Читать книгу The Golden Bees - Daniel Henderson - Страница 5

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"Jerome is a good lad!"

Madame Permon, close friend of Bonaparte's mother, was speaking. The First Consul, whom she addressed, was threatening to discipline his youngest brother.

"He is an excellent lad, all warmth of heart and good sentiments," Madame Permon pleaded. "However, you do well to transfer him from a regiment to a warship. He will make a good sailor—we need commanders who can cope with Nelson and his lieutenants. Jerome will return to you a gallant officer."

Napoleon wrinkled that forehead "which seemed formed to wear the crowns of the world."

"I confess to you that I am troubled about that brave little citizen. My mother spoiled him. I fear you helped her to do so, Madame Permon, for I admit that he was a lovable child. When he came to me from the College of Juilly, I found him reckless—wilful in matters in which he should have been obedient.

"Did he ever confess to you the first scrape he plunged into when at fifteen he came to Paris from college? I was away—at Marengo. Jerome had entered the service, but because of his youth had been assigned to duty in Paris.

"On my return, I was presented with a number of bills, amounting to a considerable sum. One was from M. Beinnais, Rue Saint Honoré, at the Sign of the Singe Violet. That worthy gentleman said that I owed his shop for an item of 10,000 francs.

"I had a notion to arrest the merchant for his audacity, but, fortunately for him, I decided to investigate."

"Jerome?" laughed Madame Permon.

"You have guessed it. The boy had purchased a magnificent traveling case, containing everything that could be invented of elegance and luxury—toilet articles in gold, mother-of-pearl, silver, ivory, the finest porcelains—it had the magnificence of a set of jewels. The cream of the jest was that while the lad had as yet no sign of a beard, the traveling-case contained razors, combs for mustaches, and china and silver shaving-pots of all sizes.

"Contrast that with the poverty of our childhood, madame, when we boys of Corsica had to be sent away to be educated on the bounty of the King."

Madame Permon nodded. "I remember, my friend, when your father took you away from the island to the school at Brienne le Château. And I remember his telling your mother when he returned that he had submitted evidence to the court of France that his sons were of the nobility, but that he was too poor to educate his boys in accordance with their birth. Did he not receive in Paris 4,000 francs as a gift from the King in reward for helping to keep Corsica loyal to the Crown? And though he left you at school with scarcely a sou in your pocket, did he not bring back to Corsica twelve suits of silk and velvet to adorn his precious back?"

The First Consul flushed at this sly attack upon his father, but to reprove the woman who had rocked his cradle did not enter his head.

"Jerome's extravagance, then," he said, "has a root in the past."

Madame Permon nodded. "You have done wisely to send him to sea. I admit that your mother spoiled him—was he not her youngest boy? But the ocean should wash out his freshness!"

"I beseech you," said Napoleon, "that you will persuade my mother that I have acted wisely. Madame Bonaparte is not willing to concede that her son, the First Consul, is a good administrator of the affairs of our family."

*****

Jerome Bonaparte, youngest brother of the First Consul, had, it was true, by his indiscreet conduct and prodigal habits, given his family much worry. Too young to have had a part in the struggle which elevated Napoleon, he yet felt himself entitled to enjoy all the advantages his brother's success had brought. No one was feared by him except Napoleon, who, though immensely fond of him, scolded and lectured him as if the culprit were his own son.

And so it was proposed to send Jerome to sea, not to make a naval hero of him, but to remove him from the seductive temptations into which the environment of Napoleon drew him.

The young man, hungry for the pleasures of Paris, sought desperately to escape. "I am not feeling well," he pleaded. "Indeed, I am unfit for sea service!"

"That will be determined by the examining board of the navy," the First Consul said sternly.

Finding that Napoleon was resolved to send him to sea despite his excuses, the young man made this last despairing plea:

"Instead of sending me to perish of ennui at sea, you ought to take me for an aide-de-camp!"

"What, take you, greenhorn?" hotly replied the First Consul. His gaze rested on the scarred Colonel Lacuée, who was standing near. Napoleon directed Jerome's gaze toward him.

"Wait," he said, "till a ball has furrowed your face and then I may find a place for you near my person!"

And so, in November, 1800, Napoleon sent Jerome into the navy, with strict injunctions to Admiral Gantheaume, upon whose flagship he was to serve, to "make him work."

The young man's mettle was soon tested. The Swiftsure, an English ship of the line, of seventy-four guns, which had become separated from Lord Keith's squadron, surrendered to Gantheaume's fleet on June 24, 1801. As a reward for his coolness in action Jerome was sent on board the Swiftsure to receive the captain's sword and to take the prize to Toulon.

Buoyed up by this honor, he now looked forward to at least a vacation from naval duties. Napoleon, however, was sending an expedition in command of General Leclerc, his brother-in-law, to crush the insurrection of Touissant and his negroes on the island of San Domingo. Instead of giving Jerome permission to return to Paris, he ordered him to accompany the expedition.

San Domingo gave the not too enthusiastic Jerome his first military experience. The National Assembly of France, when it proclaimed equality between whites and blacks, had set these West Indian islands in a ferment. The French planters had refused to recognize the decree and against them a hundred thousand blacks had risen in revolt. Touissant, leader of the blacks, though at first he had restored peace, later boasted that he was "the Bonaparte of the Antilles," and, expelling the French governor, had assumed rulership of the island. This presumptuous act Napoleon, in spite of his pretenses at democracy, resolved to punish—and so, with a great flourish, the French fleet sailed to restore French authority on the troubled island. As the black chieftain retreated into the interior, Leclerc, with Jerome at his side, led fifteen thousand men into the pathless forests and treacherous swamps in search of him.

Yellow fever broke out and the French officers and soldiers perished like flies. Jerome's sister, the beautiful, capricious Pauline, wife of Leclerc, tried to lift up the spirits of the fever-stricken colony by keeping open house; by concerts and balls at which the surviving musicians of the general's band played as merrily as if they were in a Paris ballroom, but past those gayly lighted rooms a long procession of carts rumbled to the cemetery of La Fossette, taking dead soldiers to the grave to the music of the dance. The number of deaths had risen to eighteen thousand. In this crisis the low-spirited Jerome was overjoyed to be sent back to France as bearer of dispatches to Napoleon.

Again he showed himself to be too susceptible to the temptations of Paris. Gossip connected his name with a charming little danseuse of the opera. He was shockingly gay at grisette balls, and was too bold a spirit in the carnival. Again the First Consul sent him to sea. This time, however, he was given an independent command and, in 1803, as Capitaine de Vaisseau, accompanied by his friend, General Rewbell, and by a secretary, a physician and a large suite of attendants, cruised in the waters about Martinique during the hostilities between England and France.

*****

It chanced that General Rewbell, Jerome's boon companion, had met and fallen in love with a French girl living in Baltimore—no other than Betsy's friend, Henrietta Pascault, and after an impetuous wooing had married her.

Young Madame Rewbell, whose father, Marquis de Poléon, had once been a landowner in the West Indies, felt it no hardship to go from Baltimore to Martinique with her husband. When she was presented to Jerome, she captivated him with her slim grace and her amazing gift of blending decorum with freedom in a circle where it was quite expected that a husband or a wife should have "supplementary friendships."

One afternoon Jerome escorted the charming Baltimorean to Trois Ilets—that part of Martinique where Josephine had spent her girlhood.

"Why did I come to this place!" he burst out. "It depresses me. Here my sister-in-law Josephine spent her childhood; here 'the little Creole,' a girl playing with dolls, was told by her father that she should sail to France and marry a boy she had not seen since she was seven years old. From here the fifteen-year-old Josephine sailed—the doll still clutched to her breast. You know, madame, how when her young husband Beauharnais was guillotined by the Convention, Josephine's beauty allured my obscure, ambitious brother. Why he married her is plain—she had alliances by which he could climb. But now, so swiftly his ambition soars, it has risen beyond Josephine, his star. There is no limit to his lust for sovereignty. I should not care, if he did not include me in his schemes.

"Here I am, bound in my youth as firmly as was Josephine. Since the match-making First Consul has at his disposal the hands of scores of princesses of Europe, what chance have I of following the impulses of my own heart? Indeed, the First Consul has already admonished me by letter and by envoy to be careful of my conduct abroad—which means, no doubt, that he is selecting a bride for me."

Madame Rewbell, with a show of New World independence that would have dismayed her husband had he overheard, bade Jerome ignore the First Consul's wishes.

"One of your free spirit, monsieur, should marry a Baltimore girl," she said airily; "indeed, I will take it as an affront to myself if you do not. It will mean that my marriage—the first case of a French-American union, does not seem to you an example worth following. It will imply that you think General Rewbell might have made a better choice if he had returned to his own shores!"

"It will mean," the gallant young Bonaparte returned, "that my friend Rewbell plucked the loveliest American rose."

Madame Rewbell curtsied. "You could not have truly paid me that compliment if you had met Elizabeth Patterson."

"Though she were the loveliest woman in the world—which means of course, dear lady, that she would be your counterpart, I could not marry her. It is written in the stars that I must make a marriage of convenience."

"But it might influence your brother, monsieur, that she comes of a fine family; and that her father is one of the wealthiest men in the United States. Even if these facts did not impress the First Consul, you would do well to weigh them carefully, for his fortune would make you independent of your brother."

"He controls me by law," Jerome answered. "I cannot make my own decisions until I am thirty. My brother, though he is fond of me, regards me as a pawn in the game he is playing with the sovereigns of Europe. His dream is to link some principality to France through my marriage to its princess, however homely she may be!

"It's too bad for me," Jerome went on, "that the circumstances of the Bonaparte family are not favorable to Napoleon's scheme of a line of Bonapartean rulers. He himself is united to a woman who cannot bear him a child; his eldest brother Joseph has no son; Lucien is a widower with two daughters by his first wife, and is now marrying a woman of whom the First Consul disapproves. He has already had a son by that woman, but how could France some day set the boy on a throne, when he is only made legitimate by the tardy marriage of his parents? Louis, it is true, has married Hortense Beauharnais, the daughter of Josephine, and has a son for whom Napoleon displays a remarkable affection. The boy's parents have no fortune or station beyond what Napoleon gives him. Sister Pauline, it is also true, by marrying Prince Borghese, has linked the Bonapartes with one of the great families of Europe, but this alliance, illustrious as it is, will not help in the establishment of a hereditary line of kings.

"You see, madame," Jerome concluded in vast disgust, "why Napoleon is counting on me to link him with some royal family of Europe. I doubt not that even now, among his multitude of duties, he is compiling a list of unmarried princesses. Soon he will write, 'Come home and marry this one or that one!'"

*****

Nevertheless, the thought of lovely Betsy Patterson remained in Jerome's mind. To hear her beauty praised, without being able to view it, tantalized him. Was not her city the dwelling-place of his American friend, Commodore Barney, with whom he had many a jovial glass in the taverns of Martinique? And had not the Commodore urged him to visit him? Even if the girls of America were barred from him, he could at least behold their graces. Mon Dieu, these West Indian islands were stifling. He would sail for the United States, even if it were a violation of orders.