by Emil Ludwig
The Emperor interposed: " But, Madame, please remember that the men are carrying burdens ! "
Collapse of lady! Yet Napoleon Bonaparte himself would
" Monsieur Bonaparte
not have been so considerate in the days before he came to St. Helena.
In all matters now, except when he is playing the shadow emperor in pursuance of his feud with Lowe, Napoleon adopts a simplicity of life which outdoes that even of his poorest days as a lieutenant. When for some time there has been very little to eat, and the cook has had to eke things out with French beans, he eats them enthusiastically, praises the dish and the cooking.
" In Paris, I could get along with twelve francs a day. Dinner frs. 1.50; reading room; theatre in the evening, pit; I should hire a room for frs. 20 a month. I should only want one servant; and I should associate exclusively with people of like fortune. One can be happy in any station in life. When my mother sang lullabies over my cradle, there was not a word about what I was destined to become. I believe ' Monsieur Bonaparte' would have been quite as happy as ' Emperor Napoleon.' Everything in life is relative."
His doctor has a fainting fit. Coming to himself, he finds that he is being attended to, not by a servant, but by the Emperor in person. Napoleon has lifted him on to the bed, has unfastened the collar of his shirt, and is kneeling beside him, administering vinegar.—When Cipriani, the Corsican servant, is dying, the Emperor asks the doctor whether a visit from the master would stimulate the man's flagging forces.
" The excitement would kill him."
" Oh, well, I suppose I had better not go."
When playing reversi, he establishes a bank. For whose benefit ? The money is to be used to buy the freedom of the most beautiful female slave on the island. One evening, his companions find him at work beside the lamp, slowly and carefully stitching the pages of a manuscript.
Sometimes, however, his dreams reawaken, and flutter against the bars of the cage. " I wish they would transfer me to a desert island, where I could have two thousand people of my
The Emperor Drives a Plough
own choice, with muskets and cannon. I should found a glorious colony, and should end my days happily in that model land. There I should not find it necessary to be at grips all the time with antiquated ideas." Having said this apropos of nothing in particular, he passes on to the details of the scheme, dictating specifications—how much money and stores would be needed for the founding of his colony.
A chained sculptor, his plastic impulses must be content with such outlets in the world of imagination; but, side by side with these capriccios, he displays a heroic simplicity. One day, during the early weeks at St. Helena, he is out riding with Las Cases. " We came to a field that was being ploughed. The Emperor dismounted, and took the handles of the plough. With incredible speed, he drove a long and perfectly straight furrow. All this without saying a word until he had finished, when he told me to give the ploughman a napoleon. We remounted, and rode on our way."
XV
" No one but myself can be blamed for my fall. I have been my own greatest enemy, the cause of my own disastrous fate."
This admission, the profoundest of all those made by the exile, shows that Napoleon has completely outgrown the cloudy Csesarist fancies of his middle period. Had he been a believing Christian, the confession would have rounded off his atonement upon the rock. His sense of responsibility, however, is not directed towards God but only towards himself, and therefore the utterance represents a great man's final settlement of accounts with destiny. But, at the same time, it is a last outburst of defiance, for his self-overweening esteem made it impossible for him to admit that there were any greater forces in the world than his own. Napoleon alone could overthrow Napoleon.
The remark was not the outcome of transient depression.
Self-Criticism
During the closing years of his power, he had again and again spoken to his intimates about his faults and errors ; now, upon the island, such admissions are frequent. Some of them are ardent, and some of them are cold; for even in these self-examinations there is an alternation between fantasy and realism. From time to time, we have the heartfelt cry of a penitent: " When I close my eyes, all my mistakes parade themselves before me, like figures in a nightmare." Or, again : " I wanted too much. ... I strung the bow too tightly, and trusted too much in my good fortune."
But he will coldly reckon up the cases in which he has failed to understand men, coming at this late hour to views which the ablest observers had held while he was still on the throne. The reader who knows his story will require no comment on the remarks that follow.
" I considered Emperor Francis a good man ; but he was only a blockhead, and in Metternich's hands he became an instrument for my destruction."—" I ought to have left Talleyrand at his post. What concern was it of mine that he was plundering the foreign chancelleries ? I should have been content with having him closely watched. He served me well, as long as he could hope to make anything out of me. If I had kept him in office, I should still have been on the throne."—" If only that man Fulton, with his steamboat, had been right, I should have been master of the world. But those idiots of savants made fun of his invention, just as they make fun of electricity. All the same, gigantic powers are hidden in steam and electricity ! "
He regrets that at Tilsit he had decided to maintain the Hohenzollern dynasty. He regrets having crossed the Memel too early; having crossed it in 1812, before he had settled matters in Spain. He regrets that, in defiance of Carnot's advice, he began the last campaign too early, and he regrets that at Waterloo he did not send the guard forward soon enough. Most of all, he regrets having, when his power was finally broken, entrusted himself to England, instead of to the tsar, or, better still, to the
He Should Have Gone to America !
United States. Always, when he hears of crises in France, he regrets that he did not go to America.
" From that vantage ground I should have been able to guard France against humiliation from abroad, reaction from within ; the dread of my return would have sufficed. In America I should have established the centre of a new French fatherland. Within a year, I should have had sixty thousand men grouped round me. ... It would have been the most natural place of refuge—a land of vast expanses where a man can live in freedom. If I had had a fit of the blues, I should have mounted a horse, ridden hundreds of miles, enjoyed travel with the ease of a private individual, lost amid the crowd. In Europe I was too popular; bound up, in one way or another, with every nation. ... As a fugitive, and disguised, I could certainly have escaped to the United States ; but both expedients would have been undignified. I put my trust in the approach of danger, thinking that the nation would be forced to turn to me as its saviour; that is why I stayed as long as possible at Malmaison and in Rochefort. The destiny that brought me to St. Helena was the outcome of those feelings."
This is the most productive of his meditations. The other mistakes of his career had entailed such complicated consequences that it was impossible for him to trace what might have been had he acted otherwise. But the final resolve at Rochefort had, as its inevitable upshot, brought him to this rock. In that respect, therefore, his mind was continually busied with alternative possibilities.Although, when in fancy he roams across the American prairies, he sometimes pictures himself as founding new States there, and sometimes as galloping through the wilds, we may ascribe it to the infinite variety of human passions that he should at the same time justify his final blunder on patriotic grounds.
His critical faculty is most keenly at work when he is pondering his dynastic aspirations. In the last days of the Empire, he had confided his doubts to a few choice spirits ;
Not So Lucky as Genghis Khan !
when it is too late, he freely acknowledges his error. " I was a softy where my family was concerned; by sticking to their point they could get anything out of me. What terrible mistakes I made there ! If my brothers had communicated a common impulse
to the masses I placed under their rule, we should have been able to make our way to the ends of the earth ! ... I was not so lucky as Genghis Khan, whose four sons vied with one another in their father's service. If I made any one king, he instantly regarded himself as king by divine right; the mere word was as infective as the plague. The new king was no longer my representative, but became a fresh enemy ; instead of serving me, he wanted to make himself independent. I was the only stumbling block in his path. In the twinkling of an eye, they all became kings warranted genuine ; under my protection, they all tasted the sweets of dominion. I alone bore the burden. Poor devils ! Once I had been defeated, the enemy did not even bother to declare their formal deposition." That was as far as his penitence reached. However self-critical he might be, Napoleon never uttered a word of regret for having assumed a crown, or for having wished to found a dynasty. On the contrary, again and again he returned to his basic social idea : " I was the natural mediator in this struggle between the revolution and the past; my empire was in the interests of the rulers as well as in that of the peoples. My aim was the social rebirth of Europe ; fate interfered before I had completed my task." In line with his general conception of kingship, he deplores that the kings should have made an end of Murat. They would have done better to show the peoples that kings are above the law. Though the guillotining of King Louis had opened the road along which he himself had advanced to a throne, he condemned the act of regicide ; not because he regarded the Bourbons as competent rulers, but because continuity seemed to him essential.
For he will never misunderstand Europe's historical condi-
Death mask of Napoleon. By Dr. Antommarchi.
Rebels or Heroes?
tions ; he will never try to establish offhand in Europe that which he dreams of establishing in the promised land of America or in the Utopian island of his fancy. He always sees what is, as an outgrowth of what has been ; always transforms the extant, instead of destroying it; he never wants to build entirely anew. Consequently, he docs not discard the old forms, but uses them as a foundation for his new buildings. With a passion for ordering and arranging, and with a hatred for destruction, he feels how much can be done when the basis is secure. " When I rose to power, people thought I was going to be a Washington. Words cost nothing! In America, the role would have suited me well enough ; there would have been no merit in adopting it on the western side of the Atlantic. In France, I could only become a Washington as a king among kings."
That is the truth as he sees it. Since, at bottom, he despises the purple he has hung round his own shoulders, he would have been careful to avoid taking it to America, just as Washington had resisted the solicitations of his officers. By birth, he had been neither proletarian nor prince, but a member of a petty noble family which had fallen on evil days. Thus his position was an intermediate one, sandwiched between the classes. In his conversations with Englishmen about England, he displayed the naivete of his class feeling, and his faith in the right of succession, for he closed an attack upon the British nobility in the following remarkable way :
" It is not a handful of nobles or rich men that makes a nation, but the mass of the people. True, as soon as the mob gains the upper hand it adopts an alias, and speaks of itself as the People ; whereas, if it is conquered, a few poor wretches are hanged, and spoken of as robbers and rebels. 'Tis the way of the world : mob, robbers, rebels—or heroes. As the fortune of war may decide ! "
After a reading of Voltaire's La mort de Cesar, he remarks that in youth he had himself wanted to write a " Csesar." One of
A Retrospect
his auditors, with a courtly double meaning, says that the Emperor has done so. Napoleon laughs the flatterer to scorn. " I? You poor babe ! Yes, if I had been completely successful! But, in fact, Csesar had no better luck than I have had—for he was assassinated ! "
Closely associated with his self-criticism is his own estimate of his deeds. His historical sense, which is an integral part of his composition, leads him to an objective clarity in his contemplation of himself; perhaps an attitude of mind we may vainly seek for elsewhere in history before his day. Las Cases tells us that Napoleon talks of his career as if three hundred years lay behind him; and Countess Montholon movingly observes : " It seemed to me as if we found ourselves in another world, and I was listening to a Dialogue of the Dead."
He stubbornly defends his alleged crimes, the poisoning of the plague-stricken in Jaffa, the execution of the duke of Enghien. One day he is seized with the impulse to confide to an English physician the whole story of the Enghien episode ; since, as Consul, he ran the risk of being murdered, a counter-stroke was necessary. Another time he deliberately sets himself to the task of finding out what O'Meara really thinks of him. The Emperor knows the doctor to be whole-heartedly devoted to his person, but of independent character. They are sitting over a jug of porter, drinking together. Napoleon suddenly puts his question :
" What sort of a man did you think I was before you came to know me ? Speak your mind frankly ! "
O'Meara gives the description of an amoral chimera, a man capable of any crime to achieve his end.
" I expected as much ! " exclaims the Emperor. " Probably many Frenchmen think the same. They'll be saying : ' Yes, he climbed to the top of the ladder of fame, by his own efforts ; but in his climb he had to commit many atrocities.' " Thereupon he launches forth into vehement self-defence.
One night he summons Montholon in order to dictate the
Socrates in Prison
thoughts which throng his sleepless brain. He sets down how he was ever inclined to peace, how before a battle and after a victory he always entered into negotiations. Or he compares the two revolutions, adding: " Cromwell achieved his aim when he was in the full maturity of his age, and attained to the highest rung of the ladder through cunning and hypocrisy. But Napoleon came to the fore as a stripling, and his first steps are illuminated with deeds of glory. . . . Whose blood have I shed ? Who can boast that in my place he would have acted differently ? What epoch confronted with similar difficulties has ever come through with such blameless results ? . . . I believe it to be without parallel in history that a plain man should have attained to such amazing power without committing a single crime. In face of death itself, I could make no other declaration."
Something now occurs which takes us wholly by surprise. Instead of, in the midst of this harangue, laying the blame for ill success on others, instead of allowing his inborn misanthropy to storm the heavens in resentment, he shows us that his days of exile have fostered his sense of justice. He who, for a lifetime, had declared that cupidity lay at the root of all men's endeavours, and had dealt with his fellows on that presupposition, now becomes a cautious analyst; the man of power becomes a philosopher; Napoleon becomes tolerant.
Now, he declares that mankind is prone to gratitude rather than to ingratitude ; the only trouble is, people always expect more thanks than the deed is worth. Las Cases informs us that his greatest censure nowadays is expressed by silence. He defends even those who were faithless : Augereau, Berthier, were not equal to the magnitude of their positions ; he excuses his brothers. From the altitude of these judgments, he surveys the wide perspective with a tolerant eye. We seem to be listening to the imprisoned Socrates when we read :
" It is difficult to give people their due. ... Do they even know themselves ? Those who forsook me would never have
The Diarists
believed, in the days of their good fortune, that a time would come when they would deny me. . . . Our last trials were more than human nature could endure. As a matter of fact, I was left in the lurch rather than actually betrayed, just as Peter denied his master. . . . Perhaps they have already shed tears of repentance. Who ever had more friends and more adherents than I ? Who has ever been more beloved ? . . . My fate might have been far worse ! "
XVI
The Emperor's companions keep diaries. He is well aware of this ; he even has a look into one of them, but
he reserves his thoughts. As a realist he calculates the monetary worth of these records, and he foretells what the writers will earn when they publish their books after his death; his only mistake is that he underestimates the amount. He bequeaths to each of his secretaries those portions of his writings which he has dictated to them severally. But he is correct in his estimate of the incalculable value the diaries will have for posterity in the study of himself.
Accustomed as he is to dictate, he shapes his sentences carefully even when conversing, so that his hearers may record his sayings with advantage. The value to future generations is thus enhanced, and these summaries of his thoughts raise him above his present wearisome existence. His passionate feeling for historical events drives him to this self-expression, no less than regard for those who shall come after.
Five days pass, sometimes, without his seeing anybody; he reads and he writes nothing. The future gives him no more food for thought. But during these periods of seclusion he surveys his life as a whole. Then his soul is shaken, and his lightning glance searches through and through his personality for a hundred hours at a stretch. Never has any man before him had to submit to such a scrutiny. The tension of his being is at these moments
Prometheus Bound
greater than at Austerlitz, more elemental than in the Council of State : he is a bound Prometheus, one who wishes to promote human happiness ; and, shackled to the rock, he groans. Yet he is but a little man in an old green coat! The visions, the dreams, which for twenty years he was able and willing to conjure into reality, he now dissects into ideas. Thus, in the end, he becomes the severest commentator upon his own life story.
