his voice but the
expression of his face was loftier. Bonaparte's mind,
which always worked at several ideas simultaneously, had
worked to this issue that comparison of his life to a tragedy
which he had made before the due de Friuli entered.
"The antagonist of Destiny!"
To Duroc's somewhat precise military mind the phrase,
even from Napoleon, was startling, and he looked at his
master in furtive doubt and incredulity. Annoyed, Napo-
leon turned on him swiftly.
"Why do you look at me like that? What is in your
mind? Answer!"
Duroc made a protesting gesture.
"Nothing, Sire; indeed nothing."
But the tone was ineffective, and did not deceive Napo-
leon for a second.
"I know your thought but, mon pauvre Duroc, you are
wrong. For this is how you reason. You imagine what it
would mean if you, Berthier, Corvisart, or Rapp spoke in this
way, acted in this way; and you, mon pauvre Duroc, you
become afraid of me and for me. But you are wrong. I
tell you, I will never go mad, Never!"
Duroc became perfectly pale.
"Madness?" Napoleon went on, resuming the tragic,
whispering tones. "No; I could not bear that. Poor
Pfeister ! You remember? How horrible it was, how horri-
ble! That a man, nature's paragon, should thus sink . . .
Ten million deaths were better. But I will never go mad.
Whatever my enemies say of me, never believe that I am
mad, Duroc."
Napoleon was referring to a persistent rumour circulated
in France, Germany, and Spain, in Paris in the subterranean
Royalist press, in English and even in such northern news-
papers as the Scots Examiner, hinting or openly declaring
that Napoleon had in August been struck with madness.
Napoleon's Dream 247
The Edinburgh rag had cited instances of insane monarchs,
especially Ivan the Terrible, whose hideous crimes it com-
pared to Bonaparte's. Esquirol, the great Spanish alienist,
had certainly been summoned to Schonbrunn. For the
valet Pfeister? It was unlikely. For, asked the Examiner,
is Napoleon so attached to a mere body-servant as to bring
a physician six hundred miles in the midst of a campaign to
treat him for a nervous breakdown ?
Duroc saw and seized an opportunity of retrieving the
blunder of his unfortunate word or too visible thought.
"Sire, " said he, "it matters nothing to a great man what
we think of him or say of him, we others. It matters only
to ourselves. It is not the great man, but we, who are
affected if we feed our souls with lies instead of truths.
What can the muddy vapours above the marsh matter to
the sun?"
"Yes," Napoleon answered with a short laugh into
which all his cynicism and enthusiasms had filtered, "that
is very well when we are dead. It matters nothing to
the dead man lying underground what we remember or
what we forget. But living, it matters supremely to our-
selves, to the soldier as to the politician who has work
to do amongst men. No; calumny is strong. To-night I
said, did I not, that if I had to live my life over again I
should not swerve one inch from the path I have trodden,
that I regretted nothing, repented nothing? It was an
error. I repent my acts of pardon."
Duroc, steadying his finger-tips on a table beside him,
did not at once answer.
"Your Majesty," he began, "you wrong your mildness.
You have never regretted an act of mercy."
But an adder-like thought darted through his mind and he
stood silent. Intrigue, rancour, jealous suspicion, were in
the very air at Schonbrunn. Marshals, generals, courtiers,
lackeys, all were infected. Upon Napoleon, a Corsican, a
248 Schonbrunn
nature formed by century on century of the Vendetta and by
deeply ingrained mistrust, Duroc had witnessed its effects.
Bessires had damaged Lannes; and more recently Berthier
and Murat had damaged to Napoleon's own hurt the great-
est soldier in his army, Davout, the hero of Auerstadt and
of Eckmiihl. And the question rose in Duroc's mind,
"Have not I too my enemies? And have not I been re-
sponsible again and again for Napoleon's acts of pardon?
Have my enemies been plying him this evening? Is that
the meaning of this untimely summons that the meaning
of these soliloquizings? Does he suspect that I, suborned
by Vienna or Weimar, wish him to pardon Staps? "
To suppose Duroc capable of such treachery would have
been monstrous; but to a mind like Napoleon's, consumed
by suspicions, surrounded by spies, nothing was monstrous.
And now in spite of himself Duroc averted his eyes before
the searching cold scrutiny not unmixed with surprise in
Napoleon's steady gaze. Then he made his decision.
" Sire, there are instances when leniency is a crime. I am
not always on the side of mercy. Two months ago I urged
you not to pardon Madame Oudet. The wrong to the
Emperor, to yourself, you may forgive; but the wrong to
France how is that to be forgiven? In will if not in act
this boy is a murderer, guilty amongst the guiltiest. "
A profound sigh escaped Napoleon; and to Duroc's
astonishment he flung himself on the sofa in a posture
of deep dejection.
"You do not search the heart very deeply, mon pauvre
Duroc. When the wrist falters and the aim is missed,
whether the weapon be a poignard or a musket, who dares
affirm that the first faltering was not in the mind? The psy-
chologues leave all that unexplored. But an unsteady or ir-
resolute hand, I affirm, points to an unsteady or irresolute
will. If this youth's resolution had been steadfast this
morning, steadfast as he protests, why did it fail him just
Napoleon's Dream 249
when it ought to have been at its highest? I would not
have failed, I had twenty Savarys and Berthiers rushed
between me and my enemy. "
Here Duroc lost all trace of the workings of the Emper-
or's mind and of the connection of his ideas. Napoleon,
to whom the figures of his dream had now become a portion
of the tissue of actual experience, integral and organic, was
now attempting to exorcise the notion that he was a tyrant ;
he was seeking to erase the fancy that the young Thuringian
hated him as he, the young Corsican, had hated the tyrants
of his country.
"The hazard in things," Napoleon exclaimed, speak-
ing in a voice which Duroc had rarely heard since the
Hamlet-like soliloquizings of the long evenings in the Tui-
leries during the Consulate. "Youth's ignorance and the
hazard in things! That wretched lad is but one mo^e
instance. Genius may be consummate at twenty ; but know-
ledge of the human heart comes only by experience and
in acquiring that experience what perils must not youth
encounter! In each individual of merit the woes of the race
are rehearsed. We read a book, and, mistaking the hem-
lock for the grape-vine, 'It is Heaven's very voice, ' we say.
We hear a speech; we arise and obey the divine summons,
and with a whirr and snap Fate's trap closes on us! ... I
was early instructed in misery; I have not forgotten the
errors I made, and nature's harsh chastisements. Rous-
seau, when I was sixteen, was my first guide to chaos. Then
came my hero-worship for Paoli. Yet we had a cause in
Corsica; the tyranny against which we rose was tyranny
indeed. "
There was a sudden ring in his voice. In imagination
Napoleon was confronting his two spectral visitants,
challenging their criticism.
He resumed.
"I, betrayer of Liberty? It was not I who betrayed
250 Schonbrunn
Liberty but Liberty that betrayed me. I detected the
imposture, saw through its deceptions more quickly than
others that is all. Man's last dream, I said? It shall
also be man's last disillusionment. Men are not equal.
Nature and the human soul protest against that monstrous
creed. Even at sixteen I was not its dupe. God is distinc-
tion. The mob and its virtues God despises, and fills the
mob's trough ; but with the solitary great man He converses
in the cool of the evening. But sometimes His words are
swords."
After a silence of several seconds he resumed "In place
of Rousseau's shadow-creed, the equality of men, I deter-
mined to put a substance. I resolved to give to man's life
new energies, new vigour; to resuscitate the ancient virtues,
but to mould them into a new heroism. La carriere ouverte
aux talents the path of glory to him who can tread it!
That was my message, that was my Koran. In Italy at six
and twenty I inscribed that message on my banners; and
with what a huzza of joy the young men of France bounded
to the call! Montenotte, Lodi, Rivoli, Arcola the glory
of it, Duroc, the splendour, the intoxication, and the power!
From the Tagliamento we looked towards Vienna the
gleam of our lances was enough, Austria made peace;
and conquerors still, we swept in our revel of war to the
Pyramids and the Nile. We returned; and after the burn-
ing desert we faced the Alps and their snows; and at
Marengo the watch- word that I had given to France became
the watch-word of a world. ' ' The path to glory to him who
can tread it!"
He paused. He looked around. Duroc sat as if in stone.
Only the midnight silences answered Napoleon.
He went on with his singular reverie. Yet at this point
the Emperor's rhetoric, a kind of aphoristic grandilo-
quence, partly Corsican it can easily be traced in Paoli
and in the correspondence of Pozzo di Borgo partly nur-
Napoleon's Dream 251
tured by the study of the Roman historians, always rhetori-
cal even when most terse, now took a tinge of ironic yet
anxious questioning.
"It was a creed for Achilles and the ancient world, but
not for modern France. For Asia I had too little faith; for
modern Europe too much. The heroic eras are behind us.
The day for the "doing of great things" is over. Berna-
dotte, you said this afternoon, "is envious, but not a
traitor." Who taught you that envy was a crime? In the
generous heart envy itself becomes generous. The glory of
Miltiades keeps Themistocles awake at night and by that
envy the victor of Marathon, though dead, fights at Salamis.
I would have made Europe know again those lost virtues,
valour, the high and spiritual valour and liberty of soul
which sank with Hellas and Rome. The freedom I offered
France was a more dazzling freedom than ever shone upon
Rousseau's dream. My wars they denounce my wars!
Men do not understand. Men do not think. My wars
have been the overflowing of the Nile; a devastation, but a
devastation from which Europe would have arisen new-
born. Talleyrand sniggered to the Czar at Erfurt that
Russia was a barbarous nation governed by an enlightened
ruler, France an enlightened nation governed by a barbar-
ian. I welcome the epigram. A la bonne heure ! Did not
Charles XII. love to compare himself with Alexander? Yet
what idea upbore Charles XII. 's wars except the aggrandize-
ment of Sweden? Alexander's wars had in them an idea.
He upreared by the Nile a city to his own godhead and
crossed the Tigris to Hellenize Asia. My wars too had an
idea une idee wide as humanity. I would have given
all men a French mind. A new civilization should have
dated from me, and A.N. instead of A.D. become the rubric
of the centuries . .' . Ah, if I could but have ten more
years, Duroc, or even five. Much could be done in five.
But no; it is useless, tragic and useless. I have come into
252 Schonbrunn
the world too late. Man's instinct for the heroic is gone,
atrophied by two thousand years of priestcraft and hypo-
crisy. Genius and greatness lie dying, or " Napoleon
stopped, then with a sudden grotesque inspiration added
" suffocated under bales of English wool and Lancashire
cotton!"
But his laugh was unpleasant, even terrible.
The mention of England, Duroc had observed, always
made Napoleon's thoughts, so to speak, "inarticulate."
Yet even to the worn-out Themistocles jargon the Emperor
to-night had given a new and vitalizing touch.
"I was then the man of destiny," Napoleon went on.
"Eh bien, I said, 'let us abjure heroism.' And I made
myself practical. I said to feudal Europe, to moribund and
decrepit Austria, to Germany and to Prussia, 'Your
patents of nobility are obsolete; dry-rot consumes them.
Behold, I show you a new nobility. He that has once
been wounded in battle shall have one quartering; he that
has been wounded twice, two quarterings ; and he that hath
twenty wounds shall sit .down to table with any Hohen-
zollern, Habsburg, or Wittelsbach of you all.' Heavens!
What an uproar! From the Volga to the Thames haro
against the blasphemer! A score of purple-faced monarchs
and their slaves bellowed against me 'Brigand, cut-purse,
enemy of religion, monster of vice!' I made myself em-
peror, and the monster of yesterday was Monsieur mon frere
of to-day. And the haughtiest of them vied with each
other in offering their" daughters to my brothers, to my
stepson, and even to my valets. My gospel of heroism
they rejected. I made myself a monarch amongst mon-
archs, and at their own game quickly surpassed them.
My usurpations! My lawlessness! See the Hohenzollern,
Romanoff, and Habsburg vultures round dying Poland!
. . . And in this very palace, in this very room, what was
the pet scheme that Joseph II. and his empress-mother
Napoleon's Dream 253
meditated day and night? It was to pawn Belgium for
Bavaria and make of Munich another Warsaw. Yet the
Jacobins, men like Hulin and Reynaud who ought to know
better, grumble in secret 'Why is he not like Washington?
Why make himself Emperor?' Washington! That Yan-
kee deacon with his paltry one and a half millions scattered
over millions of square miles, one man a mile, a new nation,
a new land, severed by leagues of ocean from everywhere,
whilst I, in France, this immemorial monarchy, its traditions,
prejudices, hopes, enmeshed in foreign policies of a thousand
years . . . Washington and Napoleon ! It is a theme for
the eloquence of headmasters ! Men of sense will not even
give it a thought!"
VI
The silence had now:a tinge of the supernatural, and be-
gan to affect Duroc. This room and the whole palace
seemed haunted by the dead kings and emperors, princes
and princesses, who had loved their loves and hated their
hates here. The cessation of Napoleon's voice accentu-
ated this effect, though like ghostly echoes its vibrant
accents still seemed to linger about the corridors.
And in Duroc's soul there were echoings also a life-
scheme by him who had framed it, a life-scheme which he
himself, Duroc, had lived through fourteen years that were
like fourteen centuries; for to himself, as to Desaix and
Rapp, Bonaparte had given a religion. Desaix or Lannes
was the Khalid, the Sword of God, to this new Mohammed;
Arcola and Marengo, the battles of Bedr and Damascus.
All, in an incredible panorama whilst Napoleon was speak-
ing, had been driving past Duroc's eyes, taken up as into a
mountain. "A tyrant? This man a tyrant?" thought
Duroc. "He is a hero, and has brought back the secret
of heroism that was lost to the world with Roland and
Charlemagne!"
254 Schonbrunn
And as though conscious of the very terms in which Duroc
formulated that silent, fervid thought, Bonaparte's whole
figure relaxed, and in a voice of almost playful charm,
prefaced by a smile which gave a beauty to his lips, and to
his countenance that tragic serenity seen only in certain
Greek sculptures of the heroic period, he went on :
"Did Andre*ossy tell you? In Vienna here, in this city
which I could raze to-morrow and draw a plough across
its site as Rome did Carthage, or reduce to a cinder-heap
as Genghis did Samarcand in Vienna here it was dis-
cussed two days ago by a committee of the elite whether,
without inviting me, they dared invite my aide-de-camp
Montesquieu to some assembly in the Rittersaal that is to
be held to-night. Yet it is by my permission that these
preux chevaliers even enter that Rittersaal! But I, it
seems, I have not the necessary number of quarterings.
My valet de chambre possesses them!"
Here Napoleon's smile became laughter. He seemed in
his joy at this exhibition of human fatuity to be on the point
of pulling Duroc's ear. The latter even felt the fingers of
the Emperor's hand before that hand had left the back of
the sofa which it was tapping.
"These high-born mountebanks! In Vienna is not
imbecility at its zenith? But with my Toison d'Or I will
end all that as I ended that worm-eaten absurdity the
Holy Roman Empire. Tiens, see here."
The Emperor went to a cabinet and took out the first
copy of the new Order executed in Paris from a design of
Lejeune, Berthier's aide-de-camp, and received at Schon-
brunn some days ago. Still standing by the cabinet, Napo-
leon examined the copy critically. A slight frown showed
itself on his brow at once. He had at first sight been
pleased with Lejeune's design; but to-night its ostenta-
tion outraged his common sense if not his taste. Still, he
handed it to his minister without comment.
Napoleon's Dream 255
"You do not like it? " he said instantly.
"Your Majesty as ever reads my thoughts justly."
"But what is the matter with it? Dites, dites! but it is
not necessary. I know. I know. "
He thrust the glittering gewgaw back into its case, lined
with purple velvet, and shut the cabinet with a snap.
"N'en parlons plus. Let's say no more about it.'*
The new Order of Chevaliers was, in the conception of
its inventor, to supersede or abase the Order instituted four
centuries ago by Philip of Burgundy, blending so happily
the ideas of mythology, commercialism, and mystic sym-
bolism. Emperors, princes, kings, great barons had worn
the ancient Order. It had gleamed on the breast of Egmont
and of Horn as they walked to the scaffold. The new
Order was an equally happy blending of Napoleon's habi-
tual grandiosity in such matters and Lejeune's habitually
offensive swagger. Lejeune, Berthier's aide-de-camp, over-
excited by his adventure in the Tyrol, had drawn the
French eagle grasping in its talons both the Golden Fleeces
of Spain and Austria, whilst from its beak hung suspended
the Fleece of France. To describe the design with Gentz as
"a blasphemous parody," is folly or sycophancy; but the
new Order had the fatal demerit of arrogance, and a few
months later during the negotiations for the marriage with
Marie Louise it was tacitly withdrawn.
' ' What a childish affair is this ' high ' politics, is this ' great '
history! " Napoleon said, reverting to the Rittersaal episode.
"Ragamuffins shouting nick-names to each other these are
the solemn historians and the great politicians ! I have lived
in the palaces of my enemies as no Bourbon or Habsburg
ever did; and when I ride through Vienna, Austria shoots
out her underlipand grunts "parvenu!" England, when I
make her millions quake from shore to shore, hypocrite
England screams out 'ogre' and 'anti-Christ.' Mon Dieu,
Duroc, who will deliver me from my future biographers?
256 Schonbrunn
Above all, who will deliver me from my encomiasts? From
such mud, the biography I wish is a biography in which every
sentence shall be the reverse of the truth ; a biography in which
I shall be described as surrendering at Ulm, or as defeated
at Austerlitz ; that I beheaded Talleyrand, and at Tilsit, on
the raft, secretly strangled the Czar; burnt down Versailles,
demolished the statues in the Vatican que scais-je?"
Duroc was aware that this was not Napoleon's habitual
manner in speaking of biography and of history. Only
three weeks ago, for instance, upon the occasion of a secret
embassy from the new King of Sweden, he had said to
Blenstetter the envoy :
" The Swedes have done well to depose Gustavus IV. Let
his successor profit by this example. Let him see in this
one more proof that, whilst I live, the surest presage of
disaster to a monarch is England's alliance. I am not
entirely satisfied with your new sovereign's policy. It is
timid, and unworthy of the name he bears. Why does
he not read history? It is the only philosophy, and should
be the instructor of kings."
But, more tactful than Rapp, gifted also with a finer
discernment than that slightly wooden individual, Duroc
asked for no reconciliation of the contradiction; perhaps
he himself saw that the contradiction was only apparent,
that the History of which Napoleon had spoken to-night was
History viewed from a transcendental standpoint, and that
to Blenstetter three weeks ago he was speaking of a homelier
affair.
A singular and beautiful light flickered and sank, but
rose again in Napoleon's eyes. The brooding introspection
vanished. That beauty and terror which, in Bolli's phrase,
made Napoleon's eyes "unlike those of any other mortal"
flamed in them. Napoleon was about to speak of war; and
the hero-gaze of the leader of armies for a moment had
displaced Corvisart's nervopath.
Napoleon's Dream 257
"The ancients said in Homer, 'Nothing that crawls is
more wretched than man.' I say, 'Nothing that crawls
is viler than man,' and I have had experience enough and
opportunity enough ; and a despair, blacker than the black-
est defeat, comes over me at times contempt, a corrosive
rage of contempt for the human race. To-day has brought
me one of those moments ... I can turn to that Tugend-
bund pamphlet and embrace the portrait of myself the
world-redeemer become the world-destroyer in loathing of
that which once I would have saved. But in war is purity.
What is the hideousness of war beside the hideousness of
peace? Men do not understand. War is a flame; peace
corrupts. War is incorruptible, ethereal as the elemental
fire. The sufferings of war? Never more than one life
pants out its agony on the battlefield. It is the regarding
eye that sees the united misery. In that sapper crushed
under a gun-carriage yesterday a tragedy bloody as Wag-
ram was rehearsed. What battle of mine ever led to such
concentrated tortures as the blundering British stumbling
into that pest-house of Walcheren? War? Life is war.
In all my battles never more than one man fell. I do not
underrate the individual suffering moi. It is to under-
stand such suffering that I visit my battlefields after the
victory. My enemies in their caricatures draw me as
gloating over the wounds, the amputations "
Duroc made a gesture of indignation.
"Sire, your Majesty these infamous cowards ..."
"What does indignation serve? You have seen the
English newspapers. And why do I visit my battlefields?
I visit them because I wish to see what this individual suffer-
ing means. I visit them because to the dying who lie there
in my cause, dying for me, it is a consolation or a joy to see
me. What am I in my old coat? A symbol, I suppose, a
symbol, Duroc. Francis II. who watches his battle from a
windmill ten miles away, and George III. who drivels up
17
258 Schonbrunn
and down Hampton Court gardens and never saw a battle
even ten miles away, do not believe in this. How are they
to believe in it? How are they to understand what it is to
see one of those magnificent grenadiers stretched on the
ground amid the wreckage of a fight, roaring with agony,
suddenly spring to his feet, shout your name, 'Vive 1'Emper-
eur!' and fall dead, his face resplendent with happiness, if
happiness be enough to describe the light which lights up
that face "
"I have seen it," Duroc said in a husky voice, deeply
moved. "I have witnessed it, your Majesty."
A sudden sound startled him, and startled Duroc. The
same interpretation traversed their minds simultaneously.
"It is Austria's answer."
There was an instant change in Napoleon's figure. The
relaxed posture disappeared ; energy in every muscle, every
nerve strung, and in his eyes the battle-light, he was looking
across the lines of war already.
But quicker than Duroc he saw the error that both had
made, turning every sound into the order of ideas dominat-
ing the mind.
It was the footsteps of a sentinel, but it was also the
striking of an hour, and the interchange of voices, challenge
and answer. It was not a midnight visit, but merely the
relief of the guard stationed throughout the palace at ten
o'clock.
The Emperor and his minister were silent for several
seconds. Neither alluded to the error; nor did either by
any words affect to dissemble or make light of the error.
VII
" What is the hour? " the Emperor asked negligently when
the various chimes, harsh or silvery, had died in the rooms
or along the corridors and the supernatural silence once
more crept over the palace.
Napoleon's Dream 259
"Two o'clock, Sire. In three hours day will break."
Napoleon showed no sign of taking the hint. Between
him and Duroc there had intervened one of those charming
moments of intimacy which, at least superficially, resembled
the easy-goingness of two old friends sitting late, each
certain of the other's tolerance; each feeling that he could
speak or be silent, and in speech or silence find and give
pleasure. Bonaparte had his feet on the sofa, his right
hand along its back, his chin sunk on his breast. Duroc,
at a sign from his master, had seated himself on a kind of
stool or settee with gilt legs and brocaded top. At Schon-
brunn as in the Tuileries the etiquette of the new French
court, in spite of all De Remusat's efforts, was a blending
of common sense and grotesque rigidity. Etiquette implies
gross superstition and demands the sacrifice of time. How
was the son of an attorney to see a sacred act in the un-
buttoning of his chemise, or the victor of Austerlitz to
find leisure for the six entries which caricatured even human
absurdity at the levee of Louis XIV.?
"Why do the Habsburgs crowd their houses with clocks?
In their do-nothing empty hours, I should have thought
they would have been glad to forget the waste and passage
of time. The hobby is hereditary as the under-lip. At
Madrid I found Joseph in a palace that ticked like a watch-
maker's shop. "
He laughed to himself, quietly, thinking suddenly of the
pasty of watches which Charles V.'s cook presented the
Emperor at Yuste.
"Poor old Joseph," Napoleon went on, "what an absurd
figure he cuts in the Escurial! What an absurd figure he
cuts in any position except that of a surveyor of taxes
or a confidential clerk! There, however, he sits, with his
crowned head, and his royal cares never cost him a sleepless
hour. Wellington might throw a cordon of horse around
the Escurial any night and capture le bon Joseph snoring
260 Schonbrunn
beside his Dulcinea. Think of his face and hers, Duroc,
prisoners in their nightgowns in the English camps! And,
morbleu, I should not miss him! It would be merely a
queen's pawn or at worst a bishop off my chess-board."
Napoleon rubbed his white, fat little hands in glee,
laughing immoderately at his own malice.
" B ut there is no danger, "he went on. " Joseph may sleep
sound. He was always a famous sleeper. Yes, I remem-
ber. After my father's death, though I was the younger, I
had to act as the elder brother to the family; see to every-
thing and everybody, the house, the mulberry patch, Louis,
Jerome, Elisa, Pauline mon Dieu, yes; and, I sometimes
think, I have had to play the elder brother to the whole
human race ever since. Before I was sixteen all my family
was on my hands; before I was twenty-two, all Corsica;
then all France; now all Europe, and to-morrow "
Duroc saw the excitement return to Napoleon's face, and,
remembering Corvisart's counsels, he became uneasy again.
He himself needed rest. A hundred cares awaited him.
The Grand Chamberlainship, his Carolingian office, was a
little ridiculous, but the duties it involved were serious.
That afternoon they had been made harassing by the ab-
sence of Raynouard, a brave amongst the brave, and by the
sudden illness of the chamberlain of the day. Still, he
reflected, Champagny or Liechtenstein might at any mo-
ment appear bringing the treaty for Napoleon's signature.
Napoleon, resuming his amicable pensive tones, inter-
rupted his musings.
"We went to the same school at Ajaccio, Joseph and I;
and as children we slept in the same bed, and night by
night Joseph's head no sooner touched the pillow than off he
went and never stirred till morning. I could have slept too,
but I preferred to lie awake listening to the leaves or to the
surf, working and scheming how to be top of the class to-
morrow if I were not top to-day, studying my rivals, con-
Napoleon's Dream 261
ning my tasks, history, geography, arithmetic, French.
Thirty-five years ago! Where were you then, Duroc?"
"In 1775, Sire? I was three years old, and at Lucon,
I suppose. Anyhow, it was the year of Louis XVI.'s
coronation. I remember the bonfires and the ringing of
bells."
Napoleon jerked the words from his lips:
"And to-night here we sit in the palace of the Caesars,
you and I, at that time two of the most insignificant little
boys in all Europe ..."
Duroc was about to protest.
"Here we sit, you a duke, I an emperor, in the palace of
the Habsburgs and we are at the same game still, each of
us, a writhing knot of collegiens, struggling to get to the
top of the class. Desaix is dead and Lannes, let out of
school a little earlier. I ask no holiday and get no holiday.
My generals and marshals come to me for leave of absence ;
but to whom am I to apply for leave of absence? Destiny
and the inexorable nature of things that is my superior
officer. Yet I know a spot, Duroc, a valley above Bastia,
full of wild flowers and shut in by rocks from the sea.
There, if I were to imitate Charles V. or Diocletian, there I
could still be happy. There in my garden of mulberry
trees and vines I might have leisure at last to read La
Mecanique Celeste. "
He seemed lost in recollection.
"You do not know that book, you others? It is a great
book. Laplace sent it me exactly nine years ago last April ;
but it wants three consecutive months to read it, and I, I
have never had three consecutive hours."
Napoleon pleased his own vanity, perhaps his just pride,
by distinguishing himself from his officers, as well as from
contemporary sovereigns, by the superiority and variety of
his intellectual interests. If men like Johann Markowitz
and Rentzdorf in Vienna or Gcethe at Erfurt, measured his
262 Schonbrunn
literary judgments and his scholarship, there were always
characterless old fops like Haydn and Wieland, nature's
valets, prepared to lackey the great man's "versatility."
"Yes, there I could read Laplace and write the history of
my grenadiers. What a subject-matter! No one else will
do them justice, for I alone understand them. We have
stormed through our lives together. We have watered our
horses in every river from the Nile to the Tagus, from the
Baltic to the Sicilian Sea; and in the future ... If I had
but ten more years, Duroc . . . Nature meant me to be a
writer of books, " he said, abruptly reining in his thoughts.
"It was my earliest ambition. It shall be my latest. I
could still write dramas if I had leisure. I confided the
plot of one to Raynouard the other day."
The tone was or seemed to be inviting; but Duroc's
face remained stony. He recollected Lauriston's descrip-
tion of the three hours' interview with Napoleon, walking
up and down in front of his tent on the evening of the 5th
July, the first day of Wagram. Perhaps, too, he feared lest
Napoleon should at this dread hour confide to,.him, also,
the plot of his unfinished tragedy.
Duroc was not destined to be bored for long. Napoleon
had a surprise for him. Till now he had talked with his
face partly in profile to Duroc; but now turning suddenly to
face the latter, Napoleon, as though dismissing all these
empty speculations, said with emphasis.
"But I have no son, Duroc."
Had he dropped a hand-grenade the explosion could not
have startled Duroc more effectively than these six words;
the most momentous state secret of the cabinets of Europe
was ushered in for discussion.
"My interest in France is therefore a life-interest,"
Bonaparte went on. "It is precarious. The hazard of a
bursting shell, a spent shot such as did for Lannes . . .
Hence these conspiracies; yes and the present interminable
Napoleon's Dream 263
negotiations. If I am to paralyse the hopes of a royalist
restoration I must have an heir."
"Sire, your Majesty's confidence moves me."
But to himself Duroc, all fatigue banished, put question
on question. What was Napoleon's inmost purpose in this
communication? The Emperor's face was serious, even sad ;
but it revealed nothing. Nevertheless, the communication
could not be accidental. Of what new scheme of policy
were these words the prelude? Duroc's mind hurried to
the answer. He knew the alternate advances towards and
retreats from a divorce during the past two years. A son
had been born to Napoleon, and only recently Madame
Walewska had become enceinte here at Schonbrunn. This
had disproved one falsehood and removed one obstacle.
He knew of the overtures to Alexander, foiled by the Czar-
itza's prompt intervention and the marriage of Alexander's
sister to the Duke of Oldenburg. But like every member
of the inner court circle he knew also of the persistent
rumour of a secret clause in the present negotiations,
demanding for Napoleon the hand of an archduchess.
This demand, it was said, had first been made in a manner
highly dramatic or melodramatic. During one of his
hunting expeditions the Emperor attended only by Rustum,
had entered a forester's hut. A distinguished-looking
stranger had entered almost at the same moment, and
there, it was said, Napoleon's demand had first been made.
For the stranger was the Archduke Charles.
"What is he up to now?" thought Duroc, and every
semblance of friendship vanished. He became an adversary
watching an adversary's moves. Nothing was in his mind
but a vague hostility to Bonaparte's tortuous methods,
methods excused so often by such phrases as "It is in the
blood, he cannot help himself. He is a Corsican. " Cen-
turies of private justice or private vengeance have made it
a second nature in the race to mistrust the straight road,
264 Schonbrunn
to leave even your friends in ignorance of your true
designs.
Napoleon, as though he had forgotten his minister, but
had not forgotten his own ideas, said pensively:
"My family might be an incalculable aid to me but my
family is one of my greatest chagrins. They owe every-
thing to me, and what story of sudden fortune in the
Arabian Nights surpasses or equals the fortunes of my
brothers and sisters? Yet they have no gratitude. My
brothers conspire against me openly, my sisters intrigue in
secret, Lucien, the ablest, defies me. He has abjured
France, and when last I heard of him he was in England
in England, Duroc, my deadliest, most malignant enemy!
And why, ye gods? Because he rendered me a service on
Brumaire, and, his head swollen with vanity, he imagined
that by his aid also I had won my victories. And now,
instead of taking part with me in the greatest epic action of
all time, he moons about like a discontented school-usher,
writing lame alexandrines on Charlemagne. Charlemagne!
What has he to do with Charlemagne, dead exactly a thou-
sand years ago, when I am living and here? And what has
he, my brother to do with the writing of epics when he
might be living one every hour of every day? And the
others are as absurd, destitute of common sense even in
the pursuit of their egoism. I know the things that imbe-
cile Joseph says of me. I made him King of Spain; but he
would raise Spain against me and join Wellington to-morrow
if Wellington would leave him king! And the fool can-
not even beget a son to succeed me nothing but daughters !
And Jerome, mon Dieu, Jerome! Westphalia is the young-
est kingdom in Europe, but it has every vice that dis-
figures the oldest. Jerome was yesterday starving in the
streets of Marseilles, yet he campaigns with a larger retinue
of harlots and bandboxes than ever followed a Bourbon to
disaster. How would your ideologues reconcile these con-
Napoleon's Dream 265
tradictions with Montesquiou? As for Louis that is the
bitterest. Louis, for whom at Valence I denied myself
everything, keeping both of us on my lieutenant's pay.
What privations! I never set foot in a cafe, I brushed my
own uniform that it might last longer. This for his sake
who now does everything he can to thwart me and justify
the vilest calumnies of my enemies. But let me not speak
of him. You know, Duroc, you know how well he succeeds
in making her life a burden to the good, beautiful woman he
has married. Ah, why did you permit it? Why did you
make it necessary?"
Duroc looked and felt extremely uncomfortable. Napo-
leon was alluding to Hortense Beauharnais. Ten years
ago she had had a girl's infatuation for Duroc himself;
but at that time no man suspected the coming Caesarism,
and despite Bonaparte's advice Duroc had refused Jose-
phine's daughter, and marrying Elmira d'Atchez, the heiress
of a Spanish banker, he had found with her a domestic
misery as great as Hortense's with Louis.
"And my sisters!" Napoleon said again, but this time
with good-humoured sarcasm. "My sisters! Well, Paul-
ine has a heart of a sort. She asks for nothing but a few
thousands a year and in her conduct, well, the princesses
of the old regime have set her an example that she imitates
too successfully. She leaves me alone. Would to God I
could say that of the other two! But I tell you, Duroc, if
I discovered to-morrow that Caroline my youngest and once
my favourite sister, if I heard that she had taken this fana-
tic into her embraces and in the act placed this dagger in his
hand, whispering, "For my brother's breast; be bloody,
bold, and resolute!" I could not, I swear, repudiate the
allegation. She has done things as hideous. Metternich
circulated the epigram that Caroline had the head of Crom-
well on the loveliest shoulders in Italy. Such fatuities are
worthy of a diplomatic profoundeur ; but she is heartless ; has
266 Schonbrurm
infinite ingenuity; she is ambitious and grasping beyond
belief. Still, I have a kind of regard for her; there is char-
acter in her evil. But Elisa, the living parody of myself,
whom I rescued from St. Cyr on the very day of the prison
massacres! Her I find unendurable. I never see her, and,
unless I am compelled, I never write to her. She is Joseph's
sister, not mine; worse I cannot say of her. Tuscany has
neither military nor political significance, but the Semiramis
of Lucca will have a court which apes the Tuileries and,
since it cannot have military brilliance, it must, if you
please, have literary lustre. And, mon Dieu, what a crew!
Every man whom I have banished from France or forbidden
to live in Paris finds hospitality with my sister Fontanes,
De Stael, Re*camier, La Harpe, Boufflers, Chateaubriand,
who since his return from the East has more than ever the
hang-dog look of a conspirator who has just come out of
the chimney, and her latest triumph, that fiddler Paganini,
who must have brought his devil's skill from the devil only.
My sisters!"
He took snuff, sneezed heartily, and began to walk up and
down.
"Had Alexander a brother? Or Caesar sisters?" Napo-
leon demanded abruptly and stopped in his walk, glancing
back sideways over his shoulder at Duroc.
The latter hesitated, then answered in some embarrass-
ment:
"Sire, I do not know. I have forgotten my ancient
history, and my duties to your Majesty leave me little
time for reading. Daru could tell us."
"Caesar, I think, had no sisters. He had a daughter,
married to Pompey. "
Napoleon broke off, and spat on the floor, and, as if by
that symbolical act he had rid his mind of all his relatives, he
stopped in front of a mirror and began to examine his
features.
Napoleon's Dream 267
The due de Friuli, seeing Napoleon thus absorbed,
thought this a favourable occasion for him to spit also.
Accordingly he rose and in the Versailles manner spat, not
on the carpet, but in a corner of the room, then sat down
again and looked at his master.
VIII
The latter was still examining himself in front of the
mirror. Evidently the results were not satisfying, for
with a discontented grimace Napoleon looked at his hands;
they were small, well-made, white, and plump, but the
finger-nails were long and unpleasant-looking, and a dirty-
ish yellow in colour.
He began to walk up and down, still in the proximity of
the mirror.
"Since Constant showed me how to shave myself," he
observed at length, "I have never felt clean. Is it a sign of
age or ill-health when the beard pushes so rapidly?"
"I should say it was a sign of vigorous health, your
Majesty. "
Duroc was not the dupe of the question about shaving.
There was something else in the Emperor's mind.
Napoleon had again returned to the mirror and resumed
the contemplation of his face and figure.
There was no resisting the impression, he reflected;
the notion during his stay at Schonbrunn had occurred to
him obstinately. In other years, say from the days of
Arcola to those of Marengo, even to those of Austerlitz,
that is, from his twenty-fifth to his thirty-fifth years, it
had been his mother's face which invariably started forward
to meet him in a mirror, a Corsican face, lean, bony, aqui-
line, almost haggard, but possessing its own beauty, lit up
by a burning energy, dominated by the brow, the very
throne of intellect, and an intent, scrutinizing, almost terri-
268 Schonbrunn
ble gaze. Now, however, it was no longer that face which
started to meet him, but another face, indolent-looking,
round, overlaid with fat, unattractive, the forehead a
meaningless lump of flesh, and in the eyes no longer the
ardent intensity of gaze but a look like that of a vicious
horse. It was his father's face. Recently also he had to
his surprise rediscovered in himself his father's tastes and
his father's habits. His father's maladies had plagued him
long since.
" Talleyrand is right. The club-foot is blind to greatness,
but he has insight into corruption. In the dregs of exist-
ence the highest genius finds its level."
Bonaparte had no doubts in his own mind about the
superiority of what is usually styled "glory" to what is
usually styled "love"; but he was not less certain that real
love and real glory are exceedingly rare. In his own life
he had only experienced real love once; he was not con-
vinced that he had ever aroused it in any woman. He
asseverated indeed, "I have conquered hearts as well as
kingdoms"; but he was always a little ashamed of his own
effrontery. It kindled the same embarrassment as the em-
barrassment when he, the Corsican attorney's son spoke or
wrote in the style of the French kings of "mon peuple."
"But now? This eighteen-year-old girl? What are my
chances?"
He was not a man to linger over suppositions. Assuredly,
he told himself, looking at the reflection in the glass, there
was little in that stumpy figure, those legs that waddled
under the shaking fat, that huge head set low on the power-
ful shoulders, and that dwarf-like enormity of chest
there was little in all this to attract the candid eyes of a
young girl. Yet it was just this attraction that mattered;
maturity created for itself illusions of various kinds rank,
great power, genius, wealth but once within four walls,
te'te-a-te'te with a young girl, a great soldier, after the first
Napoleon's Dream 269
fifteen minutes, lost the aureole of his victories, an emperor
that of power, and a young girl's glance became more dis-
concerting than the bristling gleam of ten thousand spears,
and the manoeuvring of three hundred thousand men on a
battlefield a slight task compared with that of banishing the
look of boredom or vexation from her eyes.
Suddenly Napoleon threw off his disguise. In Napo-
leon's character, the impatience which made it intolerable
for him to be on his guard against assassination sprang
from the same root as the headstrong outspokenness which
again and again made him disclose secrets in conversation.
His immense power saved him from the consequences of
these indiscretions; but in a weaker man they would
have been counted defects. Flatterers or dupes have
even attributed them to calculation and a superior
cunning.
Even in his frankness, however, Napoleon revealed his
mind in his own way. He made no formal exposition; he
simply began to "think aloud," permitting Duroc to over-
hear his thoughts.
"Indeed it is hazardous for a man of my age to marry a
girl of eighteen. Such a wife expects you to dance to one
tune only, to understand her whims which she neither
understands nor attempts to understand herself. Soldiers
have not the time. What a frightful fate is Marmont's!
He was as a son to me and I tried to save him from that
marriage. Yes, soldiers ought only to marry women of a
certain character and a certain age, as Davout did years
ago and as Augereau has just done. Women of thirty,
sedate in temper, make the ideal soldiers' wives. But a
child of seventeen, Duroc?"
Duroc had the distinct impression that Napoleon wished
to be contradicted; that he was stating the case at its
worst in order to refute it. He knew the two marriages.
Marshal Davout, due d'Auerstadt, afterwards prince
270 Schonbrunn
d'Eckmiihl, had in 1803 married Rose Leclerc, sister of
Pauline Bonaparte's first husband. The manage was
everywhere famous as the happiest in the French army.
Augereau, due de Castiglione, in his turbulent, half-pirati-
cal youth had married a beautiful Spaniard; but he had
long been a widower and a few months ago had married
again.
"If it is hazardous in a soldier," Napoleon went on,
"how much more hazardous in a soldier who is also the ruler
of a great empire? I have a myriad anxieties; can seldom
be alone; am exposed at any moment to start on a com-
paign it is to court disaster!"
With an air of dejection Napoleon flung himself on the
sofa again and in low friendly tones continued:
"If Josephine could have had a son, old comrade, how
simple and beautiful it all would have been. For, despite
everything, I love that woman. Mon Dieu, only six days
ago, at a vile story in the English press, I was about to start
for Strassburg, torn with rage and longing. Yes, I love her.
But a childless marriage is no marriage. How can there
be a 'home' without the laughter of children? Josephine
knows this and is unhappy, and I know that she knows this
and I am wretched as she is wretched. But my work for
France is only half completed if I leave the nation no
security; if my death is to kindle civil war and again let
loose the Terror. Yet how am I now to secure that stabil-
ity, except by grafting the new dynasty upon a firmly-
rooted stock? General Bonaparte could choose where he
would. Napoleon I. is no longer free. Cruel dilemma!
To repudiate the woman who better than any other under-
stands my character; to take to my breast an inexperienced
girl, the daughter of an old, corrupt, and haughty house,
nurtured amid curses on my name, her father the monarch
I have most deeply injured, numbering amongst her immedi-
ate kindred Marie Antoinette, whom I am supposed to
Napoleon's Dream 271
have beheaded, and Marie Caroline, whom I have cer-
tainly dethroned. What an abyss covered with flowers!
It is a moving darkness only . . . yet it is in my
fate ..."
Doubt vanished from Duroc's mind. Napoleon had
resolved to marry the archduchess.
Marie Louise was not beautiful, but at eighteen her face
had a definite charm, a union of artlessness and perversity
not infrequent in girls who have been trained in convents.
She was tall; her figure was shapely. Her sensual mouth
curved upwards at the corners in a way which gave it a
striking resemblance to the mouth of Pauline Borghese;
but she had beautiful ears, small and finely whorled.
Pauline's were flat, "the ears of a monkey on the head of
an angel," and therefore hidden always by bandelettes.
To suppose that Bonaparte was uninfluenced by the high
birth and sensuous charm of the archduchess is to take the
thing that is not for the thing that is. There was still a
remnant of Lucien de Rubempre in the all-adventurer, the
all-conquerer. To the Emperor the Habsburg marriage
was not more dazzling than had been the Beauharnais mar-
riage to the general; but it was as dazzling.
Duroc's mind, working in these directions, listening to
the profound silences, was suddenly traversed by a bizarre
idea. Was it credible that in the selection of Romeo and
Juliet Napoleon had intended to suggest in the feud of the
Montagues and Capulets the evils that might result from
the feud of the Bonapartes and Habsburgs? On momentous
occasions Napoleon did nothing without intention. At
Erfurt, as Duroc very well knew, every play staged by
Dazincourt, Denon's predecessor, had been selected by
the Emperor; he knew very well that Athalie had been re-
jected lest it should prompt some German Joash; that
Mithridate had been selected because the Pontic king's
unyielding hatred of Rome portrayed Bonaparte's unyield-
272 Schonbrunn
ing hatred of England; that Mohamet similarly had been
chosen because of the famous verses
"Les mortels sont e"gaux, ce n'est point la naissance,
C'est la seule vertu qui fait la difference.
II est de ces esprits favorise's des cieux
Qui sont tout par eux-m&nes et rien par leurs aieux."
He knew that imperial orders had even been given to the
actors and actresses Talma, Lafon, Saint Prix, and mes-
demoiselles Gros, Duchesnois, Patrat, and Rose Depuys to
pronounce certain passages applicable to Napoleon with
unusual solemnity and emphasis.
Nevertheless, Duroc felt that a direct allusion to the
play of to-night or an overt comparison of Napoleon to
Romeo would at once shock the Emperor's sense and good
taste. He therefore said tentatively:
"Sire, your Majesty is still the youngest monarch in
Europe "
"The Czar is eight years younger, " Napoleon interjected
curtly. "Yet I would know happiness, Duroc. I have
had enough of glory; I would know domestic happiness, old
comrade if at nine and thirty happiness is still possible to
man. "
Inadvertently Napoleon had made himself a year younger
than he was generally supposed to be. Duroc observed
this and drew his own inferences, but said nothing.
"My talk with M. Goethe at Erfurt made me read Wer-
ther again. There you have youthful love drawn by a
master hand. Those others, they do not know what youth-
ful love means. They have never felt it, how then can they
depict it? Look at that piece to-night. Nothing could
be more untrue to nature, nothing more loutish and unclean.
How can an Italian like Zingarelli, the countryman of
Petrarch and Tasso, permit that buffoon Shakespeare
thus to sully, thus to disfigure the most sacred of our senti-
Napoleon's Dream 273
ments? But a nation like England, dead to political honour,
is dead also to sensibility and to moral honour."
Rancour had returned to his voice, but in a lighter tone
he resumed:
"Eh bien, in this play, Juliet is an innocent girl of fifteen
or sixteen. What are her ideas and her language upon love?
They are the ideas and language of a street- walker ! Are
English girls indeed like this? We have the authority of
the greatest English poet and the applause of the British
mob to testify that this is their character. But the whole
race is demi-savage still, and I had no more compunction in
arresting ten thousand of them at the rupture of the Peace
of Amiens than I would have had in arresting the ten
thousand Cossacks who cut off the ears and noses of their
prisoners at Austerlitz. Outside science, what writer of
refinement except Richardson has England produced?"
Duroc mentioned Ossian. For in 1809, in Vienna as in
Dresden and Paris, Fingal and Temora were still the vogue
and at the baptismal font gave names to a generation
of Mai vines and Oscars.
Napoleon's answer was categoric.
' ' Ossian is not an Englishman : he is a Gael. If Ossian had
written in French I would have made him a prince. But
your Shakespeare," he said with a brusque laugh, "I would
have made him a groom. His ideas reek of the stables."
And to Duroc's astonishment, for during the performance
the Emperor for the most part had appeared listless or half-
asleep, Napoleon cited two of Juliet's speeches to prove the
coarseness or brutishness of Shakespeare's mind.
The criticism was just. Duroc could not defend the
excerpts.
"It is English, your Majesty," he said with a shrug.
"The women of that nation drink beer and brandy. My
cousin, M. le comte d'Herisson, has lived amongst them. "
"Yes, but why has Zingarelli reprinted the outrage?
18
274 Schonbrunn
Youth is the age of noble illusions. Each day a new world
of enchantment opens before the mind. He who destroys
this enchantment is an enemy of the human race. And
youthful love how beautiful it is, Duroc! Ethereal,
flying everything gross, standing at the holiest distances
from its adoration. Its existence is that of the phcenix.
It lives for days upon a smile. A word transports it to the
highest heaven, drives it into solitude, to devour in jealous
seclusion the memory of its own bliss. "
Napoleon's face had become extraordinary in its mo-
bility ; letting himself go, his countenance, his eyes, his lips,
expressed every nuance of the emotions which rapt him
anger, tendresse, exaltation, reverie, scorn, the blackness of
hate. Duroc thought of those watches whose glass faces
reveal the works.
"Even Werther sometimes errs in this respect. Goethe
promised me to amend the paragraphs. I am told that
Werther is laughed at in England? The savages in New
Caledonia would laugh at it also. The women are all
Juliets there ! Youthful love ! ' '
He spoke a woman's name. Duroc could not hear it
distinctly.
Napoleon walked twice across the room, sunk in reverie,
then said:
"We knew together, she and I, the true, the hallowed
sentiment. And what was our sanctifying hour, uplifting
us to the crystal heaven of felicity? I will tell you. old
comrade, for I live it now, and it is twenty-four years ago.
It was a morning in June. We were sitting in an arbour.
The summer dew was still on the grass. I could see each
print her light foot had made on the silver lace across the
lawn. The murmur of bees was around, and the scent of
myrtle and syringa was in the air. Once a butterfly settled
near her hand. I too could have mistaken that hand for a
flower. Time fled, struggling with our heart-beats in speed.
Napoleon's Dream 275
The sun climbed, touching first her hair, then the damask of
her cheek. We scarcely spoke, but sitting a little way apart,
we now and then ate a cherry from the same branch. And
my ambition then, Duroc? The ravening ambition that
Europe now curses? My ambition was to die young, to
die unknown, wept only by her."
Duroc shifted uneasily in his chair. He was embarrassed ;
he was "out of it. " He felt like Sancho Panza listening to
some high-pitched harangue of Don Quixote. He had no
memories of this kind. He had never sat beside his maiden
and in still rapture eaten cherries from the same branch.
He saw that it would be fatuous to ask for explanations,
still more fatuous to murmur assent. Therefore he said
nothing, but sat with a military precision, attentive.
A swift change in the Emperor's demeanour relieved him.
" Now, " Napoleon resumed, " I shall die old; diseased and
used up, and go down like a ship amid the roarings of a
tempest that is the execration of a world ! But Austria shall
accept my terms or I will grind it to powder under my heel.
I have been at Schonbrunn four months. I have dwelt
much upon the past, pondering the future. Strange ideas
have come to me. What is past, present, and future to men
such as I am ? A chaos out of which we hew colossal shapes.
I am only in part the result of my environment. I should
have achieved greatness had the Bastille never fallen, had
the Bourbon monarchy still stood. For I have integrated
my ideals, " he went on, with an abrupt diversion of manner
and employing an energetic metaphor derived from his early
studies of d'Alembert and the higher mathematics, "Un-
like the eagle which sheds its beak, I have conserved every
role, metamorphosed indeed, but vital in me and vitalizing
still. I began as a royalist officer and an Ajaccian patriot.
But Corsica was small; France was no mother-country of
mine, but France was great, and, at that hour, bleeding to
death. I resolved to save France and on Vendemiaire
276 Schonbrunn
and at Rivoli I set her above danger. But I could not
rest. My fate drove me onwards. Other men have luck
Marmont, Ney, Junot, Mass6na. Such good fortune is
unstable and exterior; but my fate is from within, present
and resistless. It watches whilst I sleep; and whilst I am
absent in thought or dull, it brings my plans to a glorious
issue. Thus I entered Egypt a soldier, but returned the
Man of Destiny. I legislated for Europe. I made myself
Emperor, still integrating my ideals; for royalist officer,
Corsican insurgent, Jacobin commander-in-chief, Man of
Destiny, legislator and emperor I am them all. But now?
I nowhere see the end, and I might as well attempt to stay a
planet with my finger as seek to check the onward-rushing
of my fate."
"At Gottingen, " Napoleon resumed, after a brief silence,
"and at Berlin, the professors style me the modern Attila,
Genghis, Timour, que scais-je? Let them beware lest I
become the thing they name! Something in me here "
He touched his breast.
"Something here is at work. Nothing shakes my fore-
bodings. My enemies may force on me an unheard-of
r61e. Others before me have written out their life-hate
in ink; I will write mine in blood. The world reads
their satires and trembles. Mine shall strike them with
madness. "
"God forbid, your Majesty." Duroc broke in vehe-
mently. " This shall never be. You are the instrument of
Providence, Sire."
"God? Providence?" Napoleon sharply interrupted
with a shrug and a sidelong look at his minister. " I get on
very well without those fantasies ces ide*es-la. What is it
you intend by that word 'God,' you others? Hein? Let
us talk of that a little. "
Sitting down, he looked at Duroc in sardonic curiosity.
"Your Majesty, I did not of course mean "
Napoleon's Dream 277
To Duroc, the feast to the Supreme Being had repre-
sented, under all its travesty, a living idea. He found it,
however, singularly difficult to express to Napoleon in what
way he regarded him as the instrument of Providence.
"We use the word 'God' so glibly," Napoleon said pen-
sively. "I am not guiltless on that count myself in my
public utterances, for example, or when I write to my bish-
ops or to that old fox Pius VII., or to that imbecile Fesch,
my step-uncle, whom I have just made Archbishop of
Lyons. But to-night, Duroc, at this dead hour, what is
that word between you and me? The occasions when
it is worth while speaking the truth are rare; the men
capable of understanding it are rarer, and rarest of all
are the men whom one respects enough to speak the truth
to them. God, we say, is not this table, this sofa, not that
forest, nor those mountains, not the stars nor yet the ether,
not you, nor Rustum, nor Josephine, nor I. He is not
even William Pitt. Enfin, what is He? He is the Abso-
lute, these German ideologues affirm, the Infinite, the Un-
changing, the Unconditioned. All 'nots, ' row on row of
negatives! In fact, if we are to believe the religions and
the philosophies, He is everything except everything that
is! I should look upon myself as an idiot, if in my negoti-
ations with Austria I swerved a hair's-breadth to right or
left for such chimeras. As for God's so-called omnipotence
I could in ten minutes conceive ten more perfect universes.
No, Monge and Lagrange are right. Matter is its own
explanation, its own reason, its own cause, its own final end,
its own destiny in a word as I am. "
"I cling to immortality, Sire to a meeting au-dela, in the
hereafter."
"With whom?" was the startling answer. "Your
wife?"
Duroc laughed awkwardly, and in his awkwardness said
a cruel word which was not spoken before it was regretted:
278 Schonbrunn
"Lannes, perhaps."
"Ah!"
Deeply agitated, Napoleon struggled to speak, half rose,
sank back tearing at the arm of the sofa.
Duroc had touched too raw a wound.
"Yes," Napoleon said with a heavy sigh, "I should like
to meet Lannes again for a short time; but not forever,
not even Lannes. And would he be glad to meet me at all,
Duroc? Would he be glad to see the man for whom he died,
Duroc?"
Duroc observed that the hand which was tearing at the
embroidery had begun to tremble.
"Lannes? Lannes? Not glad to see you, Sire? I
know he would be, your Majesty."
"As for that'seeing of God face to face," Napoleon went
on, caught in the meshes of his first idea, and always eager
to reason against any unreason, "to what end? I ask my-
self. What are we to do when we have once seen Him?
And what are we to think of a God who for a thousand
million years will make Himself a gazing-stock to His crea-
tures? I have had the stare of men for ten years and
already I begin to be a little sick of it. "
There was an abrupt silence.
"It is late, old comrade, " Napoleon said, stifling a yawn.
"We both need sleep."
Duroc got up at once.
"Sire, I wish your Majesty a refreshing night."
"Remain!"
It was the Emperor, not the "old comrade," who spoke
that command.
Duroc came back.
"Who presides at the court-martial to-morrow?"
"What court-martial, your Majesty?"
Duroc's mind in the whirl of immense problems of State
and thought had drifted far indeed from the obscure German
Napoleon's Dream 279
boy who that morning had so nearly placed his name, not
beside the hideous glory of Ravaillac, but within the im-
mortal splendour which falls on the names of Brutus and of
Tell.
"Have you forgotten? The court-martial which tries
that madman."
The minister hesitated. He knew very well that the
court-martial, its members, and its president, would be se-
lected by one man only; he knew also that the judicial form
and procedure, the witnesses to be summoned, the judges,
the place, the hour, the sentence, and the manner of its
execution, would be determined by that same man; but
in a second he perceived that, as in the cases of d'Enghien
and Palm, Napoleon wished to remain in the background.
"The due de Rovigo, Sire," he answered at length, "or
General Hulin."
Napoleon's face remained unmoved.
Savary? Hulin?
The names were ominous.
Hulin had presided over the midnight tribunal which
condemned the Due d'Enghien, and throughout the sinister
scene Savary had stood behind the president's chair, affecting
the judges, affecting the scanty spectators, like a portentous
shadow of the implacable watcher in the Tuileries, waiting
whilst the crime moved to its consummation.
Napoleon's face betrayed nothing of his thoughts.
"The due de Rovigo General Hulin," he said at length,
with an ambiguous glance at Duroc; "Mais oui."
But detaining Duroc by a mere attitude rather than by a
gesture, Napoleon said again:
"See the prisoner yourself. Savary 's patibulary counte-
nance terrifies the unexperienced. Rapp is honest but
obtuse. You, on the other hand, have sensibility; you
have finesse. Reason with him; speak to him of his father
and mother, of the books he reads, his hopes, his sweetheart.
280 Schonbrunn
Get him to confide in you. Has he accomplices in Paris,
in Vienna, or anywhere? Upon that head I am not satis-
fied. I must know all."
In an altered voice he added:
"It is as easy for me to kill this boy as it is to speak the
word. Yet to-night, I am perplexed, drawn this way and
that by more conflicting purposes, by more intricate specu-
lations than the night before a battle. Yet he too must ful-
fil his destiny. He has elected himself my antagonist.
Who knows? For him this is perhaps the greatest. Death
is never the worst of evils."
"It is the goodness of your heart that makes you pause,
Sire. I will see the prisoner, but I think we shall discover
nothing. "
"My heart has nothing to do with this," Napoleon an-
swered drily. "It is my reason; it is my will. I consider
what is wisest and most auspicious for this subtle war which
to-day my enemies have unmasked. That is all. They
are poisoning the wells. It is a dangerous device even in
war."
Duroc, as Napoleon had just said of him, had sensibility
and kindness, but to-night, all seemed as nothing beside
the drama and mighty purposes of which he had been made
the spectator and the confidant. The assassin's guilt was
manifest. After so heinous an attempt, what was the death
of an obscure German lad? His blood would scarcely stain
more of mother-earth than a mouse's. To hesitate? It
was as though, in some onset of irreflective pity, one were
to hesitate to kill a tiny but noxious insect. Let the God
who made such insects take care of them.
CHAPTER IX
THE MASKED BALL
MEANWHILE, in Vienna itself, within the old palace
of the Habsburgs, the masked ball organized by
Count Andreossy continued its course. At midnight it
was already crowded, and the guests had increased rather
than diminished in numbers as the night wore on. They
now included several of the greatest names in Vienna.
Vienna, even in captivity, was still the centre of European
elegance and of the arts. Men and women in her public
assemblies had the consciousness that higher than this spot
none could look ; that towards Vienna and her f tes all other
cities looked Petersburg, Berlin, Paris, London.
Andreossy, as governor of Vienna, had devised this ball,
and its success pleased his vanity. He had always been
a persona grata in Viennese society of the first rank ; he now
heard or overheard his "amiability" celebrated; he heard
or overheard such assertions as "After all, Andr6ossy
is a gentleman; whilst Murat or Hulin or Bernadotte "
(former governors or ambassadors) " Well, from such mush-
rooms what except mushroom manners could one expect?"
The ball, in addition to this sop to his vanity, scored for
Andreossy a political victory over his rival, Maret. The
latter had remained the journalist he was when Napoleon in
1799 "discovered" his powers and won his limitless if indis-
281
282 Schonbrunn
creet devotion. He had still the journalist's eye for a sen-
sation, however coarse or compromising, and when in the
negotiations with Liechtenstein there occurred the ominous
hitch of September 22nd, he urged his master, by the seizure
of the commander-in-chief of the Austrian army, to force
Francis II. to his knees. Napoleon refused point-blank
but he did not intervene when Maret, in the presence of the
Austrian envoys, insinuated blusteringly If the Austrian
commander had not come to Vienna as a hostage, why then
had he come at all?
Andre"ossy, annoyed by Maret's grossness, had derided his
plan.
"Detain the ambassadors, " he said to Napoleon. " It is
what Austria and your enemies wait for, Sire. A hundred
Palafoxes will start from the ranks of Germany; Hungary
will become an armed camp; and in every fortress we shall
have a siege of Saragossa."
As a means of allaying the uneasiness that the indiscre-
tions of the old redacteur of the Moniteur had created,
Andr6ossy proposed his own plan. Let the requisitions and
house-to-house searches, he urged, be relaxed or suspended ;
let the great families, by a feeling of security, be enticed
back to the capital, and the belief in an immediate signature
of the treaty be encouraged; above all let Napoleon's plans
for paralyzing Austria's issue of paper money be kept
the most rigorous secret. Francis II. 's vacillating ami-
ability, his naive pleasure in hearing himself styled "the
Father of his people, " would then make it certain, Andre"-
ossy argued, that he would accept Napoleon's terms; for he
would never have the resolution to face the city's and the
nation's disappointment.
Andre'ossy, by this counsel, had done, he considered, a
real service to Napoleon and a service that he alone could
have rendered.
The first part of the scheme had been a success. During
The Masked Ball 283
the following weeks numbers of the smaller nobility and
several of the greater families had returned to the capital.
The peace became a foregone conclusion. The date and
terms, it was understood, alone were in dubiety.
In his project of a court ball, Andreossy encountered
greater difficulties. He was, it is true, the temporary mas-
ter of the Hofburg, the Imperial palace in the heart of the
city, as Napoleon was the master of Schonbrunn, the
Imperial palace outside the walls, and, as master of his
palace, he might issue what invitations he pleased. But
how was he to induce the Viennese to accept those invita-
tions? What Austrian would attend a banquet or a dance
in the royal palace when the master of that palace was in
exile at Totis, a hundred and twenty miles away?
"We shall see," Andreossy thought with a shrug.
The situation by its very niceness attracted him. It
gave him the opportunity of displaying just that social tact
which neither Napoleon nor any man in his suite possessed.
He had set to work at once. As a preliminary he had had
the hospital for the wounded in the Hofgarten removed.
Two regiments quartered till now in the precincts were
moved to the Leopoldstadt. Finally, as by an oversight,
a large portion of the Imperial plate was restored to the
treasury.
Andre"ossy then proposed of himself that an Austrian
committee should be nominated; that this committee, hav-
ing secured the approval of Totis, should control every
invitation, subject only to Andreossy 's scrutiny "a mere
formality. "
"After all, it is no longer a secret," he said gaily to
Sturmer. "Vienna is not empty if you are in it. How
are you all to pass the time? The wines, if not plentiful,
will be, like the ladies, of the very first quality. And what
else matters?"
At Vienna, as at Buda, boredom had reached its height.
284 Schonbrunn
Was a banquet or a dance at the palace, it was asked, any
greater scandal than the archbishop of Vienna and the
heads of the religious orders assembling in St. Stephen's
two months ago to celebrate the Corsican's birthday?
The Emperor Francis II. gave his consent and that con-
sent was a command. Neither Nugent nor Count O'Reilly
nor Metternich had said a word in opposition. Metternich,
indeed, twenty years afterwards, claimed as usual that in
Andre"ossy's banquet he had "foreseen" Napoleon's design;
but in no contemporary record or gossip is there a trace of
this foresight.
The Austrian committee, probably with Andre*ossy's
connivance, secured an initial victory. It decreed that,
whether the peace were signed or not signed, the ball on the
1 3th October should not be a court ball, Hofball, but
simply a "ball at the court, " Ball bei hof; and that it should
take place, not in the Redoutensaal, built by Charles VI., the
father of Maria Theresa, but in the Rittersaal, constructed
a few years previously by Francis II. himself; that the
invited guests should be only the e*lite of Austrian society or
such representatives of "foreign nations" as had the neces-
sary number of quarterings.
This decree ruled out as "undesirables" nearly every
outstanding name in Napoleon's entourage. Marshals and
generals, dukes, princes, counts, and barons, members of
the Legion of Honour, members of the Senate and Corps
Legislatif, were erased pell-mell amid the guttural or
crystalline laughter of Viennese ladies of fashion.
"Parvenus to a man, ma cherie!"
On Wednesday, the nth October, a whisper went the
round of the city that Napoleon himself had been "black-
balled" "English clubs" were becoming a fashion in
Vienna as in Petersburg. A sting was added to the jest by
the postscript that the committee had arrived at this de-
cision very unwillingly; for, by the marriage of his stepson,
The Masked Ball 285
the " black-boule* " was connected with the great House of
Wittelsbach!
It was imbecile; it was childish; yet for the moment it
pleased Vienna. It seemed the revenge of the old regime,
here in Marie Antoinette's early home, amid the society
that had never ceased to resent her martyrdom. "You
may insult, imprison, impoverish, or guillotine us," it seemed
to say, "but you cannot become one of us. You are
brave soldiers, but you are of another caste than ours; you
are parvenus, that is, pariahs."
To some of the French it was simply puzzling; to many it
was annoying; to others galling; but the fact was incontro-
vertible.
With the marshals and generals who chose to be affronted,
and still more with such of their wives as had come to
Vienna, Andre'ossy had need of all his boasted tact and social
diplomacy.
"Que voulez-vous? It is a Viennese affair," he said
suavely, his hands thrown wide, his broad smooth counte-
nance wreathed in deprecatory smiles. ' ' Poor devils ! Pride
in birth is their fetish; ours is glory. In Paris, beauty or wit
is a woman's passport to good society; but in Vienna? It is
fifteen quarterings, three lovers, and thirty thousand a year!"
More perspicacious observers amongst the French them-
selves, men like Favrol and Latour-Maubourg, made the
comment that glory was no longer the prerogative of the
Revolutionary armies; that those same Austrians who, in
Andreossy's phrase, still worshipped the obsolete feudal
fetishes, claimed Aspern-Essling as a victory and Wagram
as "a drawn battle."
Napoleon himself was not displeased. His malice was
piqued. It brought home to his officers, these marshals,
dukes, counts, and generals, their dependence on himself;
he had made them ; this was a rebuff to their ingratitude and
their eagerness to forget their creator.
286 Schonbrunn
The riot at the Opera had, on the very night of the ball,
caused Andre"ossy some alarm; but long before midnight
that alarm was dissipated.
His fete was a complete triumph.
II
Rentzdorf and Amalie had remained together in her
rooms in the Palazzo Esterthal to the latest possible hour.
They had heard the heavy notes of St. Stephen's strike
midnight. Now it was striking two.
"You must go," she said reluctantly. "Already to-
night is to-morrow."
It had been arranged that when they separated she was
to drive straight to the Rittersaal, he to cross Vienna and,
using his privilege as an unmarried officer, put on civilian
clothes, and rejoin her an hour and a half later for the end of
the court ball.
"Unless " she now said, as she released her lover.
"The guet-apens of Vienna come after that of Bayonne? "
Rentzdorf said moodily. "No; it is unthinkable. There
is a limit to Bonaparte's treachery. I shall see you in an
hour."
The words which Amalie had suppressed were the words,
"Unless there is war, and, as a preliminary, Liechtenstein,
you, and every other officer of his suite are made prisoners. "
"What did that riot at the Opera portend?" she asked,
walking to and fro in the odorous dusk of her room.
"Nothing. I saw it begin and saw it end. It was the
usual strawfire; Gallic effervescence. Dearest, I am per-
fectly safe."
Rentzdorf spoke more confidently than he felt. He
loathed Metternich's insinuations of contemplated foul
play; the hero in himself responded to the hero in Bona-
parte; he knew his essential greatness, but he knew also the
The Masked Ball 287
temptation of Liechtenstein's presence in Vienna. The
Habsburg Commander-in-chief, the greatest cavalry leader
of Austria, was in the enemy's camp.
Silent, he walked beside her to and fro in this room,
listening to the vast stillness of night or to the imperceptible
murmur of the trees; "her trees" he called them, hers, for
day by day, week by week, in summer's luxuriance or in
winter's disarray, her eyes at dawn rested on their foliage
or their stems.
To Rentzdorf nothing could dim the sanctitude nor
lessen the seduction of Amalie's chamber those carpets,
which, like Calypso in her grotto, smelling of amaranth and
lilies, she trod night by night in unembarrassed nakedness;
that furniture, those cabinets, those vases and ornaments.
Incensed by her breathing, this square of space had grown,
like a dress she had worn, a mystic extension of her person
and of her life.
" Is it not frightful, Heinrich? You and I, born into this
era; our entire life maledict by war. "
Shuddering, she drew him closer to her side.
"Be patient with me," she said in a beseeching yet
steady voice. "I am made of fears to-night. This bliss
has been too great. The death-thirst, born of the highest
life-thirst, God's death-thirst mine, yours, do I not know it
now, Heinrich, do I not know it now?"
She leaned her face on his shoulder. The modelling of her
shoulders, the curve of her neck, that beauty in every part
of her, each part a wonder in itself, heightened by its
relation to the symmetry and wonder of her whole body,
wrought on him its terrible seduction, starting in his mind
that question formulated long ago, "God destroys this,
in world on world, irreparably what must then be the
anguish of God? I who know my own anguish, what can I
know of His?"
He made an involuntary movement.
288 Schonbrunn
"Do not go yet," she pleaded, misinterpreting the
gesture, and with a swift look into his face she drew him
gently to the window and leaned beside him out into the
night.
At first all was formless indistinctness masses of trees
and beyond the trees a blackness even more substantial
that might be houses and fortifications, might be sepulchres.
And to her over-wrought imagination the chaos of gloom
prolonged itself unendingly. Darkness was not merely the
dead earth's shadow, but the symbol of some profounder
blackness, wide as nature itself and the beginning of things.
"And down there," she said sombrely, looking towards
the bastion which, as their eyes became accustomed to the
darkness, outlined itself on their right, "two men sit who
move your fate and my fate as they will ; to-morrow peace,
or to-morrow war."
"They have no such authority, Amalie. This that we
know, this that we are, this that living we shall be, what
power outside itself can touch or change it, Amalie?"
Silent, he stood beside her silent, her white resplendent
arms and beautiful clasped hands emerging from the fringing
lace of her sleeves. In the garden below the stillness and
rest were so extreme that the leaves that fell in clusters by
day had now ceased to fall. The trees were visible thrones
of slumber. The scents of the shrubs, of the rose-beds and
heliotrope, already fading and blackening, came in a tide of
morbid sweetness, mixing with the incense of her shoulders
and of her hair.
"Dearest," she said suddenly, "dearest; listen oh,
listen!"
Above the darkness of the garden rose a faint prolonged
call; then another and another; then, most spectral-like,
detaching itself from a sycamore, an owl glided in the
direction of the sombre heavy masses westward.
"They come here from the Wiener wood?" he asked.
The Masked Ball 289
"Not always; in early winter when hunger drives them.
I never hear them hoot," she said with a happy tremor in
her voice, "without thinking of Monza. I used there, a
white owl myself with large eyes, as I saw myself once in
a glass, to watch at night hour by hour. That was in my
spindle-legged, short-frocked days."
"Your . . . ?"
" I was a Lombard maiden," she answered, mimicking
the voice of Madame Campi as Rhodumunda. "Would
you have loved me then? Hold me to you. I am cold. "
She pressed herself against him in a slow languid caress.
"Would you have loved me then?" she repeated.
And as in a mystic pledge of death she wound her arms
about him ; mouth to mouth she whispered :
"In an hour! How I love you! No; let me kiss you.
In an hour, and in that hour I shall have lived each second
of these two hours, a thousand times, made them years in
my thought."
But her embrace, despite her courageous words, was, in
its struggling hysteric violence, like an embrace by a grave
into which both were falling.
Ill
Under the open sky Rentzdorf stood for some seconds
hesitating. It was now half-past two. The distance from
the Palazzo Esterthal to his lodging in the Rothenthurm
was, by the ramparts, nearly three miles; but, across the
inner city, less than two. He did not wish to be seen at
the Rittersaal until at least an hour or an hour and a half
after Amalie's arrival. To summon a hackney in this
part of the faubourgs was to invite scrutiny. He decided
to walk to his lodging and, having changed his clothes, to
drive to the Hofburg.
He started at a rapid pace and entering the inner city by
290 Schonbrunn
the Molker bastion, he struck south-eastward across the
Graben.
Rentzdorf knew no moments in which his mind yielded
itself so absolutely to his religion, to the Tragic Vision of
God, as those moments in which he had just forced himself
from the awe and dominion of his idolized mistress.
"Art's eternities?" he reasoned. "This that now I feel,
this that now I know, alone is worth enternalizing. What is
God's highest total presence in her, in me, if it is not this
passion that I struggle to utter, this ecstasy that I shudder
tore-imagine?"
Like chords of a mystic music summoning other chords to
aid them in forming some still diviner harmonies, earlier
unforgettable hours came down the years calling to this
hour hours which he and his mistress had fixed in their
memories, now by the gift of a flower, now by a book or a
jewel; at other times simply by the hour's own natu-
ral setting, the stillness of summer woods, a garden, a
room in an inn, a moon-rise by a lake, the day's chance
environment.
"Amalie . . . Amalie von Esterthal. "
The repetition of her name was like a synthesis of the
hours passed by her side. Yes ; it was in such hours, remem-
bered thus, that he could darkly hazard the answer to the
transporting obsessant question, "What is Being?" Yes, it
was in such hours as these that the still more dread ques-
tion, "What is God?" subtly possessed the entire soul
and the entire universe, and redissolved all in the bliss that
was before Being arose.
"This," he said impatiently, yet in awe, "this is to be
God; to know this; to feel this. "
Yes; it was to such hours as these that he could say, "Be
thus for ever; thou art so fair. " For him, for her, to know
in their own fierce but unestranging sorrow the world-soul's
sorrow, the Calvary of Being, then, struggling, resisting,
The Masked Ball 291
bleeding, to be torn inexorably asunder this was earth's
meaning, God's meaning; for her, for him, this was the
manifestation of the tragic thought which underlies the
worlds.
He raised his head. An oil lamp by a window threw a
grudging light across the narrow street.
Unawares he had passed St. Stephen's square. Another
church, St. Peter's, he knew it by its dome overburdened
with gilding and ornament now loomed up a little behind
him on his left.
" I must have taken a wrong turning."
Annoyed yet amused, Rentzdorf retraced his steps.
It was an unfamiliar part of the city. Those side streets
in which the lamps were placed at wider and wider distances,
the low-arched doorways, made a sinister impression. Now
and then a stooping figure slid past him, looking neither to
right nor left. It was one of those, he thought, who in
sleepless misery wait the day and see it rise and are not
glad.
Man's burden, the struggles of the human race no
ethical leader or professional philanthropist ever felt that
burden with more imaginative sympathy than Rentz-
dorf.
He regained the main street and resumed his course. He
was now in one of the oldest quarters of the town. Bundles
of wood, according to the Viennese custom, lay heaped in
front of the doors ; here and there the pavement was merged
in the street ; sometimes he had to walk between tenements
plunged in total darkness or through narrow passages that
seemed built for sin or crime.
From under an arch at the end of a cavernous passage he
emerged into an open space. A high wall rose on his right ;
beyond, in the darkness, some dimly outlined gables and a
tower.
It was Santa Maria, the famous Dominican church.
292 Schonbrunn
Within its precincts, one of the graves was the grave of
Irne Apponyi.
Rentzdorf felt his face change. An immense sorrow stole
up to him like a visible mist.
"In questa tomba oscura ..." Overhead the starless
night; then remembrance and the heart's cry to the in-
attentive dead questioning, expostulating, in bitter,
accusing, or exculpatory appeal.
"Brought to rest there, moveless for ever, she that was
once so fever-quick in all her movements ; corruption, she
that was once so fair. Unhearing, unanswering nothing-
ness ..."
It was too great, too august for pity.
"What hand pushed me this way to-night? Incongru-
ous?" he reflected.
1 ' To stand thus by the grave of a dead mistress, the kisses
of a living mistress still hot on my lips, incongruous? Yes;
as life is, as death is. "
"Crimson-dyed with these two women's blood," he
muttered to himself, resuming his walk. "All my art-life;
crimson-dyed with these two women's blood, all my thought-
life."
He sank in reverie.
"If she too were dead?"
Rentzdorf wheeled round as though a hand had been
laid on his shoulder.
"No, no, no, no . . ."
He felt now, he knew now the horror that had pulsated
in his mistress's voice an hour ago. Her gloomy words,
"We shall have the courage to destroy each other ..."
came back to him, weaving themselves into the texture
of his own speculations.
All great art, poetry or music, all great history, is tragic,
because the inmost nature of the universe is tragic. The
more, therefore, a poem or a symphony, a statue or a
The Masked Ball 293
painting partakes of that world-anguish, the "greater" it is,
that is to say, the truer the more vital it is, for it is saturated
most deeply with Being's essence.
"Yes," Rentzdorf concluded, "that is the meaning, or
there is no meaning. "
He walked on.
A mass of trees in the West, impenetrable and dark, rose
suddenly on his right not half a mile distant. It was the
Prater. In front and on his left stretched the glimmering
levels, league on league, of the Marchfeld and the illimitable
plain beyond, and far on the horizon, just above a mist-
bank heavy and cold, burned a lonely splendour the
waning moon.
He stood rapt.
"God, how strange, how beautiful!"
The torturing pent-up emotions, thought-irradiated,
searched the profoundest mysteries the all-beginnings and
the all-endings. The beauty of woman, the beauty of
nature, the beauty of night, soul-ecstasy, sense-ecstasy, were
rays that, converging, darted from the eternity named the
past into the eternity named the future.
"Time? Eternity? What are they? They are words
by which our minds portray God's severance from God's
goal, nothing more. "
But in such moments as this, that goal was, as in a mirage,
attained; attained in him, attained in God. He sank in
yet profounder reverie.
An intoxicating vision tore him from his reverie Amalie
von Esterthal stepping from her domino, the lustre of her
arms, her shoulders, her bosom, a blinding loveliness, sur-
passing the lustre of her own gems. She was for him the
reality, realitas realitatum; and yonder in the Rittersaal she
waited.
He struck sharply for his lodging in the Rothenthurm, now
not four minutes distant. He waked his sleepy servant and
294 Schonbrunn
half an hour later, in the Spanish dress of the seventeenth
century, black embroidered velvet, white silk stockings and
sword, Rentzdorf was recrossing Vienna on his way to the
Hofburg.
IV
To Rentzdorf the pile of buildings which composes the
Hofburg, the royal palace of the Habsburgs, had by famili-
arity lost much of their antiquarian interest.
As a boy accompanying his mother, and in his youth as a
student at the university, he had been familiar with its
rooms, with the court and hall of the Switzers, the Arch-
duke's tower, and with vault or window, square or donjon,
rich with memories drawn from the crusades or later
centuries.
But the Hofburg had more personal associations.
In its winter riding-school he had first seen his mistress ; he
had met her at its fetes and at its balls; he had visited
with her its art treasures, and in jest or in earnest, they
had at length fixed on three objects as the symbols to them
of all that the palace and its heroic or romantic past had
come to mean the sword and gauntlets of Charlemagne,
Tasso's manuscript of the Jerusalem, and the Leda of Ben-
venuto Cellini. The tragic dynasty itself, the Habsburg
men and women, their crimes or madness, their energy or
their dullness, rarely came into their talk. Yet to Rentz-
dorf himself the Habsburgs of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries had still, as the protagonists of oppression, a kind
of blasting splendour, best personified perhaps in Wallen-
stein's genius and sinister magnificence.
There was a griding crash. The hackney had stopped
close to the row of brilliantly lit windows. A crowd still
loafed about the main entrance, mixing with the link-boys
and servants.
The Masked Ball 295
At the foot of the grand staircase a door opened and a
burst of voluptuous music set his blood on fire.
"What will she wear?"
A figure in Magyar uniform, but evidently a French
officer, was striding along a passage, humming the air. On
seeing Rentzdorf he stared suspiciously at his costume,
seemed about to speak, but changing his mind at Rentz-
dorf's glance, resumed his patrol.
The next minute, irritated by the incident, which re-
minded him of Austria's humiliation, Rentzdorf stood in the
Rittersaal itself.
Pillars of polished granite with Corinthian capitals
supported the frescoed roof of this imposing room, now
flooded with the soft resplendence of a thousand lamps and
candelabra that repeated their flames in crystal lustres as
in irridescent mirrors. An estrade ran down one side. On
the opposite side, between the pillars, a conservatory full of
flowering shrubs drew the eyes imperceptibly into the sap-
phire tranquillity of the night, uniting thus with nature
this, the most artificially refined scene in Europe or the
world. Everywhere about the room were flowers, massed
in the orchestra, half-concealing the musicians, crowded
on the front of the estrade, hanging in festoons and garlands
from the frieze carnations, gardenias, ropes of violets,
azaleas, and innumerable roses, all levied upon the Imperial
hothouses of Schonbrunn itself, from Prague, Innsbruck,
and the historic gardens of Znaim and Semmering; and,
mixing with this cloud of natural fragrance, the per-
fumes of a hundred women's dresses; and on the leisured
space of the wide floor the picturesque costumes of the
men Magyar, Pole, Slovac, French, Austrian; and every-
where the radiance of diamonds and the gleam of naked
shoulders.
A waltz was in progress.
Under Damirors direction the dancers were arranged
296 Schonbrunn
in two elongated circles or ellipses, taking in nearly the
whole of the wide floor, but the circles moved in opposite
directions. In the outer, the dancers moved from left to
right; in the inner, from right to left.
"A posture of the body it is in such a dance the posture
of a soul," Berthold Stahrenberg had once said, and to-
night, watching the languor and fury of this waltz, Rentz-
dorf had opportunity enough of testing the accuracy of
Bolli's psychology .
Whatever of distinction was left in Vienna or Austria
itself was here, and here also were the froth and the lees
of the most reckless society in Europe, its grossness, its
fatuity, its luxury, its vanity. Baron X., in a short velvet
coat bordered with silver fox, as well-known for his amours
as for his gambling debts, Rentzdorf recognized at once ; and
dancing not very far behind him, in the arms of one of the
Kinskys, that same Baron X.'s wife, the decoy for young
men of assured wealth, her head flung back as though
asleep, rousing herself now and then from a luxurious
dream to take the step. Then in rapid succession he
saw Prince Z., an elephant erect on the stout legs of a dwarf,
owner of seventy thousand acres; Madame A., who lived
frankly the life of Catherine II. ; the duellist Y., bully and
society blackmailer, paid "in kind," not money, dressed
in Polish costume, with yellow boots, in his biretta a
diamond aigrette; Count Purgstall and his Scottish wife, de-
scribed on her advent in Vienna as "the sister of Dugald
Stewart" and provoking the comment, "Qui diable est Du-
gald Stewart?"; the Countess Potocki, celebrated for her
house full of tame leopards, monkeys, grizzly bears, and
human dwarfs; Count Humbert, Ambassador to Naples dur-
ing Amalie's stay there; Baron von Stiegerling; von Sturmer,
afterwards celebrated as Francis II. 's representative at
Sainte Helene; Princess X., one of the "three princesses"
of Metternich's circle.
The Masked Ball 297
Decidedly Andreossy's ball was a success, thought Rentz-
dorf ironically.
"Perish the world in fire, but let Vienna waltz," was a
current version of a medieval friar's indignant cry. "The
trumpet of the Judgment morn Vienna would think it an
invitation to the waltz."
Nevertheless, Rentzdorf 's ironic mood quickly dissipated
and before the drifting forms he lost sight of individuals as
before a forest swept by winds; he saw only the vivid tor-
menting unassailable beauty of the whole of those white
and glowing arms and bosoms, those sparkling or tarnished
eyes. Woman's beauty, in evil or in good it was still
nature's supremest achievement, Time's most alluring
mystery, here on this planet and now.
Two dancers, quitting the outer circle, stopped near him.
The lady, tilting her chin to see more clearly under the
black velvet of her mask, said to her partner as she fanned
herself:
"When I die I mean to be buried like Countess Beresanyi
I shall have nothing but men asked to my funeral, all
young, all laughing, and each with an assignation that
night with one of his three mistresses. "
"What a sphinx you are!" came the heavy answer.
"A sphinx? Within ten minutes you have called Stadion
a sphinx, Bonaparte a sphinx, Speranski a sphinx, Metter-
nich a sphinx. Am I too a sphinx?"
"Assuredly; and the most charming riddler of all."
The mask, quitting her partner, advanced with a quick
step towards Rentzdorf, but checking herself brusquely she
took her partner's arm.
"How? Can you read riddles in the dark then? Mine,
for instance, could you read mine? You know the penalty
of failure."
" Let me risk reading your riddle! I would not miss that
adventure no, not for all the ambassadors of all the powers."
298 Schonbrunn
"Dance with me, then," she said with an ambiguous
laugh.
She held out a jewelled hand, and, her head thrown
languidly back, her carmined lips uplifted, with a bound
she dashed into the outer circle and the maze of whirling
skirts.
Rentzdorf looked after them.
"Can it be she?" he thought. "And Amalie here!"
He searched both circles of the waltz. He could see
Amalie nowhere.
He had recognized, or imagined that he had recognized
behind the mask, the dark eyes, the tormented mouth and
wayward grace of Adelheid Ortski.
"She too?" he asked. "My God, she too here to-night?
All to-night is incongruous as a midsummer dream."
The music rushed on; the soaring violins were like cries
of delicious anguish ; the beat of the 'cellos like the throb-
bing of human hearts. On the polished floor he saw with
a curious intentness the reflections of the dancers in pale
colours, shadows of shadows.
Quitting the Rittersaal, he sauntered into one of the
adjoining apartments.
In a long narrow room, adorned with two rows of white
marble pillars with gilded capitals, some sixty or seventy
men and women sat or reclined on sofas and low chairs.
There were groups of ten and groups of two, but all were
eating, drinking, and talking or flirting.
At a table near the entrance with three other Russians
he saw again Alexis Razumowski's broad yellowish face and
heard again his creaking voice.
"The chief thing in a masked ball is to speak before
you think. Go on talking. Say anything, say everything ;
The Masked Ball 299
pell-mell, witty or foolish, wise or dull! To raise a smile
or a laugh is the all-in-all! But you Germans never can
and never will do this. You are like the English ; you must
think before you speak."
Rentzdorf avoided this group and went into a room on the
right. Here servants in black and gold liveries were
handing about cold meats, iced drinks, candied orange,
coffee, and champagne. The conversation was in French;
but during the earlier part of the evening, in order to ac-
centuate the Austrian character of the ball, it had been in
German. Here a universal languorousness pervaded the air ;
the music was at a distance and heightened the effect.
In a niche, by an Artemis in marble, a woman of thirty or
thirty-five in a black velvet mask lay lazily fanning herself :
her head rested on silken cushions, her eyelids were lowered,
and one foot in its satin slipper, thrust carelessly forward,
accentuated the lines of her form. For her felicity she
seemed to desire nothing except to be alone with her mem-
ories or her dreams. Near her, two other women stood, un-
masked, talking to each other in low voices. A man in the
blue and red uniform of the Austrian chasseurs approached
them. Another group of five was composed of two cava-
liers and three women. One cavalier, a man of fifty, had
the look of an Assyrian dark, sleepy eyes, curving nose,
and on his protruding chest a thick black beard. Horses,
dogs, hounds, hunting had been discussed in turn. The
conversation had now settled on Bonaparte. Had M.
Uvarow, an Austrian official asked, addressing a young
Russian, heard the Cardinal Pignatelli's mot about the
flatterer who traced the Bonapartes to a Greek family of
princely rank the KaXojxepot?
Uvarow, a giant with wide-set tranquil eyes, waited,
silent. He had not heard the mot.
"Well," the Austrian went on, happy to place his anec-
dote, "when M. 1'abbe Pignatelli was told of this discovery,
300 Schonbrunn
he remarked at once that he did not know about Napoleon
himself, but he was certain that his sister the Princess
Borghese must belong to the KaXo^ep6t."
Uvarow, after some seconds' reflection, laughed, a big
earth-shaking laugh. But to the ladies the narrator had to
explain lazily that meros ([xspo?) meant a part, so that
c meant the same as Bonaparti, whereas me"ros
meant thigh, and /caXofjiepoc, Pauline's putative
ancestors, meant "the beautiful-thighed. "
Suddenly a woman's voice in low charmed surprise called
Rentzdorf's name.
'"Come here!"
It was Lan-Lan.
She had in her left hand a tiny silver plate, with the
Habsburg arms in gold and lapis lazuli on the edge, and
on the plate the fragments of a pastry which she was eating
one of those condiments the reverse of "simple, " in which
all fruits and all sweet tastes touch the palate at once
pineapple, clove, peach, caramel, honey, strawberry.
Kessling seated near her sofa, jumped to his feet.
"Ha, poet, I've not seen you before. What news from
the seat of war?"
Kessling had the mania, fostered by his riches and his
rude vitality, of treating every acquaintance as if he were
an old friend and every woman of rank as if she had at one
time been his mistress.
Rentzdorf sat down beside Lan-Lan and Bolli. The
latter was wearing a short Spanish cloak of dove-wing vel-
vet trimmed with ermine, white silk vest, breeches, and
stockings, and on his shoes broad silver buckles. "You
are in luck anyhow, " Bolli said in a sort of apology for his
satellite's crudeness. "Here is a living poem; Lan-Lan
eating burnt almonds and cream cakes. "
To Lan-Lan this evening had been a triumph. Her
costume had outshone Princess Daruka's, and after a steady
The Masked Ball 301
survey of Lan-Lan's superb natural coiffure, bound by a
fillet studded with diamonds, with one large pearl sus-
pended by a tiny gold chain on her brow after a not less
steady survey of her face, of her arms, and the opulent yet
harmonious curves of her figure, the Circassian, with a deep
breath, had uttered the fatidical words;
"It is she who is Zuleika to-night, not I."
And she had applied to Lan-Lan, Att'r's verses describing
the queen of oriental passion.
A listless voice with cadences which sounded oddly in
French, addressed Bo Hi.
Rentzdorf turned to meet the morbid glittering eyes,
the nervously working features of the young Polish diplo-
matist, Caspar Czartorisky, nephew of Prince Adam Czar-
torisky the statesman. The face, set in a cloud of soft dark
hair, was instantly arresting, but even to strangers the
effect quickly passed and only its weakness and over-excit-
ability remained to disturb rather than to engross the
mind; one turned with relief from the Slavonic pictur-
esqueness to the steadier energy and depth of the German
faces around. Yet Caspar Czartorisky was typical of a
phrase through which the German and the European mind
was passing spiritual energies which, widowed of their old
inspirations, had not yet found a new; nascent life-weari-
ness, sometimes affected, sometimes sincere. But in Czar-
torisky all was tinged with an outre sentimentalism. He
had declaimed passages of Ossian and Werther in front of a
skull, and in imitation of the Emperor Otho, he had slept
with a dagger under his pillow. He had found peace and a
home in Vienna in its picture galleries, its parks, its
romantic environs and its libraries, and above all in Mo-
zart's music, which he styled the very soul of the soul of
Vienna "Tame de 1'ame Viennoise. "
"For myself," said Bolli in answer to a remark of the
young Pole, "I find a woman more desirable just because
302 Schonbrunn
she is subject to these infirmities decay and death. I
would even imitate that troubadour whose mistress was
struck with leprosy What? Is the conversation growing
too decadent for your taste?" Bolli said, addressing Count
Markowitz, Johann's brother, who, in an immaculate
stock, grey coat and star, had unexpectedly risen to his
feet.
"Let us have no quarrelling to-night," Lan-Lan said in
her soft, lazy but authoritative manner. "Viennese we
are, and Viennese let us be not Russians or English;
no, not even Poles, " with a smile to Czartorisky.
"Oh, to-night," the latter answered chivalrously, "War-
saw is too happy to be a suburb of Vienna. "
Lan-Lan's syntax when she spoke French was not faultless,
but she never hesitated for a word, boldly interspersing,
sometimes with a picturesque charm, German or Viennese
idioms.
"Save in words of wisdom spake she not unto them,"
said Bolli; "but if in the presence of Wisdom I may adven-
ture a word, I should like to ask his Illustriousness, Count
Markowitz . . . Pardon me," Bolli said, interrupting
himself and turning to Rentzdorf. "You guess the issue?
Markowitz before you came was on his hobby; he is still
the very phcenix of Vienna, he and the incomparable
Mack! When was there an age in which that taunt, decad-
ence, has not been flung at insight by stupidity?" And to
Markowitz he said, "Meaning on this earth there is none,
except beauty. That conviction is our faith, our church,
or, if you like, our religion and our God. Is your God a
better? And in spite of our decadence, Rentzdorf's, Lan-
Lan's, Czartorisky's, and mine, our regiments did not so
badly at Aspern, n'est-ce pas?"
" Do you know whither this will lead you? Do you know
whither you are going? " Markowitz said solemnly.
Bolli looked at him, ironic, and answered disconcertingly :
The Masked Ball 303
"Perfectly."
"Perfectly?"
"I will repeat the word in six languages if it will make my
meaning plainer. "
Rentzdorf looked at Bolli. This was not the man he had
seen at Buda in July last. What was this change which
the three months had worked? Lan-Lan too was altered.
A smile lay on her lips, but there was a feverous melan-
choly in her eyes and each time she met Bolli 's glance her
white lids perceptibly lowered.
"Everybody now wishes you to be something else than
you actually are," Lan-Lan's younger brother, Max Die-
trich, said in the pause. He spoke in an awkward, self-
conscious, but modest and very winning manner, and when
Bolli looked at him encouragingly and Lan-Lan dropped her
air of sisterly condescension, he went on, "It spoils Napo-
leon to me. He wants everybody to be cut after a certain
pattern. "
"Right, " said Bolli. "If he could make Europe a moral
drill-ground he would appoint Markowitz his moral chief-
of-the-staff. "
At a repeated tapping made by the master of the cere-
monies' wand on the floor in the adjoining room Lan-Lan
said to her brother, "What is it? Maxi, will you go and
see?"
Max got up leisurely, not sorry to display the magni-
ficence of his uniform and the gallantry of his carriage.
"The figure dance!" he called back a second later.
VI
There was a general movement in the company towards
the Rittersaal. Bolli took Rentzdorf's arm, detaining him.
"Let's stay a little. God, but it is good to see you again!
We in Vienna have been walking amongst precipices for
304 Schonbrunn
days, for months. One is named war; the other and the
ghastlier descent, peace. "
Rentzdorf looked at the handsome, reckless, dissipated
features, the high, square forehead, the ardent eyes. A
mean or cowardly thought had never found lodging or
comfort there. What then was it that harassed him?
"I pray it may be war to-night anything, anything
rather than this hideous, humiliating, unspeakable peace.
War is like brandy; it saves one from thinking. It even
gives a meaning to this unmeaning Austria and this unmean-
ing earth. The world-soul's strife? Shiva dancing high
above the roaring agonies of worlds! That is the best
thought I have derived from your book, Heinrich. I
repeated it the night before Wagram. War? Bonaparte
has his limitations, but, by God, what grandeur! What
heroic vitality!"
"Only the limited are strong, Bolli," Rentzdorf said,
humouring him and attributing his state of mind to the
excitement of the hour, perhaps to wine.
"That is what I cannot get Johann to see! He has the
Markowitz taint. He will drag in morality, the good will ;
as if any one knew, outside the Markowitz barracks, what
good or evil really is. I quarrelled with him this morning;
now that you are here we shall understand each other
again."
He looked in friendly anxiety into Rentzdorf 's face.
The latter stepped aside.
A lady with a beautiful, white, oval chin passed and
smiled up to Bolli. He bowed deeply.
" You do not know her? Ah, you have been away. It is
Frau von Seckenheim; newly married; a Suabian. "
It was the lady whom Rentzdorf had observed reclining
alone, sunk in her dreams.
But there was a sound like the click of fans, a burst of
music, laughter, talk.
The Masked Ball 305
"The minuet is over. We must go in for the figure
dance. "
Taking Rentzdorf 's arm, he sauntered with him into the
Rittersaal.
VII
The figure dance was, like Damirol's scheme for the
waltz, designed to be seen as well as danced. It was a
modification of the tarantelle as danced in Naples some
ten years before by Lady Hamilton, and in Paris by Josephine
Beauharnais, Madame Tallien and Madame Re"camier
slower, more majestic, and though so arranged that several
couples or groups could dance it simultaneously, not less
passionately voluptuous. It had been styled, not infelicit-
ously, the Austrian tarantelle ; la valse tarantelle.
Amalie, on the estrade, surrounded by a brilliant crowd,
was looking at the dancers. Toe, Lan-Lan, and Nusschen
were now close to her, dancing together, moving in a slow
cadenced rhythm.
"Whose is the music?" Rentzdorf asked.
"Weber's," said Bolli. "He is quite young, but can do
this kind of thing supremely well."
Suddenly, on seeing Bolli, Lan-Lan quitted the circle,
and, with a glance at Toe, led Nusschen towards Amalie.
Bolli at the same moment stepped forward to Lan-Lan
and in apparent consternation "Lady, you have dropped
your pearl."
Lan-Lan put both her hands to her brow, then to her
snowy bosom.
"What made you say that?" she demanded. "Hein?
What made you?"
The smile on her lips was like sunlight on the crimson of
a rose.
"Pardon! in the effulgence of your brow I could not see
the pearl."
3o6 Schonbrunn
" I am so hot, " she'said aloud; her eyes steady, she whis-
pered, "Take me into the gardens. Not that way, here,
under the trees. What is the hour? Day must be nearer
than I thought. The sky is sapphire."
VIII
In the tarantelle meanwhile Amalie had taken Lan-Lan's
place. In an instant Rentzdorf was in a dream, a dark
enchantment. Life's end was Time's end, and Time's end,
the soul's destiny, was to hear that music, gazing on those
exquisite forms Toe's flexuous grace, Nusschen's vital
youth, his mistress's entrancing presence.
The measure of the dance had heightened. It became
intenser, wilder. More than twenty groups were now on
the floor, some in threes some in twos. The women's forms
to his imagination seemed less a material essence than a
celestial song, creating new harmonies, more impassioning,
more soul-enthralling, as they danced on now advancing,
now receding, in wreaths, in circles, an intertwining loveli-
ness without end.
"This it is, beauty's very soul, its dread inaccessibility
that it is. Can this power exist latent in those bodies yet
not know its effects upon the heart? No; by God, yes,
they do know."
In confirmation of his words the dancers by an uncon-
scious or purposed interchange of thought appeared to
have conceived a design by which they could display their
supreme grace a figure in which each manifested the per-
fections of her body at once in movement and in sculptural
repose. It was a figure of a difficulty so extreme that to
fail in it creditably was a success, to succeed a triumph.
Breathless he waited. Could they succeed?
A cry of deep but suppressed admiration escaped him
and was repeated in several voices around. The success
The Masked Ball 307
was as bewildering as it was complete. Nearer the dancers
came and nearer, circling round and past each other, like
light upon light. No music had ever penetrated his soul
more intimately, no symphony had ever worked in him a
transport more ineffable; yet this was sight.
In a second they swept past him, revolving; his blood
felt the indescribable magnetism. A pungent yet delicate
perfume that he seemed to know and yet not to know
remained in his nostrils.
"Beauty and mystery ..."
Close beside him Caspar Czartorisky in his most affected
manner was declaiming to three or four listeners:
"No woman's face ought to show so royal a joy. It
challenges the gods to envy. Had Paris on Mount Ida
a fairer vision ? Who is she, that demi-deity with the hair ?
Countess Esterthal ? What ? ' '
"Tshut ..." came the answer. "You have evidently
just come from Warsaw."
Rentzdorf moved away.
Suddenly he was aware of a fast-spreading confusion,
here, there, everywhere. The dance had been inter-
rupted; the orchestra silenced. The dancers were stand-
ing in bewildered groups. The spectators on the estrade
alone seemed to know the cause of the disturbance.
Their looks expressed astonishment, impatience, anxiety, or
excited joy. Amongst the dancers, several preserved the
position in which the disturbance had first arrested them.
Some had one foot still raised; others had stopped in
the midst of a sentence; one lady, stooping to detach a
fallen wreath that clung to her skirt, still held it in her
hand. Others stared at M. Damirol seeking an explana-
tion. Then came questions, exclamations of annoyance
or amusement, and some oaths.
All at once the confusion was interrupted by a single
sound. It was a wild hurrah, repeated, and repeated again.
308 Schonbrunn
"Long live the Archduke Maximilian! Es lebe der Erz-
herzog Maximilian! Hoch! Hoch! Hoch!"
The master of ceremonies strode excitedly towards the
orchestra. It broke into Haydn's anthem, the Austrian
national hymn, made more solemn by the death of the
composer not many months before "Gott erhalte unsern
Kaiser ..."
At that solemn melody there was a wild rush from the
gardens and from the rooms surrounding the Rittersaal.
What could it mean? Each as they arrived stopped and
stood bound as in a charm.
Even at such a moment Rentzdorf was forced to notice
Bolli and Lan-Lan. They came in very slowly. On Lan-
Lan's face was a set flush ; a tress of her hair loosened on the
left temple imparted to her something maenadic, world-
defiant. A delicious recklessness was in her bearing,
forming a bizarre contrast with the richness of her dress
and the magnificence of her jewels. The diamond fillet
was still on her brows, but the pearl had fallen or been
unhooked from its edge.
But at a louder shout he turned to the corner of the
room whence the excitement emanated. There a crowd
had gathered round the three men whose entrance had
caused the uproar. In one he recognized instantly the
discomposed, turbulent countenance and blackguardly,
high-bred air of the Catiline of Vienna, the Archduke
Maximilian, the hero of the bombardment. He had
the Habsburg peculiarities, the heavy refinement, the
breed, the cruelty, something of the madness. In his mad
attempt to defend the city there had been no patriotism.
His mistress, Julie von Hofstenger, had been captured in
the hunting-lodge dedicated to those nocturnal orgies
where, with the debauched companions of his revels, he
rehearsed the suppers of the Borgias. Yet like his brother,
the Cardinal, and like the two Emperors, his uncles, he was
The Masked Ball 309
a fanatic of the new music, passing whole days lulled by
Mozart's melodies and Julie's autumnal charms. But that
other beside the Archduke, a man with grey hair and beard
and vice-worn or care-worn face who was he?
A man behind Rentzdorf, in civilian costume but with
the Order of Maria Theresa conspicuous on his breast, had
been observing the sinister figure, and now said "He
looks like a man who has sold his country and has the price
in his pocket, and is now troubled with the question
Have I asked too much? Should I have asked still more?"
The excitement mounted. Men wearing various foreign
orders, men in uniforms covered with stars, seemed to start
from the ground. Women in silks and satins, rushed
this way, rushed that way, and jostled against each other,
yielding or overbearing.
Gradually the chaos of emotion became a cosmos, became
a joy, became triumph. Tears and hysteric laughter;
then the regulation screams and faintings of women, but
even these had a sort of sincerity. Men and women clasped
each other's hands and stood silent; others, locked in
embraces, laughed and cried together and, without visible
embarrassment, unclasped each other to clasp others.
At last the confused shouting became an articulate cry,
"The peace! The peace is signed! Long live Austria!
Long live our Emperor! Long live the Archduke Maxi-
milian!" and again the band broke into the national hymn.
The gesticulations of the master of ceremonies, aided by
the stewards, at last succeeded in restoring a temporary
order or semblance of order.
Bolli, crossing the floor, came up to Rentzdorf. "It is
over then?" he said in a curious voice. "Well, it was to
have come."
There was no gladness in the tones yet no resentment;
the man to whom chance offers the opportunity of perfecting
a crime might have had that voice, that manner.
310 Schonbrunn
Rentzdorf by his own emotion knew now how intolerable
the suspense had grown to himself as to his mistress. Her
joy after the haggard anxieties of the months broke in his
heart ; but he knew in that same moment how much he was
a German.
Standing silent by Bolli his mind groped at the meaning
of this event, this certainty after so much dubiety. Peace
not war. But upon what terms ?
And as in a kaleidoscope he saw Bonaparte with Prussia,
the Rhine, with Central Germany, Saxony, Bavaria, the
Tyrol, with Italy, with Austria, with Russia as his allies
or his vassal states. In world-history what single man
had possessed a power so portentous? Could any man
stand so high and not fall from sheer dizziness? He saw
Napoleon's face in marble quietude, the eyes, the resolute
chin. Nothing could jar that calm neither disaster nor
triumph.
"In action the most astonishing portent that the Aryan
race has produced. Christ is the glory of the Semitic; so
is Hannibal. But this man? Will his name indeed in the
centuries supplant Christ's?"
Bolli's hand was on his arm.
"Yonder comes Johann: he will give us the authentic
details."
Rentzdorf turned. The next instant Johann was beside
him. The latter's features, always very dark, had a stern,
repressed expression, but under the mask it was easy to
detect his fearful emotion. He stared about him like a man
v r ho, coming suddenly from darkness to intense light, sees
all things too distinctly and too confusedly. Nothing was
in perspective. "Let us get out of this, " he said to Rentz-
dorf, ignoring Bolli.
In a deserted side-room the curious gloomy sentimental-
ism which in the Austrian nature contends with Teutonic
apathy showed itself. In rapid words in answer to Bolli's
The Masked Ball 311
questions, he sketched the terms of the Treaty three
millions of their most faithful subjects torn from the
Habsburgs; three million square miles of territory torn
from Austria; a war indemnity of three millions.
"But that is nothing. It is this marriage ..."
" The marriage? It is true then? "
Both of Johann's listeners paled frightfully.
"My country, oh God, my country!" Johann said
furiously. "There is no longer a Germany. Men shall
say to-morrow Here stands a French fortress once named
Germany. Her rivers are in bonds. The Rhine mirrors
the faces of voluntary serfs. Slaves by a tyrant's permis-
sion crawl on their mother-earth and dig Germany into a
grave for a nation's honour. Upon what shall the return-
ing sun look? Austria Hell and death ! Austria?"
He grasped at his sword.
Rentzdorf misunderstanding his purpose, seized his
arm.
" Leave me, Heinrich. "
He wrenched himself aside, and, sitting down, placed
the blade against his knee. He tugged, he pulled, but the
proved steel did not break.
With an oath he sprang erect, and putting his foot on the
blade close to the hilt :
' ' Break ! Malediction on you, break ! ' '
With a griding horrid crash, like a creature in pain, the
blade snapped.
Johann stood staring dully and stupidly down at the
fragments.
"An emperor gave it to my father the morning after
Hochkirchen; and, of the same house, an emperor to-day
has shattered the honour of Austria more irretrievably
than that sword is shattered."
Bolli with a haggard face walked to and fro muttering to
himself. Under his slender hooked nose a patch of powder
312 Schonbrunn
on his chin covering a slight razor-cut, hung to the place
like a plaster.
There was a momentary blaze of anger, if not of scorn, in
Rentzdorf's eyes. This patriotic effervescence grated on
him harshly.
Was patriotism this?
Yes, sentimental it might be and even theatrical, yet
the hope of Germany was just in such despair and in such
authentic wrath as this.
CHAPTER X
NAPOLEON'S ADDRESS TO HIS GUARD
QATURDAY, the I4th October, was the anniversary
O of Jena, a date sacred in the annuals of the French
armies.
Nevertheless, every attempt at celebration had sputtered
out. If the subject had been discussed at headquarters no
instructions had been issued. The soldiers themselves were
for the most part indifferent or hostile. After six months
on the Danube, three of war and three of insufferable tedium,
war- weariness had become epidemic. The single will which
Napoleon attributed to every army had declared itself,
and it was the will not for the celebration of past battles,
but for the celebration of immediate peace.
Since 1806, the Old Guard had been recruited from the
veterans of many corps, and at Enzersdorf, as around
Schonbrunn, there were hundreds of grenadiers who had
fought at Jena with Napoleon or with Davout at Auerstadt.
These men were as jealous for the glory of the Third Corps
as those of the Fifth were jealous for the glory of Lannes
and the capture of Hohenlohe's division at Prenzlow,
and, this morning, in default of Turkish fire and salvoes of
artillery, they talked.
"It was just such a raw and foggy Saturday morning as
this," said one of Davout's grenadiers to a conscript of the
314 Schonbrunn
Young Guard, "but instead of the Danube and Enzersdorf
we had the Saale and Hassenhausen. Just after daybreak,
I was squat on a ridge; I had taken off one of my boots to
get rid of the pine-needles when I saw well, 'twas Iik6 a
bit of lovely colour, pink and white and pearl and blue on
the mist coming straight at me. Quick as lightning,
'By God, they are charging us!' thought I; and old Bliicher
it was and his hussars, coming bang on us, like bewigged
devils out of the fog."
"To-day is Saturday, Jules, that was a Thursday," said
a disconcertingly quiet voice on the narrator's left.
"You were there, perhaps?"
"No; but I was at Jena the same morning. It couldn't
be Thursday at Jena and Saturday at Auerstadt, only
three miles away, could it?"
"Well, our twenty thousand beat sixty thousand Prus-
sians, Bliicher and all, which is more than you did at Jena.
Saturday or Thursday, though le petit bougre himself was
with you."
"Right you are. Vive Davout, vive le Troisieme Corps ! "
shouted a dozen voices.
Of all the marshals, Davout at this period commanded the
greatest confidence amongst the rank and file. Every
survivor of Auerstadt had seen him that October morning
rushing from regiment to regiment, his face blackened
with powder, his coat in tatters, persuading, exhorting,
encouraging, or terrible in his rebuke compelling his men
to be steadfast, to stick to their positions, and not to waste
a cartridge.
Then more argument and more narrative.
It was between seven and eight o'clock. The sun hung
as a disc of dull orange above the levels of the Marchfeld;
but white mists still trailed along the Danube, here draping
the steep banks, forest-crowned, there veiling the dripping
tarpaulins of barges laden with corn and fruit, or the cluster-
Napoleon's Address to His Guard 315
ing masts and pennons of the many-languaged, many-
hued craft from every port between Ratisbon and Rustchuk.
Near Enzersdorf, four miles to the west of Vienna, where
this talk on Jena was going on, the twenty-third company
was dribbling into camp from reveille drill. As they
marched they sang, as men sing who are happy or in high
spirits. The rat-a-tat of kettledrums heightened the
gaiety.
"Buvons, enfans de la patrie,
Abattons les bouteilles, abattons!
Bai-aisons les belles femmes, bai-aisons!"
The new-comers fraternized with the grenadiers about
the bivouac fires, the faces again became the masks of bore-
dom or bad temper, of gaiety, or vigilant anxiety such as
marks the faces of men who cherish some fierce but pre-
carious hope.
A grenadier, stretched out by himself with his back
against the stem of a chestnut, watched the scene. To the
talk of Jena and Auerstadt he had at first not even listened,
but a look of listless curiosity gradually illumined his hag-
gard, sunburnt features. He made no effort, however, to
approach the group.
He was a Champagnard and his name was Pierre Lestocq.
Like the other "veterans" of the Guard, he was not more
than six and thirty ; but his long drooping moustaches were
already grizzled. Severely wounded at Znaim, he had just
recovered when he was struck down by "hospital" fever,
and though dismissed two days ago as "cured," he knew in
his heart that he was "done for. "
"And I'm damned glad of it, " he had said to a comrade.
"I've had my fill of war and peace."
Stubbornly resisted at first, this life-weariness as well as
war-weariness had become oppressive as sleep in his limbs
at the end of a long forced day's march.
316 Schonbrunn
Pierre Lestocq was one of thousands of French soldiers
whose lives at this epoch had, in sheer crude truth, been but
a battle and a march. Seventeen years ago the cannon-
ade of Valmy had ushered in a period of almost incessant
warfare, in which Aspern and Wagram were the most recent
episodes. These were the men whom the Revolution had
made Frenchmen, giving them the consciousness that the
soil they tilled, the land for which they fought, was in very
deed theirs, that France was not a stepmother any longer,
but a true motherland. Lestocq himself had in him some-
thing of Lazare Hoche's temper, but nothing of Hoche's ge-
nius for war; nevertheless to him, as to Hoche, the discovery
of a tattered copy of Rousseau's Contrat Social had brought
as it were a message from on high.
"You speak of the ancien regime?" he would say to the
younger conscripts, jibbing at the ceaseless wars. ' ' What did
that do for you? It murdered your father by forced labour
and your mother by hunger. And what has the Revolution
done for you? It has made you men; given you and me
something to live for or to die for. Oh yes, I've seen
ugliness enough during a battle and after it, blood and grim
death enough; but I have seen nothing so terrifying as the
things I've seen in peace on the edge of a wood. I was a
boy then and I daresay I thought them 'funny.' They
are hell to my memory now; hell to me in my dreams. Did
you ever see the teeth and lips of dead men who had eaten
nothing but grass for three months? A battlefield is nasty,
desperately nasty; but, fichtre, it's beautiful beside that
sight. To die in battle is to die a wolf's death, if you like,
but, wolves or not, we know what we're dying for."
Yet Pierre Lestocq was not by any means a "born"
fighter. He had "time to be afraid." After fifteen years
of war he had still to goad himself into the firing line.
"Curse on you!" he would say to himself when the order
to charge flashed along the ranks. "Would you die a free
Napoleon's Address to His Guard 317
man, or live and go back to serfdom?" And in the mele'e,
when the bullets, like a roof of death, came lower and lower
down over him, he had to repeat the adjuration, "Curse on
you, would you live forever?"
It was the Champagnard peasant's version of Turenne's
adjuration to his own terror on the morning of Nordlingen,
"Tu trembles, carcasse, et tu tremblerais davantage si tu
connaissais ou je te porte. "
II
In the group of veterans and conscripts nearest to the
tree under which Pierre Lestocq was lying, the talk of Jena
had fizzled out most rapidly.
A short, lean, merry-eyed infantryman pronounced its
epitaph :
"Jena! Nom de Dieu, what I want to know is when le
petit bougre means to sign this peace and let us see France
again?"
He was a Picard, wiry and agile as a monkey, and as ugly.
"Yes," said another, "we'll celebrate his Jena in Mont-
martre when we get there."
Wooden huts and white tents dotted the ground for a
circuit of a mile. On the flat roof of a granary built of
brick, to the left of the bivouac fire, officers' linen was dry-
ing. A quarter of a mile away, close to one of the streamlets
into which the Danube at this part divides, stood a saw-mill.
Now and then the grenadiers round the fire looked lazily
in its direction, watching the automatic motions of their
comrades lifting a tree-trunk, holding it to the saw and then
flinging down the planks. On the sand beside the Picard
a piece of rusty sheet-iron served as a trencher for several
haunches of raw horseflesh. These were cut into shreds
and dropped from time to time into the savoury mess stew-
ing in front of him.
318 Schonbrunn
Lifting the lid of a saucepan the Picard made a comic
grimace, replaced it, and, poking a conscript in the ribs,
demanded :
"It's seven months to-day since I left Joinville. Why
don't you go and make le petit bougre come to terms with
these accursed Austrians? But its le petit bougre 1 s way,"
he went on philosophically. "He knows what passes in a
soldier's mind; he knows what we can and what we cannot
do; yes, and how much we can bear. Nom de Dieu, at
Boulogne just when every man of us spat at the sight of salt
water, piff ! comes the word, Not to London this time, mes
enfants but to the Danube and Vienna! That's his way.
Oh, he's great, great and sudden!"
He turned to his saucepans, hissing between his teeth
a parody of the Qa ira:
"Bloody your bayonets, brothers,
Bloody your bayonets, ho!
Bloody your bayonets, brothers,
Or down to hell you'll go."
Napoleon's armies had ceased to sing the great songs of the
Revolution but under the parodies the tunes and something
of the old inspiration smouldered.
"Shut up!" cried a good-looking Gascon, raising himself
on his elbow and surveying the Picard angrily. '-'Can't
you let a fellow sleep?"
A girl's voice between two neighbouring tents interrupted
the altercation: "Plums, ripe plums! Apples and apri-
cots and peaches."
She was a Viennese, blonde-haired and blue-eyed, a
favourite with the twenty-third. She wore the long redin-
gote anglaise then fashionable in every class; her smiling
face looked out from the depths of her huge cylindrical hat
like a pixie's from the bottom of a well. She had neither the
vivacity nor the effrontery of the French vivandiere and now
Napoleon's Address to His Guard 319
as though fatigued she put down her basket and began to
fasten a shoe-strap. A pattern in crimson silk was worked
on her black stockings.
There was an instant rush to her assistance; hustled,
breathless, laughing, blushing, she sat down and let a dozen
hands adjust her shoe.
Yet the fruit did not sell. Dysentery was in the camp,
and an order of the day had forbidden the consumption of
any fruit except that served out as rations. Lotte was
turning away in a pique; but one of Letort's dragoons caught
her waist and attempted to reach the red lips at the bot-
tom of the cylindrical cap. The grenadiers, who regarded
Lotte as their perquisite, sprang to their feet.
"Bayonet him! NomdeDieu! Does he think Lotte's a
sack of beans for his horse? A la lanterne!"
The marching song of the men accompanying a waggon of
wheat to the granary diverted them and they joined lustily
in the refrain: (
"Marie, trempe ton pain,
Marie, trempe ton pain,
Marie, trempe ton pain,
Dans 1'eau claire. "
It reminded them of Paris; for it was Jouy's own travesty
of the most famous scene in La Vestale. Suddenly the
homesick chorus stopped.
"Thunder, what's that?"
It was a bugle: the sound rose a mile away, clear and
sweet, cleaving the morning stillness.
Had Bessieres, the commander of the Guard, unexpect-
edly returned? The grenadiers strained their eyes through
the mists. A gunner, with stern eyes and well-cut features,
seated in the waggon, stood up on the shafts and stared also
through the fog.
Again the bugle-call rose, sharper, more threatening
320 Schonbrunn
and much nearer; and instantly, to the right and to the
left, it was answered; nearer and yet nearer came other
answering calls, that sprang, as it were, from the very
earth close beside the excited men. And now towards the
Danube, across the levels, human figures were seen running
between the tents towards a certain point. The gunner
sprang from the shaft, spat on the ground, and putting his
hands to his mouth, rent the air with a yell:
"Vive 1'Empereur! Vive 1'Empereur! Vive 1'Emper-
eur!"
He sprang forwards. Every man followed. In an in-
stant the black sanded flat about the tents was a desert.
The Picard glanced frantically from his saucepans to his
flying comrades; darted after them for a yard or two,
then back again to his saucepans; but at the blast of a
trumpet that to his ears seemed like the trumpet of the
Judgment Day, he thrust the pans firm in the flames,
jammed on the lids, and rushed with the others.
They did not rush far; for yonder, enhaloed, as it were,
by those trumpet-calls as by a rainbow arch of glory rising
above him, yonder sat Napoleon, tranquil, on the white
charger Solyman.
He was wearing the famous grey coat, old as his hat,
its flaps dropping below his spurs the coat that on winter
nights in Poland they had seen whirled about him by the
blast, wrinkled and white with ice and frozen snow.
Before the Emperor had uttered a word every man knew
that the wish of his heart was fulfilled. Their war-weari-
ness was ended; their homesickness cured. The Peace
had been signed.
Chasseurs and fusiliers, light horse and heavy guns,
voltigeurs cuirassiers, lancers, sappers, gunners, grenadiers,
and pontoonists yonder he sat, the realization of each
man's wish personified. Companies and squadrons, tum-
bling out of workshops, mills, booths, from wooden bar-
Napoleon's Address to His Guard 3 21
racks or from canvas tents, fell into their places, fastening
bandoliers or straps a thick wall, a field crested with
gleaming brass or crested with shakos, with black hair or
crimson aigrettes or feathered hats.
Ill
Pierre Lestocq, the sick grenadier, got slowly on his feet.
The transport, the joy throbbing around him, affected him;
but it affected him as the cry "Fight on!" might affect the
soldier who has got his death-wound, and knows it. Yes,
he was dying; but, by God, he was glad to have lived, and
Napoleon the religion in which he had lived was yonder !
Everlasting rest the religion in which he could now die
that too was near.
And north, west, south, and east, at Znaim, Gratz, Brunn,
Linz were his co-religionists the legions to whom Bonaparte
was as a fate, the legions whose devotion was to him not less
as a fate a religion, that is to say, a wish, an ideal, a pur-
pose, a watchword, for which a man is prepared to fight to
the death, name it "Liberty, " name it "France, " or simply
"the greatness of man."
Pierre listened, dazed, breathless; imagining rather than
seeing the Emperor's face. Shout after shout rent the air.
' ' Vive 1'Empereur ! Vive 1'Empereur ! ' '
A vast silence followed. Napoleon was speaking. At
first, for the beating of- his arteries, Pierre could not hear
a syllable.
Again, an immense shout, a shout of passionate, long
expected joy and deliverance ; then once more an abrupt and
complete silence. The Emperor had raised his voice, and,
listening intently Pierre could distinguish the shrill, raucous
Corsican accent softened by distance. Napoleon, as al-
ways, was speaking rapidly, not rising in his stirrups, as
when he made a harangue to his army or distributed the
322 Schonbrunn
eagles in the Place de Carrousel, but sitting well down
in his saddle. Nevertheless, the unpremeditated sentences
ordered themselves into cadences.
"Soldiers! Your standards in the spring of this year
flew from Paris to the walls of Vienna in thirty-one days.
You fought on your march eleven pitched battles and
twenty-seven combats. You scattered or destroyed an army
of five hundred thousand men who, whilst you in Spain
were hunting the English leopards to the sea, had dared
to insult your frontiers. Soldiers ! To-morrow you return
to Paris and to France. Will your journey in peace be more
rapid than that by which you marched across your defeated
enemy to Vienna?"
Many did not at once seize the point ; but in an instant the
insinuation that they had marched through the ranks of
their enemies as if they were nothing leapt from mouth to
mouth. The soldiers burst into a roar of enthusiasm and
laughter, amid which the cries of "Vive 1'Empereur!"
rose piercingly, like joyous sword-points flung on high.
A sarcasm, taunting but indignant, at the perjury and
perfidy of the Habsburgs followed. God's vengeance had
struck Austria down, Napoleon said, and then by three or
four rapid touches the campaign was made to live before
the soldiers' eyes.
"In April you fought five battles in five days. It is
named the campaign of Ratisbon. In May you scattered
at Aspern and at Essling an army of a hundred and eighty
thousand men."
And then he cited incidents of the fight and of the weeks
at Lobau ; but individual names were not mentioned ; he was
speaking to the army, and the deeds of the army made his
theme. Yet, as if under compulsion, he named his stepson,
Eugene. In June, on the anniversary of Marengo, Eugene
had gained the victory of Raab. Twelve days later at
Gratz, the 84th regiment had displayed a heroism not sur-
Napoleon's Address to His Guard 323
passed in the annals of war. There, for fourteen hours,
Gambini, with only seven hundred bayonets, had held at
bay an army of ten thousand Croats.
"Such are your victories. And in the pause between
those victories your engineers astonished the world by erect-
ing in fifteen days three bridges across the broadest, deepest,
and swiftest river of Europe. Our detractors have taunted
us with the bridges of Caesar and of Trajan. But the bridge
which in four days Caesar threw across the Rhine could not
have borne the weight of a single gun. Your bridge of
sixty arches across the Danube was broad enough to permit
three carriages to cross abreast, and yet strong enough to
support the weight of four hundred cannon. But, they say,
you are not the first. Trajan too, they allege, threw a
bridge across the Danube. In this your detractors speak
history; but though he chose a point where its course is
slow and its banks narrow, it yet took the Roman engineers
three years to build it. You built your bridge in three
weeks ! Who henceforth shall dare to compare the bridges
of Caesar and Trajan with that structure of yours which rose
with the solidity of iron and the speed of fire in order that
my legions might cross it to their harvest of glory on the
fields of Wagram and Znaim?"
The tumult became a frenzy, enthusiasm passing and
returning, replicated from man to man; tears, laughter,
cries ; men gesticulated ; men embraced each other, or stood
apart, silent and unmoving as trees.
Pierre Lestocq, in a zigzag line, staggered forward. He
was now trembling in every limb; in all his frame was a
mortal faintness, a mortal lightness. He reached the stem
of a second tree and then a third. The trodden grass, the
listening crowd, the distant hills, Napoleon's face, all dis-
appeared. It was the pas de charge of the Guard that he
heard. Napoleon was leading them. A glory was in the
air. He stood fiercely erect. Heroisms and splendours
324 Schonbrunn
flamed around him. Life's greatness had closed in a
wrestle with death's greatness.
"Vive 1'Empereur!" he shouted between his clenched
teeth, and like a suffocating sob, the echo "Vive 1'Em-
pereur!" died in his throat.
His head dropped on his breast; he struggled against the
engulfing darkness, and, as in a light-halo, he saw again
Napoleon's forehead, the seat and very throne of god-like
power and will.
"Vive 1'Empereur!" he shouted.
Death was grasping at his face. There was a sound in his
ears as of up-rushing waters; a sensation in his brain as if
innumerable curtains of darkness were closing in upon him,
like an enemy with rapid and precipitate rushes. Still
struggling, he sank, stiffening himself out on the earth, his
shoulders propped on the tree trunk.
Meanwhile the immense silence had again come down
upon the listening soldiers. The Emperor had resumed his
harangue.
"Thus to your past glories you have added this glory
the right to have it said of you by your country and by
posterity, 'He was of the Army of the Danube and of Ger-
many.' They shall point to the trophies of this war, to
that enduring monument now rising in your city, that city
which is already the capital of the world, a monument
forged from the cannon captured on the fields of Ratisbon,
Eckmuhl, Aspern-Essling, and Wagram; they shall point out
to each other objects of art that shall adorn your public
buildings, and they shall say, 'These are the spoils of per-
jured Austria!"
Suddenly Napoleon's voice changed. The pallid mask
of his face remained unaltered; but his eyes, blue now as
the blue of the sky reflected in sword blades, filmed, and
their look became blacker and intenter. In the silence the
champing of a horse's bit was as distinct as though that
Napoleon's Address to His Guard 325
packed arena were an empty hall, or a reaped field across
which a peasant was trudging in the morning stillness
to his day's work, and in that awed silence were heard the
words, stern, yet cadenced like a lament:
"Soldiers! On your homeward march you will pass the
graves of your comrades. Salute them as I salute them.
They sleep the sleep of their glory. Their names shall
stand on the monuments of their country. You yourselves
by your bivouac fires have told their history. Their deeds
are graven forever in the memories of men. Many things
pass ; glory such as this endures. In age after age, when the
living shall most wish to live greatly and to feel and to speak
greatly, they shall single out your actions and the actions of
your dead comrades and find that greatest life in the praise
of your battles."
The hush of awe, the tears, the surprise, the silence of
stupor, then the frantic burst of shouting, attested the
power which, after ten years, Napoleon's "fire-streaming
words," as Grillparzer described them, still possessed over
the French mind. The awe which had stilled the listeners
was an awe at once for the living who spoke and for the dead
who had died for him. A funeral cortege followed by the
grey spectres of the fallen had seemed to pass yet what a
splendour environed it!
Napoleon's bulletins and his harangues might exaggerate
or distort the achievements of his armies, but they were
winged in every word with the heroism which had won
them. The man who had the genius to win their battles
had also the genius to describe them.
Satisfied with the effect, Napoleon turned his horse, and,
surrounded by his suite, rode slowly towards Schonbrunn.
IV
Yet crowds, as though Napoleon and his white charger
were still there, lingered about the spot; then slowly in knots
326 Schonbrunn
of two and three or ten and twelve began to disperse, com-
menting on the peace, guessing at its terms, commenting on
the harangue; excited, laughing, gesticulating. The eyes of
many were wet. A few were sombre and silent.
Amongst the first to fly back to his saucepans and the
bivouac fire, was the Picard.
"Did I not tell you?" he cried excitedly. "Just as
at Austerlitz. That's le petit bougre's way. You think
you are going to Peking or to Moscow? Piff! The
word is Paris! 'Baisons, enfans de la patrie!' Nom
de Dieu! Where's my frying-pan? Oh that hell's pup
dragoon ..."
The saucepans were still there but the frying-pan was
gone. Incredulous, he searched frantically in every direc-
tion ; he did not seem to have been absent five seconds.
Hot and flurried, now erect, now stooping, "Jules!
Pierre!" he called. "What the devil! Why don't you
answer?"
Jules was invisible.
The Picard glanced swiftly at the figure of Pierre Lestocq
outstretched in his long grey coat, his shoulder against the
tree, his heavy cap thrown forwards on his brow. His
left arm hung loose. A dead leaf had fallen between the
thumb and finger of his right hand. He did not stir. It
was impossible to see his expression, but the attitude was
that of deep rest.
"Asleep, and the Emperor speaking! Fichtre, that's
odd!"
Ferretting everywhere, his eyes at last caught sight of the
frying-pan thrown under the flap of a tent door; but its
savoury contents were gone. Gone too was Lotte, gone
the three evil-looking camp-followers, two male, one female,
who like gnomes had seemed to emerge from the earth
during the soldiers' first absorption in Napoleon's presence.
Could the thieves have been those two bitches?
Napoleon's Address to His Guard 327
His face cleared a little. If it were not the cavalry who
had the laugh on him, it would matter less.
The crowd rapidly thickening round the fire gave him
little time to pursue his investigations. Some demanded
food, some drink, some tobacco; some took snuff; all
talked.
The inmost meaning of the incident alone was endurable.
"The Peace!"
Yesterday it had seemed a commonplace, a certainty,
each man's secret wish; to-day it seemed a miracle, an
incredible thing, because it had happened. Time was
needed to understand it. And already the bitterness which
in life lurks at the bottom of every sweetness was making
itself felt.
" Peace? And for how long? To France to-morrow; but
how long to stay there?"
France and the army had been promised peace after
Austerlitz, and within three months there was war with
Prussia; they had been promised peace after Jena, and
within one month there was war with Russia; they had been
promised a long, a sure, a lasting peace after Tilsit, and
within seven months there was war with Spain; and from
the Sierras they had hurried to the Danube.
"But this time?"
Jacques Dupont, the gunner with the stern eyes and
finely cut features, and two grenadiers came back to the
fire. The Picard, for reasons of his own, said nothing about
the frying-pan. The four sat down.
"Our Emperor has pluck, " said the gunner, "that's what
I like in him. Intrepidite that is his name! And I am
just^beginning to take in his idea, to realize his plan. Gigan-
tesque mais oui! Paris the capital of Europe. The old
families not our enemies; and other nations, Spaniards,
Germans, Swedes, Russians, Poles, Magyars, not our ene-
mies either, but competitors with France in the race for glory.
328 Schonbrunn
Not birth any longer no matter whether you are noble or
peasant, German or Finn manhood and genius is the
thing all is one in the race for glory. Nom de Dieu, but
it's gigantic! And, by God, he may succeed."
Jacques Dupont was a Norman, transferred after Ratis-
bon from Davout's corps to the Old Guard. He had the
authentic Viking look, rather tall, erect, lean and sinewy,
with steel-blue eyes, close-cut hair, tightly shut cruel mouth,
forced into prominence by the cheek-strap. After General
Dupont's surrender at Bayleu he had, in the universal
stupefaction and loathing, wished to change his name; but
recognizing the futility of such a disguise, he had determined
to wipe out that disgrace by his own actions, and, by his
own valour, to restore the lustre of the name he bore. He
loved glory as the Picard loved a breakfast; he was as cer-
tain of promotion as the Picard was certain to remain in the
ranks. As a matter of history, he came out of the carnage
of Leipzig four years later as the captain of this same
company.
"Where do you and I come in, and the rest of us that's
what I want to know?" the Gascon grumbled. "Your
great man it's all very well; but where's his greatness
without us? That puzzles me. He's Emperor, lives in a
palace "
"And we shiver in a hut on rotten straw when we can
get it?" Dupont said quietly. "That's right enough: the
thing is to sleep sound. He's Emperor, but he can't eat
more'n three meals a day."
The others listening, nodded acquiescence, yielding to his
natural authoritativeness.
"Nom de Dieu, yes," the Picard joyously asseverated,
"but you are a savant, Jacques. That's well said. "
And happiness and excitement raising his mind to an
unaccustomed height, he went on, "He can eat no more'n
we do, that's flat and one girl's like another, and with
Napoleon's Address to His Guard 3 2 9
her he can do no more'n you or me. It's funny, oh, it's
funny! That's fraternity and equality, I call it. And
they say now there's neither a heaven nor a hell just
nothing. Nom de Dieu! 'Marie, trempe ton pain, ah!
ah! ah! dans 1'eau claire!'"
"Where's Pierre?" Dupont asked in his quiet, com-
manding way. Contrast had drawn him to the Cham-
pagnard.
"Can't you see? Yonder asleep. Poor devil. He has
earned it. A bayonet in his shoulder-blade, then typhus
he's had his guts' full!"
The grenadiers looked in the direction indicated. The
new-comer, an old "brave" of tipsy habits, illiterate, dirty,
but with the cross, looked longer than the rest.
' ' Pierre's lying rather queer, ' ' he said, getting up. " How
long's he been like that?"
He had seen dead men lie thus on many battlefields.
But before the Picard could answer four cavalrymen,
arm in arm, came swinging along, their spurs jingling
pleasantly. Their company was to move towards Linz
next day: now the order was countermanded. The Picard
eyed them suspiciously, but there was not a trace of mock-
ery or irony on their fine faces. No: the two drabs of
camp-followers, not the dragoons, had stolen his mess.
"Pierre! Pierre Lestocq!" one of the troopers called
suddenly. "But this is good! Sacrebleu, I thought he had
croaked at Molk. Pierre, mon vieux, Pierre, old boy!"
Two of them, as their accent proved, came from the same
province; the first speaker from the same village as Pierre.
Bending over him, he put his hand affectionately on his
shoulder.
" Pierre mon vieux ..."
He started back. The grenadiers slouched slowly for-
ward. All became unexpectedly silent. The old "brave"
with the beery countenance knelt down beside Pierre.
33 Schonbrunn
"He's croaked," he said briefly and stood up, brushing
the earth from his knees.
"Dead?"
In the surprise, accustomed as they were to death, a
sound that came from the direction of Nussdorf or Vienna
escaped their notice or left them unmoved. But a second
sound came clearer and deeper. They looked at each other,
then at the dead man.
' ' What's up now ? What's that firing ? ' '
There was no answer.
A staff officer on a fine English grey rode past. He
turned his freckled, sunburnt face towards the group, sur-
veyed it quietly and sped on. The hue of his uniform was
lost in the mist on the road towards the city.
The grenadiers looked after him. What message was he
carrying at that speed?
In the camp itself, to the promiscuous singing and shout-
ing, a burst of military music was added, drums and bugles,
clear and shrill; and all in the morning light, a sparkling
squadron of Nansouty's cuirassiers, the October sun on
their helmets and swords, trotted gaily across the level
northward of the camp.
"I saw yesterday that Pierre had got his dose; yes, I
did," the Picard asseverated. "I never believed he'd see
the night through. Well, what's to be done now? He
can't lie there. Here, lend a hand, boys!"
The dragoon, Pierre's fellow-villager, a big, soft-hearted
fellow, stepped aside.
Six grenadiers, at the Picard's summons, came forward.
Two planks were hastily constructed into a bier, and bending
over the dead man, they lifted him to their shoulders, bearing
him towards some wooden sheds that rose close to the river.
The last glittering sound of Nansouty's bugles and drums
came softer and softer as the squadron moved towards
Schonbrunn.
CHAPTER XI
ON THE TRACK OF A CRIME
THE court-martial for the trial of Friedrich Staps was to
assemble in the arsenal that same afternoon, Satur-
day, the 1 4th October, at four o'clock. Complete secrecy
was enjoined. No member of the commission was to be
informed of its object until the prisoner was before his
judges. The Emperor reserved to himself the right of
confirming or annulling the sentence of the court.
A peremptory note from Napoleon had, at an early hour,
instructed Savary to use every second of the interval in
tracing out the movements of the accused since his arrival
in Vienna. "The due de Rovigo," ran the missive, "shall
also endeavour to ascertain whether in the city itself, or in
the surrounding villages, the prisoner has any relatives,
friends or acquaintances who may have acted as his abet-
tors if not as his accomplices."
There was a postscript.
' ' The due de Friuli shall have access to the prisoner at
any hour. "
This at once alarmed Savary. Duroc, "the man who
never shed a tear, " was, nevertheless, a Don Quixote in the
devices he invented for the mitigation of Bonaparte's
severities. This command could only mean the Emperor's
intention of pardoning his assailant.
33 2 Schonbrunn
Disturbed and irritated, Savary determined to take the
first part of the work in hand personally. At Schonbrunn,
especially since the middle of August, he had felt himself
and his work to be under surveillance. His most trusted
agents had been tampered with either by Fouche, anxious
to countermine his mines, or by the Emperor himself,
infected with the disease of setting one army of spies to
watch another in every capital city and in every camp or
headquarter of Europe.
"But in this business," thought Savary, "I will see with
my own eyes, hear with my own ears."
He at once despatched a courier to Rapp requesting him
to meet him at the arsenal at ten o'clock.
Meantime, he summoned his confidential chief and with
him went over the results of the investigations pursued
during the night. The prisoner's account of himself had
been verified. A young man answering his description had
lodged for ten days at the Goldener Adler inn near Nussdorf .
Two witnesses had seen him on the Schonbrunn road,
another had observed him in a small cafe in Vienna. Several
additional clues had been followed up; four arrests had
been made; but the police had discovered nothing that
really implicated the detained persons in the dastardly
crime.
Savary looked up sharply from a dossier he was examining.
"These arrested persons," he demanded, "do they know
why they have been arrested?"
The chief, who had the dress and beard if not the counte-
nance of a Greek merchant, answered by a mournful re-
proachful shake of the head. How could his master imagine
that after so many years he would neglect so rudimentary
a precaution?
"You have done well," Savary replied, imitating Napo-
leon's manner.
His attention once more riveted itself to the dossier.
On the Track of a Crime 333
ii
"Fanatic or hired agent, this young fool is unfit to live, "
he said impatiently to Rapp when, an hour later, they met
at the arsenal. "No recanting should get him a pardon.
His brain will become a magazine of lies against you, me,
or any one. He will have our reputations and even our
lives in his power."
Rapp's considerate but not very penetrating glance rested
on Savary's close-set, foxy eyes; then, averting itself, wan-
dered to the iron gloom of the arsenal walls.
" His majesty is not such an ass, " he said bluffly. " Why
should he suspect you or rne?"
Savary did not deign to answer, and, after a rapid explan-
ation of his design, and a sketch of the story of a French
noble in search of a young German as a "courier" on a
journey to Pomerania or some other foggy region, he and
Rapp proceeded to the Burgplatz to hire a carriage.
Both officers wore forage caps and the undress uniform of
colonels of the Guard, without orders or decorations.
In the "Old City" the streets were thronged. Rumours
of the Peace had already spread.
In the square before the royal palace workmen with their
sleeves rolled up were piling upon carts and barrows wreathes
and evergreens, shrubs and flowers. They were the deco-
rations of last night's ball.
French sentinels with bayonets fixed still marched to and
fro in front of the main entrance.
A row of hackney coaches stood in front of the garden
railings. The drivers, seeing the two officers on foot, began
to wave their long whips. The lean wretched-looking
horses, "too lean even for soup, " stood with drooping heads.
Their sides were striped with red flesh. The sinews of
their necks were in places uncovered and looked like raw
wounds.
334 Schonbrunn
Savary, after haggling over the fare, engaged the likeliest
hack.
"Let me sit this side, may I?" Rapp asked, taking the
left-hand corner of the carriage. " My right arm this morn-
ing aches like hell. "
Every officer in the army knew of the sabre-cuts in Rapp's
right arm and of Napoleon's famous remark.
" It is this Danube air, " Savary answered. "I too begin
to feel rheumatic."
Ill
Their enterprise was not without danger. In the north-
ern villages Vandamme's savagery had made the French
unpopular. Stragglers disappeared with a frequency which
only murder could explain. Nussdorf, the chief "river-
port " for two hundred miles, was crowded with loafers and
fugitives from justice or from injustice Slavs, Magyars,
Poles, Croats, Slovaks, Serbs, Roumanians.
"If the Emperor wishes this to be a real secret," Rapp
observed as they reached the open country, "he acted very
unadvisedly in writing so precipitately to Fouche. Every-
thing shows that this youngster had neither confidant nor
accomplice."
"You never can tell," Savary said with a shrug.
He began to busy himself with his notes.
Even at this early hour, outside. Vienna, knots of villagers
or citizens in holiday attire succeeded each other on the
highway. And now in the city from which they were re-
ceding the bells were ringing the boom of St. Stephen's
huge bell, heard by the Turks two centuries ago; the
mellow-toned St. Eustathius; St. Peter's in the Graben; and
finally St. John's.
"One would suppose these damned Germans had con-
quered us, not we them," Savary said morosely; and he
On the Track of a Crime 335
turned back and looked at the city which in the morning
light spread in tranquil loveliness to right and left.
Rapp's Alsatian blood resented the remark, as well as
the tone in which Savary made it. It seemed intended to
wound.
"The truth will out, " he said curtly. "We are afraid to
remain a day longer. " And touched by a vague sentiment
he let his eyes wander over the Wiener woods.
Everywhere as they drove northwards they encountered
the traces of war and the destruction wrought by war the
red gashes in the soil dug by artillery; the fire-blackened
gables of roofless farms; a deserted hamlet; a squalid
assemblage of huts named a "field-hospital," and at the
doors of the huts or in a trodden field, a few wretches,
maimed or sick, crawled to stare at the noise of their
wheels.
"It is war; yes, it is war," Rapp thought and shrugged
aside the temptation to think.
Savary, his right arm along the edge of the carriage, was
sitting with knit brows, his note-book in his left hand.
Whenever the two men were together the difference in their
temperaments was certain to assert itself. Rapp despised
the "police de caquetage" and was already bored by this
morning's business. Savary was in his element. His am-
bition was on the alert. If this incident got out of his
hands what capital might not Pouche* make of it? But if
he succeeded
To Napoleon, Savary had long ago become, in the Jesuit
phrase, "like a stick in the hands of a man," and the gloom
of his nature made him naturally the executor of his mas-
ter's baser will. His fidelity was his ugliest virtue. "At a
word from me Savary would stab to the heart his own
father." The mot had been coined by Talleyrand, but it
expressed Napoleon's conviction.
As the carriage bent away from the Danube, the roofs
336 Schonbrunn
of Nussdorf were visible on their right. Savary in a very
short time ordered the carriage to stop, and, dismounting,
dismissed the driver and the two officers proceeded on
foot to a picket stationed a quarter of a mile away where
Vandamme's main body had, to avoid the fever, been quar-
tered on the high ground. They enquired the way to the
Goldener Adler. The sentry pointed to a few houses hidden
by trees less than a mile distant. A shorter road ran
across the open fields.
They crossed two fields, and all at once found themselves
in a country lane.
"This does not look the place where a murder would be
planned, " Rapp observed.
Savary seemed not to have heard the remark.
The air all round was sweet, as though gardens or scented
wild-flowers were near; behind, on the wooded heights,
the noonday stillness brooded. In front some grey strata
of quiet clouds slept on the horizon. The hedgerow on their
right rose through a spreading undergrowth of brambles
and hemlock to a height of eight feet; here and there a
solitary spray of woodbine gleamed in safe inaccessibility.
Near its farther end the lane passed a coppice of hazel and
birch, the haunt of nightingales in summer; and through a
gap on the left they saw a meadow where, in times of peace
the kine would have been ruminating udder-deep in the lush
grass. To-day these meadows were a tangled wilderness
of dead nettles and fennel. Half a mile away, on the
last spur of the Wienerwald, was a herd of goats, watched
by a boy, whilst full in front, clearly visible in irregular
lines of white walls, red tiles, or thatched _roofs, straggled
the village they were seeking.
IV
A walk, or rather a march, of a few minutes brought them
out in front of the Goldener Adler. Its sign-board, the
On the Track of a Crime 337
double-headed Austrian eagle, gold upon a russet ground,
swung unmoving above the rusty, weather-beaten porch.
The garden spread in a luxuriance of weeds behind the
house; in front, on a patch of grass, a deserted dove-cot,
rotten and falling to pieces, stood on the top of a pole;
near it, a heap of refuse and two dismantled carts.
A more evil-looking hostelry could hardly be imagined,
even in Austria. Murder might have here its fixed resi-
dence. Trap doors inside, a secret passage or two, and
beyond it, the broad tide of the Danube that would sweep
away every trace of the crime forever.
"This looks just like the house in which a murder might
be done, eh, mon ami?" Savary said sourly.
It was his answer to Rapp's remark in the lane.
Rapp looked at him, but did not retort; for before his
eyes had arisen the figure of a German boy, footsore and
weary, turning aside after a long day's tramp to seek rest
in this lonely inn. " Mon Dieu, " he asked himself, "medi-
tating murder, did he select for his last halting-place a house
that seemed dedicated to murder?"
Savary, meanwhile, had tapped sharply on the door
with his sword-hilt.
There was no answer.
"Are you sun-struck?" he asked Rapp; then, coming up
close to him, he whispered: "A word of counsel. There is
no sense in showing too much policy merely to be told lies.
A little manly maladroitness often elicits the truth. You
take my meaning?"
There was shrewdness in Savary's estimate of his com-
panion. Conscious of his own frankness, Rapp was just
the man to throw off his natural manner, and, aiming at
over-subtlety, ruin all.
"I will obey, monsieur le due," he answered with ironic
ceremoniousness.
At the end of a dark passage they found the guest-room,
33 8 Schonbrunn
raftered with oak, low, badly lighted, and smelling of stale
tobacco and beer. A grimy wooden crucifix rose in a corner ;
a cup of holy water stood at the door. Above the fireplace
there were outlined two clean spaces where two fowling-
pieces had once hung. The edict of disarmament had ex-
tended even to such weapons. The stillness was unbroken
even by the buzz of a fly.
Savary's second imperative knock on the wooden table
was answered after a time by the sound of heavy footsteps,
and the landlord appeared.
He looked from one to the other of his two guests. A
cunning expression came into his eyes, and his mouth,
clean-shaven, with a long, hateful-looking upper lip, closed
abruptly, as though only the "iron pear" would open it
again.
"At your service, genltemen. What can I do for
you?"
Savary, instantly taking in his gaol-bird appearance, and
judging it impolitic to pretend to have entered such a
hostelry for food or drink or lodging, stated his errand
briefly.
"Stabbs?" the landlord muttered, seeming to search his
mem ry, "Stabbs? Donnerwetter, what sort of a name is
that? Ach, der knabe Friedrich Stips? Him I know;
yes-s, nice lad; quiet as a mouse."
Savary, as though inadvertently, moved his hand to
the hilt of "his sword.
He had stayed at the inn, the landlord continued, some
eight days, no, ten yes, from a Wednesday to a Friday he
had paid his bill. He had no friends in Vienna that he knew
of, and he received no letters; but he had seen him writing;
he had also heard him reciting to himself like a play-actor.
"What then brought him here? Has he a sweetheart
in Nussdorf or in the neighbourhood? Did he frequent
women?"
On the Track of a Crime 339
"A sweetheart? Women? What am I that I should
know what company my guests keep outside my house? I
am too busy, your honours. "
But interrupting himself, "Ja, ich komme; coming!
coming!" he unexpectedly shouted, and without a word
of apology, going to the door, he answered along the dismal
passage questions that no one had asked and gave orders
that obviously had no meaning in this place, or a meaning
that the two officers were not intended to understand.
"Why then did he come to Vienna? " Savary insisted in
bad German, but affecting the Viennese accent. "Erfurt
is a hundred and twenty miles away."
"Does he come from Erfurt way?" was the cunning
rejoinder. "Your worships know more of him than I do. "
Savary saw that he had made a false move.
"We must loosen this dog's tongue," he said in French,
turning brusquely from the landlord. "For if he does
not speak we shall have to arrest him, and the affair will be
in every pot-house throughout Austria to-morrow. "
He ordered wine and the two officers sat down.
During the landlord's absence Savary began a stealthy
examination of the apartment. A sign from Rapp stopped
him. Through a small square hole cut in the wall, a pair of
jet-black eyes, hard and bright as steel, were watching
every movement of Savary's.
The sight of those eyes gave Rapp a feeling distinctly
unpleasant. On the track of murder, they might in this
lonely neighbourhood find themselves the victims of mur-
der. Why had they ever started upon this useless enter-
prise without an escort? Why had Savary's over-caution
dismissed the carriage and left them unprotected in this
cut-throat's den? And for the second time that morning
34 Schonbrunn
he remembered the frequency with which Vandamme's
stragglers disappeared in this very neighbourhood.
The landlord returned with a bottle of wine, ostenta-
tiously wiping away the dust and cobwebs with a dirty
cloth.
Savary invited him to drink.
"You are far from rivals, " he said civilly. " Has the war
interfered with your trade?"
"Not much to complain of, my prince. Times are
hard; but, for my own part, I am very contented and very
happy," was the answer. And with a kind of insolent
familiarity, mixed with deference, he began to expatiate
on the war, on duty to the fatherland, the greatness of the
French Emperor; but also on the greatness of Austria, and
above all, on the greatness of Carinthia and its capital, the
ancient city of Klagenfurth "The waterfalls of the Miirr
are the gates of Paradise."
Rapp was interested. To Savary, however, this garru-
lity did not seem natural ; the patriotism was obviously false.
It- was all the talkativeness of a man who wished to gain
time. For what?
"Where do you come from?" he asked, resuming his
harsh and arrogant manner.
"Carinthia, my prince. The city of Klagenfurth, as I
have just told you, gave me birth. " And he began to dilate
on his past life.
The inn-keeper, though not born at Klagenfurth, was
a Carinthian, Fedor Zagnitz by name. His father and
grandfather belonged to the race of mountaineers who, on
the very edge of the Carnic glaciers, earn a savage livelihood
as wood-cutters, rolling the pines down the mountain side
into the waters of the Drave far below. But Fedor and
his three brothers had tired of this life, and with a few
kreutzers in their pockets had made for the plains. And
after various adventures confessable or unconfessable in
On the Track of a Crime 341
Hungary and Styria, all four had ended as inn-keepers,
two at Klagenfurth, one at Villach, the fourth, Fedor, the
youngest, here at Nussdorf.
"How are we to bring this drole to the point?" Savary
asked in a French patois that he used in speaking to his
police.
"Let us be frank with him," Rapp answered; and with-
out waiting for Savary's assent, he stated their errand in his
own way. They had come expressly to enquire into the
character of this Friedrich Staps. The peace had been
signed, and a French officer of great rank was setting out at
once for Pommern, and desired a bright young fellow as his
interpreter and courier. Staps had seemed a likely youth
what did the inn-keeper know of him?
"And is that all your errand? " the inn-keeper ejaculated,
his black eyes glistening. "Why I thought you were
princes; yes, and I saw myself as ambassador to Klagen-
furth announcing the great Napoleon's clemency; yes, and
I saw my two brothers' faces yellow with envy as they
eyed me. 'Thunder,' they would say, 'is not Fedor still
the lucky penny of the family?"
He sprang to his feet with a wild laugh, and swinging to
the window, stood biting his nails and staring through the
dirty panes; then, as though by chance, he flung himself
on a stool immediately between his guests and the door.
The criminal in him appeared uncaged, yet Rapp ob-
served that his eyes, even when standing by the window,
watched every motion of Savary's; he observed too the
fellow's powerful wrists, the black hair coming down the
arm to the very knuckles, suggesting wild beast strength
and agility.
Savary, who with difficulty had curbed his temper, got
on his feet; but Rapp, made cool by the danger, adhered
to the plan agreed upon.
"What have you to say? This lad should begin his
34 2 Schonbrunn
duties and start on his journey to-night, or to-morrow
at daybreak unless, of course, we discover from you any-
thing to his discredit."
The inn-keeper's insolent mocking glance rested alter-
nately on the two Frenchmen; and thrusting his thumbs
into the armholes of his waistcoat, he asked leisurely,
"And it is a long journey this that His Highness your
friend is going upon?"
The thought darted simultaneously through Rapp's
mind as well as Savary's "This ruffian knows of Staps's
arrest." There was no mistaking the emphasis that had
been laid on the words "a long journey."
Savary's chagrin was extreme.
He saw his whole scheme crumble; he saw Staps re-
prieved, or Germany by his death furnished with a martyr
immeasurably more pathetic than Schill or Palm; he saw
Fouche's triumph; whilst he himself was further removed
that ever from the Ministry of Police.
"It is no business of Fedor Zagnitz, " the landlord re-
sumed ; "but the lad is sickly, as you might say, and if your
great friend were travelling, say towards the Tyrol "
"We should not want a German," Savary interposed in
a voice thick with the emotion against which he was con-
tending.
"No, of course not, my prince," was the startling retort.
"You'd find plenty of Germans Bavarians, for instance,
on the spot dead, if not living, eh? eh? Plenty of Ger-
mans, ha! ha!"
The outburst of savage hate astounded Rapp. Did this
hideous rage express the true feeling of Germany for
France? Had he been in error in imagining that the young
Thuringian had no active accomplices "save God"? Or
was the hate masked in this brutish peasant's breast an
example of all Germany?
But the inn-keeper, as though contented with this taunt-
On the Track of a Crime 343
ing allusion to the Franco-Bavarian surrender in the pre-
ceding summer, now changed his bearing. Probably he
himself had been working out the situation, and tacitly
gave up the enterprise against two officers of distinction
as "risky."
"You asked about women, did you not?" he remarked,
with a show of friendliness. "Well, the lad had a sweet-
heart. I have so many cares, but my memory comes back
to me now. Well, as I was saying, I came one day into the
lad's room. I found him weeping over a maiden's picture
and sitting with his arms like this. "
The host laid both his arms flat down on the table and
buried his face in the sleeve of the right.
"Ah who was the girl? Was she of Vienna?" Sav-
ary asked indifferently.
" I cannot tell; he never spoke of her, mon prince, never a
word."
But he described the miniature and gave it as his opinion
that the maiden was not of Vienna or the neighbourhood.
"He had the look of a lost dog, " he jerked out at length.
"Why should a lad look like that if his maiden were near?"
Savary nodded, but put some further questions.
Not another word, however, could he extort, either by
frankness or cunning.
"Is there any good in going on with this?" Rapp said in
the patois already adopted by Savary. "We do not want a
woman on our hands." And he added in German, "Our
young friend will suit the appointment."
" I am not satisfied , ' ' Savary said slowly. ' ' The Tugend-
bund has women in its ranks. This drdle may know more
of her than he pretends. Put a question or two about the
Illuminati but carefully."
Rapp stifled the wish to ask Savary to put such futile
questions himself. His honest, soldierly intelligence led
him to see in all such associations as the Illuminati and
344 Schonbrunn
the Tugendbund "mere moonshine," or at best conspir-
acies to which Savary's or Fouch^'s police for their own ends
gave a factitious importance.
"The Illuminat?" the landlord exclaimed. "Thunder!
What's them? The Prince of Carinthia has often supped at
brother's tavern in Klagenfurth ; but he is a Serenity, not an
Illuminat."
"Enough! Enough! Show me his room," Savary
interrupted, annoyed by Rapp's laugh. "This is no time
for jesting," he muttered with a scowl, when Rapp under
his breath repeated, "A Serene Highness, but not an
Illuminated Highness."
The host searched the leather pocket of his pantaloon
and took out an iron ring garnished with keys.
Behind him the two officers climbed the rickety stair,
covered like the inns of the period, with the filth of
months or of years. On the fifth step Rapp turned, he
knew not why, and saw on a wooden bench the outstretched
figure of a man in the picturesque dirt affected by the
Magyars. Further back in the gloom another figure in
the same attire sat smoking. A peat fire smouldered on
the hearth, and as he twirled his long moustaches he stared
into the dull embers.
Rapp felt for his pistols, and, with a sense of relief, saw
Savary make the same precautionary gesture.
VI
The room into which they were now ushered had a
slanting roof, and they had to stoop in places not to knock
their heads against the ceiling. Savary stood with the
host. Rapp walked to the window. It was a dormer win-
dow and looked across a garden stocked with pear trees,
plum trees, currant bushes, and beds still brilliant with
marigolds and dahlias. A deal table, green with mould,
On the Track of a Crime 345
stood under a pear tree; a bird-cage swung from a branch,
and in it a grey parrot sat blinking in the sunshine. Beyond
the garden lay a level expanse of fields, and beyond the
fields gleamed the Danube, broad as a lake, flashing silver
and azure in the October sun.
"Yes," the host said, "the lad should make a good page
to a man of condition. His habits, you see, were as dainty
as a girl's."
Flinging back the chintz coverlet, he pointed to the sheets
on Staps's bed, their dirt neatly covered by squares of white
paper sewn to the under side.
"Down with the French! To hell with Napoleon!"
screamed a weird voice, apparently at Rapp's elbow, and
instantly the two officers wheeled round, pistol in hand.
" "Tis only the parrot, " the landlord said with a sneering
laugh. " We're quiet folks here. "
Rapp and Savary stood listening.
"God bless the Pope! God's curse on Bonaparte!"
An eldritch scream followed, then total silence. But in
a second or two the low jug-jug of a nightingale's song rose
and terminated in another scream.
Savary stepped to the window. In a cage a few feet
distant the parrot was sitting as if carved in stone, its head
down, its right eye upturned, apparently deeply satisfied
with the effect that it had produced.
"You have guests who do not love us, mine host?" Rapp
observed jestingly. "Where did the parrot learn that
singsong?"
"Ach, not so bad?" was the imperturbable answer.
"What is one to do ? Men of all sorts come here, from every
port of the Danube between Donauworth and Rustchuk,
and that's a thousand miles and more."
Savary continued to stare out of the window.
"Who is that?" he sharply asked. "And to whom is he
signalling?"
34 6 Schonbrunn
" Ach, that?" the landlord said, coming up to the window.
"That is poor Wilhelm. He got his dose at Aspern. He
was bandaging one leg when whiff ! comes a round shot and
rips the flesh from the other. Both had to come off in
hospital. But he got over it, God knows how. Better
dead, I say. Wilhelm, however, does not take that view,
and there he is! He used to sing as merry a song, tell as good
a story as any man in Nussdorf, and he would stand his
drink like a Suabian. Now he's queer. He's queer. I
give him a crust for scaring the birds, and that shed to sleep
in."
He pointed to a hovel of dank and rotting planks.
Near it, prone amongst the refuse and garbage, lay a
monstrous figure, horribly mutilated, both legs amputated,
waving a huge flapper with both hands; now and then a
groan of fatigue or pain escaped him, and with a cry of
baffled rage he would lie panting, the flapper inert. Crowds
of starving birds sat watching for these intervals, perched
on trees, on the wall, on the bushes, or fluttering along the
ground.
"That too is war," Rapp thought, and looked at what
to him resembled a monstrous caterpillar.
"He hates them birds," the host continued with hideous
affability. "He used to be kind-hearted enough; but now,
as I said, he's a bit wrong here," tapping his forehead.
"Seems to make no difference: starling, finch, tit, redbreast
or thrush, he hates 'em all."
"He must have had a black spot in him somewhere,"
Rapp said suddenly. "Never have I seen a man wounded
in battle that did not come out of it a better man than he
went in. "
"Think so?" the landlord said, with his insolent good-
nature. "Well, there's no saying. I've seen plenty just
the other way."
Savary, who understood the drift of Rapp's remark,
On the Track of a Crime 347
looked at him in contemptuous surprise. Was this the
place or the time for moralizing on war and peace?
But now, not less anxious to be rid of his visitors than his
visitors to be safely out of this house, the landlord returned
to the subject of Staps's habits.
"Was he religious? Was he an adherent of the Jesuits or
other society?"
"Religious? He used to pray morning and night, if
that's religion. There!" he said, pointing to a neat clean
rug in front of the bed. " I have heard him at it when every-
body else in the house was snoring. I used to pray myself,
but that's long ago. God bless you, where's the good of it?
A man of sense must pray to himself, aye, and answer his
own prayers, or they'll never be answered. What do you
think, monsieur?" he said, addressing Rapp. "You look
as if you knew'what's what. Why, when I was young, I tried
all sorts of praying dodges; I prayed for this, I prayed for
that ; but never an answer, big or little. At Klagenfurth I
prayed to God to give me two post-horses. Did I get 'em?
Instead of getting my two post-horses, three of my cows
sickened and died in one day. After that I stopped pray-
ing, and tried other ways of getting on in the world. But
this made me notice the lad at his prayers. 'We're all
alike when we are young,' says I to myself, 'and doubt-
less the lad is asking for things just as foolish as I asked at
his age.'"
"Quite as foolish!" was Savary's grim retort.
He was thinking of Staps's asseveration that he had
implored the divine guidance as to the murder of Napoleon,
and to himself he thought, "To attack the master of a
million troops and the dictator of Europe certainly it
wants God Almighty Himself!"
"Had he any clothes to be sent for?" Rapp asked, struck
by a sudden thought.
"No clothes I ever saw but those on his back. "
34 8 Schonbrunn
"Is he an educated lad? Had he books? His new
master will like him to read aloud to him."
It was Savary who put this question.
"Yes," the landlord answered contemptuously, "he
read a deal in books. I've got 'em downstairs. I took
them out of his room for to keep them for him."
"Show them to me."
VII
A quarter of an hour later Rapp and Savary quitted the
Goldener Adler and walked to the Zwei Kronen, the chief inn
of Nussdorf. It was close to the wharves and overlooked
the highroad from Brunn.
Savary visited the custom-house, but discovered nothing.
He and Rapp crossed the river in a boat without a keel,
which rolled excessively and increased Savary's sulkiness
and contempt for Austrian civilization. His enquiries pro-
duced nothing fresh.
It was nearly two o'clock before they returned
As they re-crossed the river they heard in the distance
the heavy thud-thud of guns. Savary looked at Rapp
enquiringly, but Rapp knew no more than he did.
Napoleon had not waited for the signature of Francis II.,
but as though it were enough that he had affixed his seal to
the Treaty, commanded Vienna, by the thunder of a hun-
dred cannon, to rejoice at his magnanimity. The action also
dispelled the rumours that the story of peace was a fake,
and allayed the dangerous excitement rising in the city.
CHAPTER XII
AN EMPEROR AND HIS SECRETARIES
TO those about him an extraordinary elation marked
Bonaparte's demeanour all that day, affecting them
exactly as the proximity of a highly charged magnetic
battery might have affected them marshals, generals,
officers of his suite, officers of the household, pages, aides-
de-camp, secretaries, courtiers.
Berthier's face had an angry congested look, such as it
wore only in days of battle, and he gave instructions or
orders to his subordinates in a shrill and imperative voice,
but with a slight stammer habitual to him in moments of
great strain.
The Emperor himself since his return from the morning
ride and the address to his Guards had betrayed nothing,
and appeared to feel nothing but an overwhelming energy and
capacity for work. His countenance was calm ; in his eyes
burned a fixed concentrated light. The oppression as well
as the presentiments of the preceding days had dispersed.
The apparitions of the past night might, he told himself
again, have been an actuality, or they might have been
merely a projection of his mind; the essential thing was
that he had undergone the strangest ordeal that can affect
the heart, and in that ordeal he had conquered. The out-
burst to Duroc had made clearer to himself masses of in-
349
35 Schonbrunn
choate ideas gathering in his mind for the past three months
or the past three years. He had placed the actions of his
manhood front to front with the dreams of his youth; the
contradiction for a moment had appalled his reason and
troubled his will; but the contradiction was only appar-
ent for he had analysed his career stage by stage, and stage
by stage he had justified that career.
"But all my career is mystery. How at such an hour as
this can the superhuman fail to assert itself? The assassin's
dagger may have prepared the way for the phantoms of the
night. Who shall assign limits to the possible and the
impossible?"
The whole incident, the epileptoid attack of the afternoon,
the vigil, interrupted only by a couple of hours' sleep to-
wards dawn, had left merely a painful hyperassthesia. The
most ordinary incidents got on his nerves. The evil odours
which, at that period, lurked for several hours every morn-
ing about the corridors of every great house in Paris or
Vienna nauseated him; but he surrounded himself with
a cloud of eau de Cologne. The scratching of a quill,
or a page hastily turned by one of his secretaries, ex-
asperated him; but he refused to give way to these
sensations.
"To work! To work!"
He repeated the phrase that day a hundred times. He
seemed to seek forgetfulness and to find pride in the display
of his prodigious energies, now liberated and functioning
joyously. He seemed determined to push on every phase
of his gigantic plans simultaneously the fortification of
Passau, of Antwerp, of Toulon, of Linz, of Ratisbon; the
plans of campaign for his armies in Portugal and in Spain ;
the giving of a central impulse to the dislocated actions
of Soult, Mortier, Victor, and St. Cyr; the canal joining
the Seine to the Rhone; the canal joining the Meuse to the
Rhine; public buildings in Paris, public buildings in Lyons;
An Emperor and His Secretaries 351
the scheme to paralyse for ever Austria's unlimited issue of
paper money.
He had begun immediately after the harangue to his
troops; he had given elaborate instructions first to Berthier,
then to Maret, then again to Berthier and later to Lauriston.
He had eaten a hasty lunch and recommenced. From one
to three o'clock he had dictated to Men6val alone; at three
he had called in the aid of Fain, now Meneval's right-hand
man; but, his activity generating new force, he had in a
quarter of an hour summoned as secretaries two other aides-
de-camp, Montesquieu and Bertrand, and finally Marbceuf,
a good-looking, sinewy guardsman of two and twenty, son
of the former commandant of Corsica, the early protector
of Lastitia Bonaparte. He was now dictating to five secre-
taries at once.
At times Napoleon seemed to find a pleasure in display-
ing to others or in proving to himself the range of his
faculties. To-day, however, his purpose in summoning
five secretaries was practical. He wished to be out of
Vienna and out of Germany ; he wished to feel his own hand
once more on the reins in Paris and throughout France.
He wished to dispatch within twenty-four hours a mass of
business and correspondence that in ordinary circumstances
would have taxed even his powers of work to dispatch in
forty-eight hours. He had an additional incentive per-
sonal and moral. This display of conscious strength
affected him somewhat as the visit to his grenadiers had
affected him that morning. It gave him tranquillity the
tranquillity born of conscious and deliberate might. The
death of Pierre Lestocq had moved him, and, yielding to an
impulse, he had permitted a brief word from himself to be
addressed to the regiment by its colonel, "Your Emperor
sympathizes with you in the loss of a comrade. His ardour
to return to the standards made him quit the hospital before
his wounds were healed. He was one of the brave."
35 2 Schonbrunn
ii
Four o'clock had struck. In Napoleon's cabinet all was
still vibrating energy, invention, intellect, and will. Ideas
and plans hurtled in on his imagination more rapidly than he
could find words to express them or find hands to take them
down. Masses of them were flung out in rapid and elliptic
utterances. These were seized by Meneval and his trained
subordinates, set down fragmentarily, recast, approved, or
torn in shreds and redictated. At other moments Napoleon
spoke in a low melancholy voice, as though obsessed by
thoughts of a darker complexion; then again, gathering
force, his words became rapid and vibrating; or he would
suddenly cease his pacing of the floor, and, standing in total
silence, he would tug with a spasmodic motion at the braid
on the right sleeve of his coat, then after a second or two
he would burst into a torrent of violent rhetoric, through
which, however, a definite meaning forced itself. The scene
and the hour suggested one other scene only, Condivi's
vivid description of Michael Angelo's studio, the Titan
figure at work in the twilight, the air filled with hot dust,
chips, and fragments of marble flying from the chisel like
sparks from the iron on the anvil.
Me"neVal sat near the fireplace on Napoleon's left. Along
side of Me"neVal at a table by the south window sat Baron
Fain. These had in charge the correspondence with Paris
with Clarke, Cambace'res, Decres, and even with Fouche".
To Marbceuf were dictated the letters to subject or allied
kings, to independent princes and other minor poten-
tates of Germany. The two military secretaries, Mon-
tesquiou and Bertrand, occupied the opposite corner of
the room on Napoleon's right. They were at this mo-
ment taking down the day's instructions for the gene-
rals in Spain Soult, Gouvain St. Cyr, Augereau, and
Suchet.
An Emperor and His Secretaries 353
Napoleon in a pause glanced at the clock. It was twenty
minutes past four.
The trial of the intended assassin, though not a man in
that room except himself was aware of it, must now be
ended. Savary might arrive at any moment to announce
that Staps had made his recantation or had received his
death-sentence.
"And why is Savary not already here?" he asked himself
impatiently.
For a second or two he ceased dictating, and, apparently
idle, stood in gloomy abstraction staring out on the scene in
front, on the sinking October sun, the paths strewn with
dead leaves, the broad squares of grass, the white statues
niched in their walls of solid greenery. Beyond the Glori-
ette a flock of starlings passed in whirring flight. They
were on their way from their feeding-grounds by the Danube
to their homes in the Wienerwald. He turned abruptly
aside and resumed his diagonal pacing of the room, glancing
again at the clock.
In the oppressive silence Pain's slightly asthmatic breath-
ing was unpleasantly marked. Me'neval's pen continued
its steady scratching. His large, calm, bald forehead was
held high above the sheet on which he was writing.
As though by any means to drown these irritations,
Napoleon, without indicating the secretary to whom the
order was addressed, exclaimed "Send Poniatowski a
sabre. I am not done with him and his horsemen. He is a
Pole and will value such a gift from me; but strike out that
clause about Warsaw. Poland has not yet proved her fit-
ness for self-government."
Two secretaries lifted their heads at once, uncertain to
whom the words were spoken ; but knowing by instinct that
Meneval had taken the minute, Napoleon turned angrily to
one of the two who had lifted their heads it was Bertrand
"Demand of Daru what has become of the 34,000 pairs
23
354 Schonbrunn
of slippers and the 34,000 pairs of winter boots which he
reported to me four days ago yes, and the 45,000 shirts
and the 9,000 gaiters destined for Trieste? Not a rag is to
be left behind us. War is war. And command him at once
to dispatch 50,000 rations of biscuit to Passau."
Bertrand jotted down the places and figures and began
at once to outline the dispatch.
The Emperor glanced down a draft handed to him by
Marbceuf.
"Good!" he said. "But why do you say, 'I write to
Your Serene Highness to inform you '? Why say 'I
write'? Does His Serene Highness imagine that you are
shouting down an ear-trumpet? Put simply, 'This is to
inform Your Highness. ' '
And turning to Bertrand, who had not yet finished the
order to the governor of Vienna, Daru he gave the unex-
pected command:
"Send for the Prince de Neuchatel. When he enters, let
Montesquieu and yourself correct or verify these instruc-
tions by my interview with him. Remain ! " he said abruptly
to Fain, who had risen to let Montesquiou pass. " Demand
of Clarke" (his Minister of War at Paris) "why I have not
yet received the detailed report on my order for 120,000
muskets on the model of 1777, and of my second order for
180,000 muskets No. I Republican."
"Les droles!" he said to himself, taking a pinch of snuff.
"Do they sleep in their chairs in Paris? To whom have
you now come?"
"To the King of Wurttemberg," Marbceuf answered.
Napoleon frowned. "Ah, Jerome! Let the coquin
wait." Jerome's debts and the criminal extravagance of
the court at Cassel had compelled him to modify a secret
clause in the Treaty.
At this moment both the folding-doors were flung wide.
"The Prince de Neuchatel."
An Emperor and His Secretaries 355
Two pages of the household, in gold and scarlet, appeared,
and, between them, through the vertical oblong of dark-
ness, Berthier in full uniform entered, scarcely less glittering
and dazzling than the imperial chamberlains and pages.
His carriage and six fine horses waited below, and he had
been stopped at the very door.
Napoleon considered him. A malicious smile broke over
his face.
"We cannot part with you, mon prince. Where is your
baton?" he went on, taking him affectionately by the ear.
"What a comedy!" Montesquiou murmured to Bertrand
as he took his seat beside him at a temporary desk made
out of a low box in acacia-wood laid on the top of a
gilt table. Montesquiou's audacity threw Bertrand into a
panic; but to suppress Montesquiou was out of the ques-
tion. He had all the levity and all the dare-devil courage of
his caste. He was chivalrous, never refused to do a kind-
ness that was in his power; and if he were in debt every-
where, he was also, whenever he had money, the most
open-handed of men. To him certainly Napoleon's bitter
sarcasm on the noblesse could not be extended "I showed
them the path to glory, but they would not tread it. I
opened my drawing-room doors and they rushed through
them in crowds."
ra
"The mine under the Molker bastion has not exploded.
Why ? ' ' the Emperor said, addressing Berthier, as though that
information, just semaphored by Daru, were the cause of his
interrupting his Chief of the Staff's return to Vienna. Buc
without waiting for a reply, he addressed to him a series of
rapid questions upon the provisioning of the Eleventh
Corps, Marmont's, which, three days later, was to replace
the Imperial Guard in the capital.
35 6 Schonbrunn
"Tell me the 3ist foot, the I4th chasseurs, and the
1 9th in what parts of Tuscany are they quartered and
the 6th hussars and the 4th Polish lancers? I must give
Eugene at least twelve regiments of cavalry. I cannot
have Lefebvre's blunder repeated. And a flying column
must be sent into Istria. The English on hearing of the
peace will at once attempt a descent. "
Berthier gave the necessary answers. It was an amazing
feat of memory; but Berthier was not the "heaven-born
chief of the staff" for nothing.
"Good good!" Napoleon said, still in the affectionate
voice which all that day he had employed in talking to him.
"And how many rounds of ammunition are there at Gratz? "
"Eight hundred and seventy-five thousand, but other
two hundred thousand are on the way. "
"Eight hundred thousand? Good God! There ought
to be two millions. See to it at once. And when can
Macdonald occupy the town?"
"In five days."
But this time Berthier's answer was too unhesitating.
Napoleon's suspicious ears caught the accent of a premedi-
tated or prearranged reply.
" In five days? Why not in three? Have I forgiven the
past, recalled him from exile, afforded him an unparalleled
opportunity of glory at Wagram and made him a marshal,
to be repaid with ingratitude or sloth? Five days ! "
A storm seemed imminent; but Napoleon turned with a
gesture of impatience to Bertrand.
"Write! The two divisions of Marshal Macdonald shall
be at Gratz in three days."
The order, as Berthier very well knew, could not possibly
be executed. It affected him disturbingly; for it showed
that not only in external and negligible affairs but in press-
ing and organic things Napoleon had divorced his mind
from reality. Nevertheless, not a muscle of his face moved.
An Emperor and His Secretaries 357
The unfortunate trick of folding his arms across his chest
alone betrayed his discomposure.
Napoleon saw it ; a slight nervous cough, habitual to him
in moments of excitement, seized him. He spat angrily on
the ground.
"And Drouet?" he exclaimed, addressing Berthier.
"And the three Bavarian divisions? They must have their
vengeance on the Tyrolese ; they must themselves punish the
rebels; they must themselves teach these swineherds that
no one can with impunity revolt against my ally! I am
ready to hear their grievances; but they must state them
upon their knees. Let me hear not a syllable about their
independence, or the continuance of Austria's rule! I will
wage eternal war rather."
Again the nervous cough, caused by an irritation in the
bronchial tubes, aggravated by his speech in the Danube
mists that morning, seized Napoleon.
Berthier was about to take his leave, but the Emperor,
instantly changing his tone, drew him aside and said in a
low voice:
"You know my plans. Has Barraguay d'Hilliers an
organizing head? Can you make use of him? I will
retain the nominal command till I reach Passau; but you
will leave the Alleegasse at once, and take up your residence
at Schonbrunn. Here your power is absolute. But re-
member : there is no peace so long as we are in an enemy's
country. Relax nothing. I desire each corps to enter, pass
through, and leave Vienna every man with his finger on the
trigger. The conditions are "
He stated the details of the evacuation. By November
ist, Massena with 40,000 and Davout with 60,000 were to
evacuate Moravia, the latter concentrating upon Vienna,
the former upon Krems. Oudinot with the Second Corps,
24,000 strong, was to be out of Vienna by the same date and
concentrated upon Polten and Molk. Then followed a
35 8 Schonbrunn
second series of instructions, giving the position of each
corps up to the I5th December, Berthier now and then inter-
polating a variant or a suggestion, every word, including
Berthier's corrections, being meanwhile verified or corrected
by Bertrand and Montesquiou.
With a tug at his ear and a friendly tap on the shoulder
Berthier was dismissed.
IV
In Napoleon's presence, the individuality of other men
was effaced. During that interview six men were taking
down his commands or ideas or words as rapidly as he could
utter them, but Meneval seemed to speak and act like Ber-
thier, Berthier like Fain, Fain like Marbceuf, and Marbceuf
like Bertrand. Montesquiou alone retained a certain per-
sonality, the corrupt cynicism of his mind, the negligent
disdain of his manners, making this Mephistopheles of the
ante-chamber, even in his youth, one of the most outstand-
ing representatives of the noblesse in Napoleon's entourage.
Me*neVal, meanwhile, had been engaged on a dispatch
to the Czar. Napoleon had aided him, now by a word, now
by a phrase, jerked in amid his dialogue with Berthier. He
now took the draft from M^neval's hands, and, with a grim-
ace, began to correct.
"What is this? It is incredible."
He tore the draft into shreds and trampled on them.
Meneval waited, suave and imperturbable. Less down-
right than Rapp or Duroc, less sincere au fond, he yet
retained in Napoleon's neighbourhood a measure of critical
power which he had constantly to disguise.
"Write!"
The Emperor sketched the heads of the draft in the
following saccade* phrases,
"To the Czar write, Who has been poisoning the mind
An Emperor and His Secretaries 359
of Your Majesty? I will never protect a rebel. What!
Tyrol in flames, insurrections in Spain, Prussia arming
does Alexander think me mad ? Does he imagine that I will
imitate the accursed House of Lorraine? Let Francis II.
send gold chains to ci-devant emigres or to insurgent peas-
ants! If a single Polish rebel seeks refuge in my State I
will have him instantly shot or sent in chains to Moscow.
The only hope of Warsaw is in the favour of its sovereign,
his Imperial Majesty the Czar. Let it look to him for
redress. Repeat that I have given Austria most lenient
terms. She cedes Salzburg and some trifles beyond the
Inn. I have not taken an inch of Bavaria, and in Italy
only the region indispensable for my communications with
Dalmatia."
This, Me"neval thought ironically, Alexander L, who has
never forgotten Suvarow's campaign and is still sore on
account of Italy, is to accept as an accurate description of
Austria's surrender of the Innviertel, Salzburg, the best
portion of Friuli, Carniola, Trieste, and all Dalmatia and
Croatia south of the Save 3,500,000 subjects and an in-
demnity of 3,400,000 ! And will Alexander accept the half
million wretched peasants of Tarnopol as the equivalent of
the 1,500,000 added to Warsaw?
But Napoleon tricked his partners in war as at cards.
Shortsightedness was part of his "greatness."
"Say also," the Emperor began again, stamping his foot,
"that I have been thus lenient out of consideration for his
Imperial Majesty the Czar. Add that Madrid is safe, Well-
ington in full retreat, and that America is about to declare
war on England."
He turned to Bertrand, Eugene's admirer and flatterer.
"To the Viceroy, Prince Eugene," he said, "write 'It
is fitting that the victor of Raab shall be the subjugator of
the Tyrol, and secure for himself the laurels that fell from
the brow of Lefebvre. ' "
360 Schonbrunn
He stopped abruptly. "Quoi done? What is it now?"
Fain, at the table on his left, had raised his head. The
letters to the secondary kings and princes announcing the
peace were completed and awaited the Emperor's signature.
Without sitting down Napoleon took a quill, shook off
the ink, then glanced keenly at the headings and at the
"Monsieur mon frere" to Frederick Augustus, the big,
broad-faced, somnolent King of Saxony; to Maximilian
Joseph, King of Bavaria, changing without rhyme or
reason the first line of Fain's draft into "Je m'empresse
d'annoncer" and handing it to the secretary to re- write,
whilst he proceeded to sign the remaining letters to Dai-
berg, prince primate of the Confederation of the Rhine, to
the Grand-Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, to the Prince Borg-
hese, husband of Pauline, now at Turin, to the Grand-Duke
of Baden making the singular flourish that now passed
for his name, though only an eye accustomed to decipher
Shabestari handwriting could transliterate more than thf
"N."
He returned then to Bertrand's letter to Eugene.
It had long been Napoleon's whim to make a soldier of his
stepson, and he had decided to train him in the art of waf
himself. Eugene, though an amiable individual, was as
unfit for the part assigned to him by his great step-father as
were Joseph or Louis; but he was as incapable of treason
as of ambition, and more conscious than the brothers
of Napoleon's greatness, so conscious, indeed, that three
months hence he, the son of Josephine, was to describe
Napoleon's resolution to divorce her as "an honour to my
mother. "
"Write," he said to Bertrand, "write to the Viceroy I
charge you especially, first, with the submission of the Tyrol ;
secondly, with the duty of organizing the territories ceded
to me by this treaty, henceforth to be described by the name
of the Provinces of Illyria. You shall yourself remain
An Emperor and His Secretaries 361
in Vienna until the exchange of ratifications. You shall
review at once the Eleventh Corps, which is now under your
command, and furnish it from the magazines at Vienna
with everything that it requires. The sick and wounded of
the Army of Italy and of the Eleventh Corps shall be
removed to Gratz and to Loben. "
Then followed instructions to Generals Rusca and Drouet
in regard to the concentration upon Villach and upon
Salzburg, Balsano and Brixen, terminating with a sketch of
the plan of campaign.
These instructions, dictated alternately to Bertfand
and Montesquiou, the former taking the Tyrol, the latter
the newly acquired territories, amounted, even in their
condensed form, to 2,500 words, packed with geographical
details, directing the movements and numbers, the length
of the marches, the positions of brigades, regiments, divi-
sions, extending over a vast region whose government,
fortresses, its finance and laws, its river, mountains, cities,
and plains, were not less clear to Napoleon's mind, un-
aided that afternoon by any map, than the inlaid pattern of
the costly table at which Bertrand sat writing.
The torrent of geographical names and military details
ceased; and, in the silence broken only by the scratching of
the quills, observing that MeneVal's pen was idle, and that,
with his bald head and wide perspiring face uplifted, he
was waiting for a command, Napoleon, interpreting the
look before Me'ne'val had spoken a word, exclaimed:
"Ah, that absurd business!"
He sat down and, putting his fingers together, laughed
shrilly, jocosely, cunningly.
"What blockheads your men of letters are! Indeed it is
one thing to lead for a single week an army corps of thirty
362 Schonbrunn
thousand men and another to translate like Delille an epic
in twelve books, or write a history in thirty volumes like
Lacretelle! This proposal for a monument to me how
fatuous in itself ! No man should permit a monument to be
erected to himself in his lifetime. At most he may allow
his own generation to choose the site; the generation after
him may raise the pedestal ; it is the third generation only
that should dare erect the statue. Yet what can I do? I
have been drawn headlong by the follies of this age. Good
God ! These men of letters ! If the secret of stupidity were
lost to the world I could find enough in the Institute to re-
people a planet!"
He broke into another strident laugh.
"They intend nothing but honour to your Majesty,"
MeneVal said, deprecatingly. "This monument has long
been in their minds. It was intended as a surprise upon
your return to Paris. This unfortunate dispute about the
names has frustrated that intention."
"Bah," Napoleon said, flinging himself back, "phrases!
phrases!"
Me'ne'val was alluding to a letter received from Paris
three days previously, but left for consideration till this
afternoon, requesting Napoleon to decide whether he would
be styled "Augustus" upon both piers of the triumphal
arch, or "Augustus" upon the one and "Germanicus"
upon the other, or, again, "Augustus" on both piers and
"Germanicus" on the entablature above the key-stone, so
that, beginning from the top, it would read, "Napoleon,
Germanicus, Augustus, Augustus."
"But this earth is a children's nursery," Napoleon went
on in reflective tones, "and grown men like myself must
play with the toys in use there or leave it or leave it!
But these messieurs of the Institute ! Daily they move me
to anger or to laughter. A year ago I had to reprehend one
for comparing me to God, another for asserting that the
An Emperor and His Secretaries 363
universe was hushed in my presence. The universe! If I
frown, will a fly cease its buzzing, or a cricket its song?
These phrase-makers! To what depths of imbecility or
vileness will not the human mind descend!"
The cloud dissipated instantly, and he resumed:
"What do they intend by this request? Fontanes
that pompous school-usher, fit only to be a laureate in prose
to the Princess Bacciocchi does he think to overwhelm me
with his empty words? Augustus? Germanicus? What
are these names ces noms-la to inscribe on my triumphal
arch? Augustus won an indifferent sea-fight at Actium,
but for the rest of his life his sword was sheathed. When
Varus lost the six legions, did Augustus hasten from Rome
to avenge the insult? Not a bit of it. He wandered up
and down his palace wringing his hands and wailing
'Varus, give me back my legions; give me back my legions;
Varus!' Is that the part for a hero or even for a brave
man to play ? And is that a name to inscribe on my monu-
ment? As for Germanicus, he owes his fame to his widow,
his funeral urn, and the venomous eulogies of Tacitus."
He looked at Me'ne'val as though expecting or tempting
him to argue. Meneval knew better.
"Sire," he said with extreme deference, "does not M.
Fontanes mean merely to express by Germanicus, 'the
conqueror of Germany,' not the individual Roman?"
"Very well. But why not say so in good French? Why
use Latin? The Romans when they raised statues to
Cassar did not inscribe his victories in Greek ! France is a
greater empire than Rome, and possesses a greater lan-
guage. Why should it not use its own tongue? I desire
French to become the language of a reconstituted Europe, a
re-united Europe. I am resolved that Europe shall be one
and indivisible; that in the future a man shall say 'I am
a citizen of Europe,' as now he says 'of France,' 'of
Saxony,' 'of Austria.' Language is the very principle of
364 Schonbrunn
division. Language sows division amongst men; it fosters
that effete absurdity 'the nation' and national spirit.
What barbarous alphabets and literatures are the German
and the Russian ! They are fit only for a Museum of An-
tiquities. But to the religion and culture, to the arts and
civilization of the new era I intend to give one language
French. Therefore to inscribe my name in Latin is at once
to insult the majesty of the French tongue and to thwart
my ultimate designs. Is it not so? Is it not so? No, but
answer, Meneval, answer!"
Meneval had no answer.
Napoleon went on:
"But the pedant is the pedant still; the same to-day,
yesterday, and for ever. He is perpetually on the hunt
for comparisons. He cannot see a thing until he has found
something like it in a book. History is the instructor
of mankind; it is the only philosophy; but History never
repeats itself. Because I fought the English in Spain in
1808, why must I be perpetually reminded that Louis
XIV. 's generals fought in Spain in 1708? What resem-
blance is there between my wars and his ? My wars are wars
for a new Europe, his were wars for an old dynasty. I
came to Spain to put an end to feudal and to priestly ty-
ranny; Louis XIV., to fasten on the neck of Spain the yoke
of Jesuitism and feudal oppression. Pedantry ! Pedantry !
Why must Canova make me stand naked to posterity's
gaze as if I were a Greek boxer? I would destroy every
copy of that statue if I could. France and I should be
examples to the future, not imitators of the past. Write
as I bid you no Latin, no Germanicus, no Augustus; but
simply my name and in French."
MeneVal jotted down a hurried note.
Napoleon turned sharply to Bertrand, "Demand once
more of Daru whether cloth breeches have been supplied to
the Second Corps and to the two regiments which a week
An Emperor and His Secretaries 365
ago sent in their petition. This is not weather for cotton.
Does he confound the Danube with the Bay of Naples?
And request Admiral Decres to execute at once my orders
of the 1 2th. Do you understand?" he said to Marbceuf.
"To do them without any more of his 'buts' or 'fors' or
'ife.'"
A smile flickered in Montesquieu's eyes. He disliked
the ruddy, loud-voiced sailor, whose prolixity during the
recent Walcheren episode had caused frequent explosions
in the cabinet at Schonbrunn.
Excitement and anger, some secret impatience, had
replaced the silky, humorous, bantering tone in Which the
Emperor had spoken to Me"neval.
A storm against the Swiss followed the angry tirade
against Dam's remissness and Decres' prolixity. Napo-
leon was becoming more and more irritated by Savary's
continued absence.
"The Helvetian Republic grumbles because it has to
supply me with a miserable 18,000 men, yet England has
two Swiss regiments in her pay. Write to these deputies
that there shall be no abatement, not a single conscript, no,
not a cartridge! And what does Clarke mean?" he said to
the same secretary, Fain, for by this time Fain had acquired
something of Meneval's dexterity in seizing the Emperor's
phrases on their flight.
He thrust a volume of the Code before Fain's eyes.
"I see there," he said, pointing with a trembling, short
but finely manicured finger to a particular clause, heavily
pencilled on the margin, "I see there a law which ordains
that any man who receives a deserter or a flag of truce after
sunset shall be shot. Good God! Are we still under the
Terror? Is the Committee of Public Safety still sitting?
Command Clarke to prepare at once 'A Guide for Military
Tribunals' permitting the abrogation of this infamous
law."
366 Schonbrunn
There was a lull of a few seconds.
Napoleon glanced at the time-piece. Nine minutes past
five. Why had Savary not arrived ? Had there been some
hitch? Some fresh discovery?
He was about to dictate a sentence to Meneval, but a
subconscious process of his mind having worked to its issue
he stopped Fain, and dictated a rapid order in addition to
the three with which Fain was already struggling.
"Write also to Aldini at Milan to have a brochure written
but not more than fifty pages long. I do not wish a treat-
ise that will not be finished before Judgment Day, but a
short, pungent article, seasoned with Italian anecdotes,
proving that the Papacy is and always has been the enemy
of Italian unity. Request him to take as his motto Machia-
velli's maxim, ' The Papacy is the stone thrust into the side
of Italy to keep the wound open.' Make him paint Julius
II. and the League of Cambray hurling France and Austria
against Venice."
Me'ne'val had now completed the letter to the Institute.
Napoleon glanced along the pages, and, without a com-
ment, stooped forward abruptly and scratched his signature.
The vicious flourish at the end betrayed something of the
writer's mood.
Me'ne'val was preparing to continue the interrupted
letter to Francis II. As yet only the concluding sentence
satisfied Napoleon entirely, "Voici done la quatrieme
guerre entre Votre Majeste" et moi termine'e. "
But at that moment the double door was again flung
open. A page appeared.
"The due de Rovigo begs an audience of your Majesty."
"Where is he?"
"In the audience chamber, your Majesty."
"Bring him here."
He passed swiftly into the adjoining cabinet, which, during
Napoleon's residence at Schonbrunn, corresponded to the
An Emperor and His Secretaries 367
Bureau