Читать книгу The Life, Exile and Conversations with Napoleon - Emmanuel-Auguste-Dieudonné Las Cases - Страница 51

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28th—31st. My son and I prosecuted our labours without intermission. His health, however, began to be affected; he felt a pain in his chest. My eyes also grew weak: these were really the effects of our excessive occupation. Indeed, we had gone through an amazing quantity of work: we had already nearly arrived at the end of the Campaign of Italy. The Emperor, however, did not yet find that he had sufficient occupation. Employment was his only resource, and the interest which his first dictations had assumed furnished an additional motive for proceeding with them. The Campaign of Egypt was now about to be commenced. The Emperor had frequently talked of employing the Grand Marshal on this subject.

Those of our party who were lodged in the town were badly accommodated, and were dissatisfied at being separated from the Emperor. They were harassed by the constraint and mortifications to which they were subjected. I suggested to the Emperor that he should set us all to work at the same time, and proceed at once with the Campaigns of Italy and Egypt, the history of the Consulate, the return from the Island of Elba, &c. The time, I observed, would then pass more quickly; this great work, the glory of France, would advance more rapidly, and the gentlemen who resided in the town would be less unhappy. The idea pleased the Emperor, and from that moment one or two of his suite came regularly every day to write from his dictation, the transcript of which they brought to him next morning. They then stayed to dinner, and thus afforded the Emperor a little more amusement.

We made such arrangements that the Emperor insensibly found himself more comfortably situated in many respects. A tent, which had been given to me by the Colonel of the 53rd regiment, was spread out so as to form a prolongation of the room occupied by the Emperor. His cook took up his abode at Briars. The table-linen was taken from the trunks, the plate was set forth, and our first dinner after these preparations was a sort of fête. The evenings, however, always hung heavily on our hands. The Emperor would sometimes visit the adjoining house; at other times he would endeavour to leave his chamber to walk; but more frequently he remained within-doors, and tried to pass the time in conversation until ten or eleven o’clock. He dreaded retiring to bed too early; for when he did so, he awoke in the night; and, in order to divert his mind from sorrowful reflections, he was obliged to rise and read.

One day at dinner the Emperor cast his eyes on one of the dishes of his own campaign-service, on which the Royal arms had been engraved. “How they have spoiled this!” he exclaimed in very energetic terms; and he could not refrain from observing that the King had been in a great hurry to take possession of the Imperial plate, which he certainly could not claim as having been taken from him, since it unquestionably belonged to him, Napoleon; for, he added, that when he ascended the throne he found not a vestige of royal property. At his abdication he left to the crown five millions in plate, and between forty and fifty millions in furniture, which was all purchased with his own money out of his civil list.

In a conversation one evening, the Emperor related the circumstances attending the event of Brumaire. I suppress the particulars, because they were afterwards dictated to General Gourgaud; and a detailed account of this remarkable affair will be found in the Memoirs.

Sieyes, who was one of the Provisional Consuls along with Napoleon, astonished to hear his colleague, on the very first conference, discussing questions relative to finance, administration, the army, law, and politics, left him, quite disconcerted, and ran to his friends, saying, “Gentlemen, you have got a master! This man knows every thing, wills every thing, and can do every thing.”

I was in London at that time, and I told the Emperor that the emigrants there had formed great hopes and placed much confidence on the events of the 18th of Brumaire and on his Consulate. Several of us, who had formerly been acquainted with Madame de Beauharnois, immediately set out for Paris, hoping, through her means, to exercise some influence, or give some direction to affairs, which then appeared under a new aspect.

Our general opinion at the time was that the First Consul had waited for propositions from the French Princes. We grounded this opinion on the circumstance of his having been so long without manifesting his intentions respecting them; which, however, he did some time afterwards in a way the most overwhelming, by means of a proclamation. We attributed this result to the stupid conduct of the Bishop of Arras, the counsellor and director of our affairs; who, according to his own confession, went to work with his eyes shut, and boasted of not having read a single newspaper for a series of years, ever since they had been filled, as he said, with the successes and the falsehoods of those wretches. On the first establishment of the Consulate, some one having attempted to persuade the Bishop to enter into negotiations with the Consul, through the mediation of Madame Buonaparte, he rejected the proposition with indignation, and in language of so coarse and disgusting a nature as induced the person to tell him that his expressions were far from being episcopal, and that he certainly had never learned them from his breviary.

About the same period he made use of some gross invectives against the Duc de Choiseuil,—and that too at the table of the Prince, where he was smartly reprimanded for them; and all this was only because the Duke, on being released from imprisonment at Calais, and escaping death through the protection of the Consul, concluded his reply to the enquiries made by the Prince relative to Buonaparte, by protesting that, for his part, he should never cease to acknowledge his personal gratitude towards him.

To all this the Emperor replied that he had never bestowed a thought on the Princes; that the observations to which I had alluded proceeded from one of the other Consuls, and were made without any particular motive; that we, who were abroad, seemed to have no idea of the opinions of those at home; and that even if he had been favourably disposed towards the Princes, it would not have been in his power to carry his intentions into execution. He had, however, received overtures, about that period, both from Mittau and London.

The King, he said, wrote him a letter, which was conveyed to him by Lebrun, who had it from the Abbé de Montesquiou, the secret agent of the Prince at Paris. This letter, which was written in a very laboured style, contained the following paragraph: “You delay long to restore me my throne. It is to be feared that you may allow favourable moments to escape. You cannot complete the happiness of France without me, nor can I serve France without you. Hasten, then, and specify yourself the places which you would wish your friends to possess.”

To this letter the First Consul replied:—“I have received your Royal Highness’s letter; I have always felt deep interest in your misfortunes and those of your family. You must not think of appearing in France; you could not do so without passing over a hundred thousand dead bodies. I shall, however, be always eager to do every thing that may tend to alleviate your fate, or enable you to forget your misfortunes.”

The overtures made by the Count d’Artois possessed still more elegance and address. He commissioned, as the bearer of them, the Duchess de Guiche, a lady whose fascinating manners and personal graces were calculated to assist her in the important negotiation. She easily got access to Madame Buonaparte, with whom all the individuals of the old Court came easily in contact. She breakfasted with her at Malmaison; and the conversation turning on London, the emigrants, and the French Princes, Madame de Guiche mentioned that as she happened a few days before to be at the house of the Count d’Artois, she had heard some person ask the Prince what he intended to do for the First Consul, in the event of his restoring the Bourbons; and that the Prince had replied:—“I would immediately make him Constable of the kingdom, and every thing else he might choose. But even that would not be enough: we would raise on the Carrousel a lofty and magnificent column, surmounted with a statue of Buonaparte crowning the Bourbons.”

As soon as the First Consul entered, which he did very shortly after breakfast, Josephine eagerly repeated to him the circumstance which the Duchess had related. “And did you not reply,” said her husband, “that the corpse of the First Consul would have been made the pedestal of the Column?”—The charming Duchess was still present; the beauties of her countenance, her eyes, and her words, were directed to the success of her commission. She said she was so delighted she did not know how she should ever be able sufficiently to acknowledge the favour which Madame Buonaparte had procured her, of seeing and hearing so distinguished a man—so great a hero. It was all in vain: the Duchess de Guiche received orders that very night to quit Paris. The charms of the emissary were too well calculated to alarm Josephine, to induce her to say any thing very urgent in her favour, and next day the Duchess was on her way to the frontier.

It is, however, absolutely false that Napoleon, on his part, at a subsequent period, made overtures or propositions to the Princes touching the cession of their rights, or their renunciation of the Crown; though such statements have been made in some pompous declarations, profusely circulated through Europe.—How was such a thing possible?” said the Emperor; “I, who could only reign by the very principle which excluded them—that of the sovereignty of the people—how could I have sought to possess through them rights which were proscribed in their persons! That would have been to proscribe myself. The absurdity would have been too palpable, too ridiculous; it would have ruined me for ever in public opinion. The fact is that neither directly nor indirectly, at home or abroad, did I ever do any thing of the kind: and this will no doubt, in the course of time, be the opinion of all persons of judgment, who allow me to have been neither a fool nor a madman.

“The prevalence of this report, however, induced me to seek to discover what could have given rise to it, and these are the facts which I collected:—at the period of the good understanding between France and Prussia, and while that state was endeavouring to ingratiate herself in our favour, she caused inquiry to be made whether France would take umbrage at her allowing the French Princes to remain in the Prussian territories, to which the French Government answered in the negative. Emboldened by this reply, Prussia next enquired whether we should feel any great repugnance to furnish them, through her medium, with an annual allowance. To this our government also replied in the negative, provided that Prussia would be responsible for their remaining quiet, and abstaining from all intrigue. The negotiation of this affair being once set on foot between the two countries, Heaven knows what the zeal of some agent, or even the doctrines of the Court of Berlin, which did not accord with ours, may have proposed. This furnished, no doubt, the motive and pretext, if indeed any really existed, for the fine letter of Louis XVIII., to which all the members of his family so ostentatiously adhered. The French Princes eagerly seized that opportunity of reviving the interest and attention of Europe, which had been by this time totally withdrawn from them.”