by Emil Ludwig
Such was the reply of the modern Xerxes.
Napoleon, we are told, " laid the paper on the table, and, after a pause, began to protest in vigorous terms." He said :
" I am not a prisoner of war ! . . . I came on board the
' Bellerophon ' of my own free will, after previous negotiation with the commander. I threw myself on your protection, and claimed the rights of hospitality. The tricolour was still waving over Rochefort and Bordeaux. I might have gone back to the army; or might for years have lived secretly among the people, who were devoted to me.
" Instead, I came to this country as a private person. I asked the commander of one of your warships whether he was disposed to take me and my train to England. He told me he had orders to this effect from his government. If I have fallen into a trap, your government has acted dishonourably and has dishonoured your flag. ... St. Helena will kill me in three months. I am used to riding twenty leagues a day. What can I do on a little rock at the world's end ? I will not go ! ... If your government wishes to kill me, that can be done here. ... I gave the prince regent an opportunity of performing the finest action
"An Everlasting Disgrace !
of his life. I have been the greatest of his country's foes, and I paid you the highest compliment in the world by voluntarily entrusting myself to your protection. . . . What you are proposing will be an everlasting disgrace to the whole British nation ! "
The most characteristic point in this protest, which he renews in writing, is the moral indignation with which it thrills. International law is but lightly touched upon, for what he claims is a hero's right. Such were the words spoken in the heat of the moment, in that small cabin, to the officers who had brought him notice of his doom, and who subsequently recorded them for posterity. Though spoken in haste, they have a historical ring and some of the sentences are modelled for imperishability. A soul has been wounded, a soul that is mourning, not so much on account of its own loss of freedom, as because the world fails to recognise greatness.
Thus, in the first moment of his doom, he recognises that which, a century later, cannot be more profoundly expressed by the great-grandchildren of the men of those days, who have been brought up on contemplation of the legend of Napoleon's career. Themistocles feels that he has been betrayed. Once again, one of these legitimate princes has failed to seize the opportunity of performing the finest action of his life. A man void of imagination, a weakling in possession of brute force, he crushed the great and splendid thing which has fallen into his hands.
But from under the brutal pressure of this fist, the spirit of what he is crushing rises in a tenuous column. He upon whom the doom is enforced has acquired a power over himself, a power which sustains him in his powerlessness—stoicism. After the first outbreak, he bears the injustice with indomitable firmness, enduring for ten days the indignity of his position at Plymouth, and unruffled while England seizes his baggage and his money.
In due course, the Emperor and his companions were trans-
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Farewell Europe
ferred to the " Northumberland," which set sail for St. Helena. It was on an August morning that, for the last time, Napoleon set eyes on the coast of France, looming through the mist. But what did he care about the coast ? The centre of his interest lay many miles to the eastward—Paris, which he had wooed more hotly than all the rest of the world, Paris, which had rejected his suit.
By evening, he loses sight of Europe, which he has ruled. Darkling is the sea, which he has never been able to rule. He stands in the bows, not looking backwards, nor forwards either. As on the voyage to Egypt, he looks upwards towards the stars. He is seeking his own star.
A great saga is drawing to its close.
BOOK FIVE
THE ROCK
On Judgment Day, before God's throne,
There stood at last, Napoleon.
The Devil had his list begun
Of crimes the Bonapartes had done,
When God the Father, or God the Son,
Cut Satan short before God's throne :
" Don't bore us all to death with reading
A German professorial pleading !
If you're bold enough to face him,
In your kingdom you may place him."
—GOETHE.
THE sea spreads out into the vast distance. It is like a mirror of steel. The man on the rock, hands clasped behind, stares across the watery plain. He is lonely, so lonely.
One looking at him from a distance would see a fat man with short legs, a man of uncertain age. He is wearing a green coat, decorated with the star of the Legion of Honour; silk stockings ; three-cornered hat in his hands. The head is large ; the brownish hair makes a bush at the back ; there is no sign of whitening. The short neck springs from powerful shoulders. The features are as if hewn out of stone, with a yellowish tint, like the marble of an ancient statue that has been darkened in the course of the ages ; no wrinkles, but the classical profile is somewhat marred by the heaviness of the chin. The only beautiful features are the nose and the teeth. These last are perfect, and he has never lost a tooth. His hands, too, are beautiful. All through his campaigns he was scrupulous in his care for them; and, when correcting the letters and despatches he dictated, he generally used a pencil in order that he might avoid staining his fingers with ink.
The doctors have told us a good deal about his physical condition. " Pulse never more frequent than 62 ; bosom well padded, almost like a woman's, and with very little hair; partes viriles exiguitates insignis sicut pueri." He himself knows much about his body, he has studied his battle-field of his life in order that here, likewise, he may utilise his forces to the best advantage.
" I have never yet heard my own heart beating; it is almost as if I had none," he says, half seriously. Moderation, he assures us, is the secret of his amazing faculty for work. " Nature has bestowed on me two valuable gifts : the capacity for sleeping
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A Body of Steel
whenever I want to ; and the incapacity for committing excesses in drinking and eating. . . . However little a man may eat, he always eats too much. One can get ill from over-eating, but never from under-eating." The alternation between campaigning and sedentary life enables him again and again to escape from the air of the study, and to fortify his constitution by long rides and drives. " Water, air, and cleanliness are my favourite medicines."
With a body thus steeled, he can drive without stopping from Tilsit to Dresden, nearly five hundred miles, and be quite fresh at the journey's end: can ride fifty miles from Vienna to Semmering, breakfast there, and be back at work in Schonbrunn the same evening; can gallop in five hours from Valladolid to Burgos, a distance of about eighty miles. After long rides and marches through Poland, he reaches Warsaw at midnight and receives the new authorities at seven next morning. These are the excesses he practises to restore the balance of his natural forces. After a long spell of sedentary life, he will start off on a ride of seven days, or will go out shooting for the whole day; after great exertions, he will keep his room for twenty-four hours. He believes that his energy has saved his life. He says to Metternich : " Sometimes death only comes from lack of energy. Yesterday, when I was thrown out of my carriage, I thought I was done for. But I had just time to say to myself that I would not die. Any one else in my place would have been killed."
His muscles are powerful, but his nerves are sensitive. Accustomed to command, he cannot endure anything in the nature of compulsion. If his coat is at all tight, he tears it off; the same with shoes that pinch him in the slightest. On these occasions, he will box his servants' ears. If he has to wear court dress, they watch out while they help him on with his coat. When his mind is busy (when is it not ?) he will push away his breakfast, jump up from his chair, and stride about, talking, issuing orders. His handwriting is nothing more than a series
Napoleon as Emperor in 1815. Engraving by Robert Lefevre, after a painting by Muneret.
Sensitive N
erves
of violent contractions of the hand which cannot keep up with the furious pace of his thoughts; a sort of involuntary shorthand, which in places has not been deciphered after a hundred years of study. He cannot endure the smell of paint or size ; he always masks unpleasant odours by using eau-de-Cologne. If his nerves are utterly exhausted, he soothes them in a hot bath. When the war with England broke out, he worked continuously, with four secretaries, for three days and three nights, and then spent six hours in his bath dictating dispatches. This nervous irritability is the antithesis of his slow circulation. He thinks that, the constitution of his nerves being what it is, he would be in danger of going mad, " if it were not that my blood works so slowly."
But there is no evidence at all that his nervousness ever rose to the pitch of convulsions, that he suffered from epilepsy. This illness usually begins in childhood, and none of his schoolmates have reported that he had fits. Never was any one's life more closely watched than Napoleon's ; and the documents upon which the assertion that he was an epileptic is based are scanty, confused, and untrustworthy.
As long as his body remained healthy, he was able to endure all the tensions and shocks to which he was exposed. It was when he was approaching forty that he began to show the first symptoms of a stomach trouble which was in those days summarily diagnosed as cancerous. Beyond questions, the tendency to it was inherited. During the last three years of warfare, he was put out of action in decisive hours by paroxysms of gastric spasm. His courage and resolution were practically unimpaired ; had it not been for these attacks, the history of his decline would have been different.
II
The soul which governed this body was driven forward by three fundamental powers :
Three Fundamental Powers
Self-confidence, energy, imagination.
" I am not as other men ; the laws of morality and convention cannot be applied to me." In these cold words, he emphasises the " I " with which he began his first political writing in the days of his youth. They are a plain acknowledgment of a fact, by a man of thirty to whom nothing is more alien than vanity. " I alone, because of my position, know what government is," he said when he was Consul. " I am persuaded that no one save myself could govern France at this moment. Were I to die, it would be a great misfortune for the nation." He utters such words seldom, and only when he is with an intimate ; but these sayings show with what scientific aloofness he could contemplate the phenomenon, Napoleon. When, during the Russian disaster, he was asked who in spite of all would defend him in France, he replied : " My name."
His contemporaries and posterity have held this fundamental feeling to be ambition. That view is mistaken. Common ambition distinguishes itself from Napoleon's self-confidence as a restless, climbing animal does from a bird of prey whose free flight, by a law of nature, assumes wider and wider circles as it swings heavenwards. Napoleon's aspiration is neither restless nor envious : it is nothing but his natural disposition which, as Consul, he once charmingly explained to his friend Roederer :
" I have no ambition whatever; or if I have, then it is so inborn, so intimately knit up with my very life, that it is as the blood in my veins. It does not incite me to outstrip my associates. ... I have never had to fight for or against it; it does not urge me to greater speed than is natural to me, it comes out only when circumstances and my ideas demand."
Already in the days when he was a general, ideas and circumstances forced upon him the conviction that he was the man predestined to rebuild France. It is nothing other than the conviction of his mission which makes him say to Roederer: " Circumstances have changed. I am now one of those who found States, not one of those who ruin States." Another time, he
Self-Confidence
speaks of Corneille, but he means himself when he says : " Whence did this man acquire his antique greatness ? From himself, from his soul ? Very well. Do you know what that is called, My Lord Cardinal ? It is called genius. Genius is a flame, which comes from heaven, but seldom finds a head ready to receive it. Corneille is a man whom the world has recognised." When his interlocutor observed that the poet had not seen the flame, so how could he recognise it, the Emperor answered scornfully : " Precisely for that reason I consider he is a great man ! "
He thus, indirectly by anticipation, announces his own genius to the world, just as Goethe had announced his own.
The will-to-power, not as an endeavour or even as a question, but, rather, as simplicity, dwells within him close at hand. He calls interest the key to ordinary deeds ; the will to govern the intellect, he describes as the strongest of all the passions : and the artistic urge of genius, he depicts in the following words : " I love power, yes, I love it, but after the manner of an artist: as a fiddler loves his fiddle in order to conjure from it tone, chords, harmonies."
That is why it is his nature to command. " Wherever I may be, I command, or else I keep silence." He might have added: " I negotiate," for he had spent a quarter of his time in negotiating. Even as a young general of twenty-seven, he aroused the respect of all who came in contact with him. He never learned to obey; but to command came to him naturally at the very outset, just as a calf stands and walks in the first hour of its life. Because this power of commanding comes so naturally, he never acquires the art of asking; because he can command as no other, he is denied the gift of being able to ask favours.
His self-confidence confers on him a natural dignity that amazes and angers the legitimist world, which believes dignity to be consonant only with heredity and culture. The friends of his youth stand embarrassed when they recognise him as their
Dignity
commander in the field and yet realise the solitude which his position as leader entails. All his companions-in-arms speak of him with spontaneous homage. One of his intimates writes : " When he speaks, every one listens, for he speaks as an expert; if he is silent, his silence is respected ; and no one would venture to say that he was silent because of ill humour. We all felt that between him and us there lived a great thought which was wholly occupying his mind and forbade familiar accost." This statement is all the more surprising since it was made during a campaign, when tent life usually breaks down barriers. With absolute ingenuousness he once said, while playing and chatting with friends at Malmaison : " I have no sense of the ridiculous. Power is never ridiculous."
An adept at analysis, the greatest psychologist of his epoch, he knows all about his own qualities, and is therefore able, by degrees, to elaborate these instincts into principles. " The goodness of a king," he informs his brother Louis, King of Holland, " must always bear a regal stamp and must never be monkish. . . . The love which a king inspires should invariably be a manly love, wedded to reverence, fear, and esteem. If people speak of him as ' a good man,' his rule is a failure." This love and fear which he himself inspires has the greatest practical results.
Nevertheless, the dignity which holds people at-a distance is not assumed, for a leading element in it is a bewildering naturalness, which grows with the years and with his successes. His Unsophisticated and frank realism, the sterling simplicity of his character, shows itself in a hundred gestures and words, and in the freshness with which he repeatedly makes fun of his own ardency. He expresses this in a profound saying: "A truly great man will rise superior to the events which he himself has brought about." The greatest successes, whose fateful origin and consequences he fully grasps, he sums up to his intimates in a schoolboy's laugh. Many have reported this, for between the boisterous gaiety of a soldier and the most delicate curl of the
Simplicity
lip are many shades of good humour; possesses all.
On the eve of his coronation he exclaims : " Is the result not truly delightful, to be named brother by the kings ? " Or he sends his ambassador to St. Petersburg with the words : " Our brother in Russia is fond of luxury and festivity. Very well, then, give him his fill of them! " Sometimes his simplicity of manner infringes etiquette, and the legitimists blanch : " When I
was an insignificant lieutenant," he begins once at table with the kings in Dresden. General consternation! Every one gazes into his plate. Napoleon clears his throat: " When I had the honour of serving as lieutenant in the second artillery regiment at Valence ..." Or he is sitting with the tsar in Tilsit, and, since he is ever eager to learn, he asks offhandedly across the table : " How much does your tax on sugar bring in yearly ? " We are told that this question places all present in a state of grave embarrassment. Why ? Beacuse, as a big man of business, he calls money by its name ; whereas the kings never mention it by name, though they are glad enough to reap the harvest!
Since he was not vain, he knew when he had made mistakes. His whole life long he was in the habit of saying that next day he might lose a battle ; he frequently consulted his friends and his experts, and was inspired with the feeling of God-given necessity. How well Napoleon could bear to be told the truth, we can learn from Marmont—who, when he praises, is one of the most trustworthy of witnesses, for he wrote his memoirs long after the Emperor had publicly stigmatised him as a traitor. " Napoleon had a strong sense of justice, and would readily forgive an improper word or other sign of anger in one who had good grounds for complaint, provided of course he was alone with the offender. ... He made kindly allowance for others' weaknesses and could never resist the appeal of well-grounded sorrow. One who chose time and place, could say anything to him. He was always willing to listen to the truth. Though it did
Love of Frankness
not invariably influence him, there was no danger in uttering it."
He saw through the wiles of flatterers, and they gained nothing from him. Byzantine bombast, devoid of political value, infuriated him. " How could you depict the French eagle tearing the English leopard to pieces, at a time when I cannot safely send even a fishing-smack out to sea ? Break up your moulds instantly, and never show me anything of the kind again! "
