Napoleon

by Emil Ludwig

  Goethean Motifs

  that the Emperor had not read Goethe's Zur Morphologic, or Lamarck's Philosophic zoologique. He had actually refused to receive Lamarck.

  Still more remarkable are his deductions concerning psychophysical processes. In a Christmas discourse at St. Helena, he expresses his doubts as follows: " How can any one understand that God should sanction the caprices of a ruler who sends thousands of men into battle that they may die for him ? . . . Where is the soul of a child; or that of a madman ? . . . What are electricity, galvanism, magnetism ? In these lies the great secret of nature. I am inclined to believe that man is a product of these fluids and of the atmosphere; the brain sucks them in and imparts life, and the soul is composed of them. After death, they return into the atmosphere, whence they are sucked up again by other brains." After giving utterance to these Goethean motifs, he is alarmed at his own temerity. Breaking off suddenly, he says, as a soldier among soldiers : " Oh, well, my dear Gourgaud, when we are dead, we are simply dead."

  Side by side with this scepticism, there exists and expands a theism. To Laplace, who denies the existence of God, he says : " You should be more ready than any one else to admit that God exists, for you, more than most, have seen the wonders of creation. If we cannot actually see God with our own eyes, this is because he did not wish our understanding to reach so far.' On another occasion: " We believe in God because everything around us testifies to his existence." In St. Helena: "I have never doubted the existence of God, for, even if my reason were incompetent to grasp him, still my inner feelings would convince me of his reality. My temperament has always been harmony with this feeling."

  How shall such a spirit come to terms with destiny ? Since his self-esteem makes it impossible for him to believe that a man can have beaten him, he is forced to ascribe his defeat to fate. But this sense of the workings of destiny is present in his

  Destiny

  mind before the final overthrow; it accompanies him throughout life, and appears to be an equivalent for the reverence, devotion, and faith by which other men live. With the aid of his belief in destiny, Napoleon wages a heroic struggle. In his strongest moments, he feels that he wears armour of proof: "I have a soul of marble. The lightnings were unable to destroy it, but broke on it in vain." Once he expresses his defiance even more poetically: " Should the heavens fall down on us, we shall hold them off with the points of our lances ! "

  But these defiant moods are rare. In general, he is resigned to fate. There are hundreds of his sayings to bear witness to this. Here are three: " All that happens, is written; our hour is fixed, and no one can postpone it. ... No one can escape his fate." To the duchess of Weimar : " Believe me, there is a providence which guides all. I am merely its instrument." To Johannes von Miiller : " Fundamentally, all things are linked together, and are subject to the unsearchable guidance of an unseen hand. I have only become great through the influence of my star." In such tropes we see awareness of God and a sense of dependence welded into pride in his own mission. At these times, a prophetical effulgence seems to radiate from him, but is obscured again and again by the self-confidence of his iron energy.

  Yet Napoleon was far from believing in his star as another man may believe in a god or a talisman. He could not bear to have the greatness of his deeds minimised by insistence on his good fortune. He was, therefore, far less superstitious than other men of his type. Louis brings him a valuable knife, but hesitates to give it to him; Napoleon snatches it from his brother's hand, saying: " Don't bother, it won't cut anything but bread ! " He scolds Josephine because she consults fortune-tellers ; but then, being curious, asks her to tell him all about the hocus-pocus. He wants to have the signing of the peace of Pressburg postponed for a few days, that it may take place after the reintroduction of the prerevolutionary calendar; but he does not order this, being

  Circumstance and Chance

  content to use the unwonted phrase, " that would please me very much." Schwarzenberg's death, in 1820, is a great relief to him ; for when a fire broke out in the Schwarzenberg mansion at the ball given in honour of Napoleon's second marriage, the Emperor had interpreted this as a bad omen for himself ; now Schwarzenberg's death is a derivative for his own uneasy forebodings !

  Apart from these trifles, in a life so packed with important happenings, we do not hear of a single day during twenty years on which he forms, postpones, or modifies a resolution on superstitious grounds. But he makes an adroit use of his " star " and his " destiny " for political or rhetorical purposes. Since he wishes to pose before Europe as the Man of Destiny, he tries to work upon suggestible minds like Alexander's by such turns of phrase as the following: "It is wise and politic to do what fate commands, and to march on the road along which we are led by the irresistible course of events." His mind is fond of playing with the kindred notions of destiny, circumstance, and chance ; and while he regards destiny as involved in more or less obscurity, he believes himself able to calculate the chances of a coming battle with almost mathematical certainty. " In these matters one must be careful not to make a slip, for an overlooked fraction can modify the whole result. ... To people of mediocre intelligence, chance will always remain a mystery ; but to the clear-sighted, it becomes a reality."

  Sometimes he lumps them all together—talents, destiny, and power,—and shows himself an energetic fatalist when he says : " Against attempts on my life, I trust in my luck, my good genius, and my guards."

  In this virile spirit, he strides resolutely along betwixt life and death.

  A modern tragedy depicts a man who wishes to die. Napoleon says that the portrait is well limned, but unnatura " A man must wish to live, and must know how to die." That is why, from youth upwards, he opposes suicide ; first, in an essay ;

  Daimonic Loneliness

  then, in an order of the day ; then, with the reiterated argument that suicide is cowardice, especially in hours of misfortune. A careful study of the documents shows that the story of his having attempted suicide just before the first abdication is apocryphal. The leading memoirs make no reference to the matter, and such accounts as we have are at second hand and untrustworthy. There is no doubt that during his last battles Napoleon deliberately sought a soldier's death; but he never tried to poison himself.

  Yet it was not only in those last days at Fontainebleau, and after Waterloo, that he suffered from tedium vitse. The weariness recorded in the diary of the lad of sixteen, and in the letter which the man of thirty wrote from Cairo to his brother, were little in evidence during the most energetic years of febrile activity. Those who trouble to ask whether persons of genius are happy, will have to agree that this man of genius, who was not fitted by nature for happiness, enjoyed during the climax of his career, hours of content, and even sublime moments. But there were periods of doubt:

  " For the tranquillity of France," says Bonaparte at Rousseau's tomb, " it would have been better if this man had never lived."

  " Why, Citizen Consul ? "

  " He paved the way for the revolution."

  " Surely you are not the man to deplore the revolution ? "

  " Time will show whether it would not have been better for the peace of the world if neither Rousseau nor I had lived."

  Gradually these doubts fade. But what he never loses is the sense of daimonic loneliness, which increases as his soaring flight leads him to chillier altitudes. " There are times when life is hard to bear." Since the sea has always been unfriendly to him, there is only one place where he really feels at home— the desert, which to him is the image of the infinite. The desert is the sublime vacancy which expands before him when the myriad-faceted pictures of ordinary life sink from sight.

  A Tiring Job I

  But never was Napoleon more perfectly freed from the tyranny of his thoughts, never was he happier, than when seated alone in his box at the theatre, watching a tragedy being enacted.

  Nothing else could restore his inner peace of mind ; for, since he loved less than most, he
was doomed to a tragical loneliness, the price he had to pay for his egotism. " There is neither happiness nor unhappiness," he said. " The life of a happy man is a picture showing black stars on a silver background. The life of an unhappy man is a picture showing silver stars on a black background." But it is not these heroic images which best characterise the loneliness of a soul. Even more poignant voices reach us from the familiar arena of the daily struggle :

  " Don't you understand, Caulaincourt, what is going on here? The folk I have got together want to enjoy themselves ; the poor devils don't realise that a man has to fight before he can get the repose he longs for. What about myself ? Have not I a palace, a wife, a child ? Do I not weary myself to the utmost with every possible kind of tension ? Do I not day by day give my life to my country ? "

  He gives his life to his work, for that is what he means when he talks of his country. A human note, gently plaintive, and fraught with the lofty irony of the finale, sounds when he says on the island :

  " The whole time I was bearing the world on my shoulders. 'Tis rather a tiring job ! "

  X

  A volcano made the island, which was flung up from beneath the waters thousands upon thousands of years ago. Forth from the midst of the sea, projects the gloomy mass of rock. Steep, black, and deeply furrowed are the walls of lava that run down from the heights into the waves. The chasm

  The Extinct Volcano

  the harbour looks like the gate of hell to one who first sees it from a ship; and the traveller fancies that these dark ramparts must have been built by the hands of demons. Nothing betrays the work of man but the cannon placed among the rocks. When the voyager lands, the ground crunches softly beneath his feet, for the soil is made of disintegrated lava. He is treading the road of death.

  An extinct volcano in the Atlantic Ocean, two thousand miles from Europe and nearly a thousand from Africa, guarded by British guns—such is the rock of St. Helena, on which this limitless life might have ended like a tragedy of .Jischylus. But, owing to the mendacity of a moralising century, the malice of English oligarchs, and the dry spitefulness of a colonial governor, the island becomes the stage for a tragi-comedy.

  The diligence of a few farmers and the energy of the East India Company had made the place pleasant enough. Hundreds of frigates had, by degrees, brought garden mould, building stone, and timber. But since no one would stay long on the rock unless under compulsion, there were twelve hundred negro slaves and Chinese to serve the five hundred whites who dwelt there for a few years at a time.

  No one can stay there. On this island, no one reaches the age of sixty, and very few live to be fifty; the climate is deadly. We are in sunless tropics, where the fierce heat of the equator is variegated with cloud bursts, and where within an hour a damp sultriness may give place to a cold downpour. The skin of those who, just before, were dripping with sweat, is suddenly chilled by the storming south-east trade wind, whose vapours are arrested by the rock. One who, after a burning day, ventures abroad in the evening, will pant for breath as he walks. Those who stay for a year, suffer from dysentery, giddiness and fever, vomiting and palpitation. Above all, they suffer from liver disease. Whenever England tried to station a squadron at St. Helena, the sailors died by hundreds; the ships had to put out to sea, and to keep under sail. The officials and the planters fall

  A Deadly Climate

  sick. Unless they have the luck to live in one of the four or five sites protected from the wind, they and their families are soon compelled to seek some healthier place of residence.

  The inhabitants will tell you that one of the most unwholesome regions is a chilly tableland seventeen hundred feet above sea level; a lonely place, on the windy side of the island, made specially insalubrious by the persistence of fogs. There grow sparse gum trees, blighted by the trade wind, gnarled and twisted, leaning away from the prevailing blast. The St. Helenians call the region Deadwood. Here is Longwood. That is the place selected by England as the one in which the sick foe can most certainly be killed. It was not a temporary asylum, chosen hastily and in an emergency; it was not originally intended for the Emperor; it was made ready for him while he was living elsewhere on the island, in poor case, but still in fairly good health.

  Till yesterday, Longwood had been a stable, built fifty years before, and only at the last moment transformed into a dwelling-house. Negroes, and the carpenters of the "Northumberland," fixed a wooden floor over the mud of the interior, neglecting to clear away the cattle dung. Soon after the Emperor's entry, the planks rotted and broke, the stinking damp soaked through the flooring, and he had to move into another room. For himself and his followers, a home has been made out of cow-shed, a wash-house, and a stable. In his bedroom, a dark and narrow corner, the brown nankeen which covers the walls is stained with saltpetre; smells from the kitchen invade it. In this last point it resembles the lodging he had in a cafe thirty years ago when he was lieutenant in Valence. But in that earlier abode his books kept dry; here they are attacked by mould. The dining-room is lighted through a glass door; the drawing-room is furnished with a worm-eaten mahogany suite; the servants' quarters are flooded by the rain, for the roof here is made of roofing-felt.

  Companions

  The Emperor lives in two small rooms, each about fourteen feet by twelve, and ten feet high. The bedroom boasts a threadbare carpet, muslin curtains, a fire-place, painted wooden chairs, two small tables, a wash-hand-stand, and a sofa. The workroom has a bare table, under which two chairs are tucked ; rough shelves closely packed with books, and an extra bed where he would rest sometimes in the daytime or which he would use on the nights when he was restless and sleepless. The bedroom contains some trophies rescued from his ruin; the little camp-bed he had used at Austerlitz, hung with green silk curtains; a silver lamp; and, on the wash-hand-stand, magnificent silver ewers and basins.

  These rooms, and indeed the whole premises, swarm with rats, which kill the fowls, gnaw the leg of a sick horse, bite General Bertrand in the hand, and spring out of Napoleon's three-cornered hat as he takes it from the sideboard.

  Who lives in the house besides the rats ? Three counts and one baron with their families (all of them officers, and accustomed to court life), two valets, and the rest of the Emperor's staff with their dependents ; nearly forty persons in all, when they first land. After six years, at the end of Napoleon's life, the number has been reduced by half.

  Las Cases and his young son hold out for a year. Marquis and emigre, older than the Emperor, a sprig of the Faubourg, count of the empire, it was not until the Hundred Days that Las Cases became one of Napoleon's close associates. He was a man of the world, author of some works on geography ; later he was to write his Memorial of St. Helena, which is said to have brought him thousands of pounds. He was shorter than the Emperor, and as lean as General Bonaparte had been. He was cultured, pleasant of temper, always ready to serve: certainly the most agreeable companion and secretary the prisoner had. He entertained the Emperor with witticisms the Parisians had made at Napoleon's expense, thereby unfolding the comic obverse of a tragic career. Las Cases taught the Emperor

  Bickerings

  English, thus widening the scope of the exile's reading. "When the two men exchanged notes in English, the count would underscore the Emperor's mistakes. Las Cases, under various pretexts, finally abandoned the island, and left a vacant place which during the last years of the Emperor's life was never to be filled.

  For Bertrand, sometime governor of Illyria, and devoted to the Emperor, is touchy, and is too proud to write from dictation; in other respects, he observes a faultless passivity, except when he shows fear of offending his wife. This lady, a beautiful Creole, half-English with the head of a young lord, had been loath to share Napoleon's exile. At Plymouth, she had tried to throw herself overboard ; she is miserable, thinks of Paris, and weeps over her youth ; consorts much with the enemy. One day her place is empty at the Emperor's board. Napoleon says that his house is not an inn; Bertrand is aggrieved
at the reproach, and does not put in an appearance next day. Then the Emperor is so unhappy that he cannot eat, and pushes his plate away, saying softly and with deep melancholy : " If, in Longwood, they are going to fail in their respect for me, my lot is bitterer than if it had happened in Paris."

  Gourgaud is unbearable. The young general had been through the last campaigns as Napoleon's adjutant. His affection for his chief has made him accompany the Emperor to St. Helena; but he is quite unable to overcome his feelings of wonder at his self-sacrifice. After a few weeks' sojourn on the island he meets a charming lady, and writes in his diary : " O liberty, why am I a prisoner ? " He is useful to the Emperor because of his erstwhile position on the general staff; he is conversant with the science of strategy, understands maps and mathematics. Not a day goes by, however, but Gourgaud is offended. Innate vanity and jealousy are increased a thousandfold by the narrowness of the circle; he becomes the incarnation of the grotesque, which, from the first day on the island, begins to encompass the Emperor about. Gourgaud has

  Gourgaud's Petulance

  the temperament of a snarling dog; he cannot allow Las Cases to take precedence; Napoleon vainly tries to smooth the young man's ruffled plumes, and only by resorting to command is he able to prevent a duel. " You followed me here in order to comfort my life, so you are brothers. Am I no longer here to care for you ? And are you not aware that the eyes of strangers are upon you ? "

  The Emperor learns patience upon the rock. He also learns considerateness, especially where Gourgaud is concerned. A dozen times and more, he speaks to the young man in fatherly fashion; tries to persuade him to bear with his companions; cajoles him with the promise of a wealthy and beautiful Cor-sican bride. Another time he sends the general to a little festivity in the town: " You will meet the Baroness Sturmer there, and see Lady Lowe. At your age, it is always agreeable to consort with pretty women. You will go to sleep filled with pleasant thoughts, and by to-morrow morning you'll feel fit for work once more. We'll talk over the Russian campaign. ..." A voice from Tartarus! But next day Gourgaud again takes offence because in a picture of the group which has been painted by one of the valets, he appears in civilian dress. A few days later he reminds his master of an episode near Brienne: Gourgaud saved Napoleon's life by cutting down a Cossack who was about to attack the Emperor. The Emperor pretends to have forgotten; Gourgaud is outraged, saying that all Paris was buzzing with talk of the incident. Napoleon smiles : " You are a brave man, but amazingly childish."