by Alan Schom
By whatever reckoning, by the summer of 1805 the flotilla simply could not withstand another winter’s accrued loss of a few hundred more vessels. If Decrès had estimated the flotilla of being capable of transporting only 127,000 troops back in December 1804, now the most realistic estimate had dwindled to a maximum of perhaps 100,000 men. The flotilla had lost more than one-third of its projected capacity. Nor in fact were there any longer much more than that number of troops still in the camps at Montreuil, St.-Omer, and Bruges, as Marshals Ney and Soult privately informed Napoleon, over Berthier’s protests.[621] Napoleon was furious.
Despite the dismaying flotilla reports, as well as revelations as to the true character of Villeneuve’s pusillanimous actions both in Martinique and then off Ferrol against Calder, however, in a final personal letter to Decrès, Napoleon reminded him that he and France were still depending on his arrival, “when you must sweep away all that you find before you and come up the Channel where we are awaiting you most anxiously...We should all of us gladly give our lives in order to help bring about an invasion of that power that has been suppressing France for six centuries. Such,” he concluded, “are the sentiments that ought to animate my soldiers.”[622]
It was hardly surprising that by now many Frenchmen were questioning whether the emperor was serious about the whole operation, army and naval commanders reporting frustration and suspicion among officers and men alike. Flad Napoleon changed his mind about invading England, as he had so frequently changed his mind about everything else?
Thus by the late summer of 1805 even the British, who for more than two years had been taking the greatest pains to defend themselves against this impending descent, began to question the French ruler’s intentions. To rub salt into the wound, The Times now published a long spoof on its front page, poking fun at the emperor himself, entitled “Buonaparte’s Soliloquy on the Cliff at Boulogne.”
T’invade, or not t’invade — that is the question —
Whether ’tis nobler in my soul, to suffer
Those haughty Islands to check my power,
Or to send forth my troops upon their coast,
And by attacking, crush them. — T’invade — to fight —
No more; — and by afighty to say I end
The glory, and the thousand natural blessings
That England’s heir to; — ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. — To invade — to fight —
To fight — perchance to fail: — Aye, there’s the rub,
For in that failure, what dire fate may come,
When they have shuffled all from Gallia’s shore,
Must give me pause. — There’s the respect,
That makes me thus procrastinate the deed:
For would I bear the scoff and scorn of foes,
The oppressive thought of English liberty,
The pangs of despis’d threats, th’attempt’s delay,
The insolence of Britain, and the spurns,
That I impatient and unwilling take,
When I myself might head the plund’ring horde,
And grasp at conquest? Would I tamely bear
To groan and sweat under a long suspense,
But that the dream of something after battle,
That undecided trial, from whose hazard
I never may return, — puzzles my will,
And makes me rather bear unsated vengeance,
Than fly from Boulogne at the risk of all.
Thus the contemplation stays my deep designs,
And thus my native passion of ambition
Is clouded o’er with sad, presaging thought;
And this momentous, tow’ring enterprise,
With this regard, is yearly turn’d aside,
And waits the name of action.[623]
On August 11 — four days before Napoleon’s thirty-fourth birthday — Villeneuve was preparing a fateful letter to his friend, Decrès, as he weighed anchor to clear El Ferrol harbor. “I cannot pull out of this deep depression into which I have sunk,” Villeneuve began. This expedition had been a mistake from the outset, he lamented. “But the ‘sailors’ in Paris [Napoleon, Forfait, and so on]...who have been interfering in this are indeed blind, reprehensible, and stupid.” Nor could the French depend on the Spanish, he insisted, who so lacked even the most elementary naval instruction “as to prevent them from being ready to put to sea.” His own officers and sailors, “who lack wartime experience,” were no better:
It is quite impossible to have been unhappier than I have been since the moment of our departure [from Toulon]...I cannot conceal my belief that we have no chance of winning...My lord, put an end to this situation.” As for his very precise orders to sail north to Boulogne, he closed — “I am leaving, and depending upon the circumstances, am heading for Brest or Cadiz.[624]
Having said that, and made the junction with Gravina’s fleet in La Coruña Bay, Villeneuve and his combined Franco-Spanish Fleet put to sea. For the next several days no one, not even Napoleon, had the least idea what had happened to them, where they were, or even what direction they were sailing in. It was not until August 21 that Villeneuve’s powerful task force was finally sighted by the British as it reached the harbor of Cadiz.[625]
Vice Admiral Villeneuve’s report, completed and dispatched from Cadiz on August 22, reached Paris in record time on September 2. Setting out immediately from the Naval Ministry, Decrès girded himself against the inevitable storm about to break when he reached Napoleon’s small study on the second floor of the Tuileries.
“What a Navy! What an admiral! All those sacrifices for naught!” the emperor ranted. “It is sheer betrayal...That Villeneuve is the worst sort of scoundrel. He would sacrifice everything just to save his own hide...Never again mention another thing about such a humiliating business! Never again remind me of the existence of that miserable coward!”[626]
Napoleon immediately ordered Decrès to replace Villeneuve. On September 16 he scrapped the entire invasion plan and, in his ninth set of orders, instructed the combined fleet to sail from Cadiz to Genoa, the next day naming Admiral Rosily as Villeneuve’s successor. On September 20 Decrès wrote to his old friend Villeneuve for the last time, ordering him to strike his flag. He was finished.[627]
But before officially receiving his new orders (which in fact were leaked to Villeneuve by General Beurnonville, the snickering French minister to Madrid), he ordered the combined fleet to sail. “If the only thing the Imperial Navy was lacking was a little character and backbone, I believe I could provide them,” the incredible Villeneuve wrote hastily to Decrès, “thereby assuring the crowning of the present mission with a brilliant success.” “Upon my word, my dear Minister,” a bemused General Beurnonville wrote Decrès after receiving news that the combined fleet had cleared the harbor of Cadiz, “Vice Admiral Villeneuve has flown the coop. The nest is empty!”[628]
The first to spot the emergence of the enemy fleet, Capt. Henry Blackwood of the Euryalus signaled the long-awaited news to Lord Nelson on board the Victory. On October 21, off the Cape of Trafalgar, Nelson’s fleet of twenty-seven ships fell upon the French admiral’s augmented combined fleet of thirty-two ships of the battle line. By the end of that day, the Royal Navy had fought and won the greatest victory in naval history, at the price of the death of Lord Nelson but with not a single British ship lost. Combined French and Spanish losses came to some twenty-two ships, while ten others, under the direction of Rear Adm. Dumanoir Le Pelley, had abandoned their own Navy in the face of the enemy, fleeing northward to safety. The English had suffered 1,690 casualties; the French and Spanish, 5,568 dead and wounded.[629] To complete the fiasco, an unscathed Villeneuve had been taken prisoner and sent to England.
The French Imperial Navy would gradually be rebuilt, but with its spirit and morale shattered, it would never again pose a serious threat to Great Britain during Napoleon’s reign — or indeed to any country for many decades to come. However, the man responsible fo
r defending British shores throughout the crucial twenty-nine months of crisis, from 1803 to 1805, Admiral Cornwallis, was soon ordered to strike his flag and retire, his name as quickly forgotten by history and an ungrateful British people.
It was not in Paris that Napoleon learned of this great disaster, however, but on the field of battle far away in Austria, for back on August 26 he had finally given up all hope of ever seeing Villeneuve and his mighty fleet. On the twenty-ninth he had ordered Berthier to break camp and march east. Angrily turning his back on a colossal failure that had cost him two years of unrelenting hard work and consumed nearly every moment of his time in the process, Napoleon instead launched the Grande Armée on the first of a series of remarkable military victories that would more than compensate for a dozen Trafalgars — but never for his cherished dream of putting an end “to the destiny and very existence of England.”
Chapter Twenty-Three – Intermezzo à la Bonaparte
‘After all, I have the heart of a human being. I was not begotten by a tigress.’
Napoleon had been more than envious of Joseph’s magnificent reception in October 1800 for the signing of the Franco-American Commerce and Friendship Treaty, in particular because of the spacious accommodations and extensive open lands of Joseph’s estate that he, Napoleon, lacked at Malmaison for hunts and long horseback rides.
To remedy that he attempted to acquire estates contiguous to Malmaison. The first two neighbors he approached, Mlle. Julien and M. de Channorrier, both refused. A frustrated Napoleon settled on his third choice, a parcel of several hundred acres of forest known as Butard Wood. There were few physical objects in the world that impressed the blasé Corsican general — not gold, jewels, fine porcelain, paintings, or even women — but to be a grand seigneur, to have a sprawling estate of thousands of acres, that was something else.
The deed done and contracts exchanged, he proudly bundled Josephine, Laure Junot, and Bourrienne into a calèche, as he mounted a horse and galloped off in the direction of the new wood. It lay between the château and the Seine, requiring the crossing of a brook and some steep ravines. At the brook Josephine, who had a terror of riding in carriages, even on the best of roads, shrieked as the light carriage abruptly descended into a gully. Napoleon — angry, frustrated, and tired of Josephine’s constant hysterics over the most trivial matters — ordered the coachman on. Madame Bonaparte, by now in tears, ordered the bewildered postilion to stop immediately before reaching the water. He did, looking first at Bonaparte — who had already crossed the brook ahead of them on horseback and had cleared the steep bank with some difficulty — and then at Josephine, who by now was crying hysterically. A furious First Consul returned angrily and pulled up before the carriage, again ordering the driver to proceed. When he hesitated, in a quandary at receiving two contradictory orders, Napoleon slashed at him with his whip.[630]
But Josephine remained trembling and nothing could soothe her. Napoleon, wanting to show off his broad new acres, the result of months of acrimonious negotiation, was furious with his wife for spoiling his surprise, his great moment. Josephine, however, could not be moved now, and they reached the wood only later in the day. But the unpleasantness was soon forgotten.
Thus the weeks passed. “We led a merry life, and the summer slipped pleasantly away,” the seventeen-year-old mother-to-be Laure Junot recalled. They played cards — never for money — at which Napoleon nevertheless always insisted on winning (as he also did with chess, which he played badly). When playing a game called reversis, for instance, he would cheat blatantly. And then he would inevitably win and cry out gleefully like a child — “I have all the fish! Who will buy all the fish in the house?” If it was not exactly interesting for the other players, knowing in advance they were fated to lose, at least the First Consul was content.
The summer dragged on too long, however, especially after Josephine’s departure for Plombieres in the mountains for six weeks to restore her nerves. Malmaison, so gay, so cheerful when the mistress was present, now became unbearable. For the young bride of General Junot (serving as Napoleon’s aide-de-camp but stationed at headquarters in Paris), it became unendurable, with only Hortense and herself there, along with the first consul. She wanted to get away, but Napoleon would not hear of it. “We were not exactly prisoners,” she lamented, but they were caught in “a gilded cage.”
It began before dawn a couple of weeks prior to Josephine’s return. “One morning I was in a profound sleep, when suddenly I was awakened by a slight noise near me, and perceived the First Consul beside my bed,” Laure Junot recalled. “Thinking myself in a dream, I rubbed my eyes, which produced a laugh from him.” “We are going to chat,” Napoleon said, sitting down in a nearby armchair. Taking out a handful of mail and newspapers, he put them on her bed and began sorting. His only suggestive remark was about an assignation he was contemplating with a woman unknown to her. An hour later he heard the clock in the hall chime six. He got up, “collected the papers, pinched my foot through the bedclothes, and smiling...went away singing in that squealing voice, so strongly contrasted with the fine sonorous accent of his speech [what follows is Hortense’s attempt to render the Corsican accent of the leader] —
Non, non z’il est impossible
D’avoir un plus aimable enfant.
Un plus aimable? Ah! si, vraiment.
It was seduction à la Napoleon. But what would it lead to? Was it a simple one-time approach? At the crack of dawn? The rest of the day passed uneventfully.
The following morning Laure was again awakened by a knock, and the first consul entered, as before, with letters and newspapers in his hand. After admiring her “teeth of pearl,” he sat down and began reading the papers. When he was finished “the First Consul again pinched my foot through the bedclothes and left the room, singing a few false notes.” Determined to put an end to this, Laure summoned her maid and “without explanation prohibited her from ever opening the door to anyone who might knock so early in the morning.” When the maid asked hesitantly what to do if it was the first consul, she replied, “I will not be awakened so early by the First Consul or anyone else. Do as you are told!”
The next day passed, Napoleon making no reference whatever to his previous two nights of prowling. Laure became anxious and depressed. “I found no pleasure at Malmaison...I spent the night in tears.” After an anxious, restless third night, she withdrew the outer key, double-turned the lock, and took the key with her back to bed. Some time later the door burst open and there stood the first consul, glaring, his face red with anger.
“Are you afraid of being assassinated, then?” he asked. She was speechless. “Tomorrow is the hunting party in Butard Wood,” he reminded her. “We set out early, and that you may be ready, I shall come myself to wake you, and as you are not among a horde of Tartars, do not barricade yourself again...Adieu!” She afterward discovered that Napoleon had got in with his own master key.
She told no one about what transpired. To her surprise and great relief, her husband arrived from Paris to talk with Napoleon, who afterward invited him to dinner.
“The First Consul was in high spirits, joked throughout dinner with M. Monge, and made him explain more than ten times over the nature of trade winds...” After dinner they played billiards as usual, and then Laure played another game of chess with Napoleon.
But when Junot was about to leave — aides-de-camp stationed in Paris were required to return to headquarters every night — she called him aside and asked him to take her home. At first he “thought someone had offended me, and his unbounded rage and resentment against the alleged defaulter absolutely terrified me.” He gradually calmed down, however, and she convinced him that she simply wanted to go home to see her mother; she was homesick. They talked a long time, but Junot refused. It was an honor to be a house guest of the first consul, he insisted. Finding no other expedient, she instead persuaded him to spend the night with her. After some resistance he agreed.
Early the next
morning, the door to her chamber opened noisily, and steps approached her bed. “What! Still asleep, Madame Junot, on hunting day! I told you that — ” he stopped in midsentence as he drew the curtain aside and saw Junot. Junot, scarcely awake, propped himself on one elbow and looked at the first consul with an air of astonishment. “Why, General! What are you doing in a lady’s chamber at this hour?” Quickly gathering his wits, Napoleon smiled sheepishly. “I came to awaken Madame Junot for the hunt...but,” and then after a prolonged silence and a glance at Laure Junot, “but I find her provided with a better alarm clock than myself.” Various small talk ensued, and Junot himself was invited to join this famous hunt. Napoleon left. “That is an admirable man!” the simplistic Junot replied.
During the hunt Napoleon cornered her in her carriage, bending down from his horse. “You think yourself very clever, do you not? Can you explain the reason why you made your husband stay over?” he snapped angrily. “The explanation is clear and brief, General. I love Junot. We are married, and I thought there was no scandal in a husband remaining with his wife.” The conversation grew more acrimonious, and then she confronted him. “Yesterday morning you employed a method that might be called unworthy, to enter my apartment.”
“Enough!” he interrupted, striking the frame of the carriage as they approached the gathering hunters. “Hold your tongue!” he shouted at her.
As they neared the group, Napoleon insisted that she give him her word of honor that Junot would know nothing of “this foolish affair.” “Good heavens, General! How can you even conceive of such an idea, knowing Junot as you do? He is an Othello in the violence of his passions...clearly indicating that he would challenge Napoleon to a duel and kill him. She extended her arm as he was about to ride away, but “he refused my hand.” “On our return from the hunt, General, I have asked Junot to take me home,” she said. “You may dispose of my apartment here, I shall not be occupying it again.”
Napoleon had had mixed feelings about Junot from the beginning, despite Junot’s unabashed devotion to and admiration for him. Relations would remain strained for quite some time. Junot would never become a Maréchal de France, whether he deserved it or not, and for years to come Napoleon’s personal relations with Madame Junot were polite but cool.
