Читать книгу The Collected Works of Napoleon Bonaparte - Charles Downer Hazen, Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne - Страница 150

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"I have suppressed your address, it was incendiary. I called you round me to do good—you have done ill. Eleven-twelfths of you are well intentioned, the others, and above all, M. Lainé, are factious intriguers, devoted to England, to all my enemies, and corresponding, through the channel of the advocate Désege, with the Prince Regent, Return to your departments and feel that my eye will follow you; you have endeavored to humble me, you may kill me, but you shall not dishonor me. You make remonstrances; is this a time, when the stranger invades our provinces, and two hundred thousand Cossacks are ready to overflow our country? There may have been petty abuses; I never connived at them. You, M. Renouard, you said that Prince Massena robbed a man at Marseilles of his house. You lie! The general took possession of a vacant house, and my minister shall indemnify the proprietor. Is it thus that you dare affront a marshal of France who has bled for his country, and grown gray in victory? Why did you not make your complaints in secret to me? I would have done you justice. We should wash our dirty linen in private, and not drag it out before the world. You call yourselves representatives of the nation. It is not true; you are only deputies of the departments; a small portion of the State, inferior to the Senate, inferior even to the Council of State. The representatives of the people! I am alone the representative of the people. Twice have twenty-four millions of French called me to the throne—which of you durst undertake such a burden? It had already overwhelmed (écrasé) your Assemblies, and your Conventions, your Vergniands and your Guadets, your Jacobins and your Girondins. They are all dead! What, who are you? nothing—all authority is in the throne; and what is the throne? This wooden frame covered with velvet? No, I am the throne. You have added wrong to reproaches. You have talked of concessions—concessions that even my enemies dared not ask. I suppose if they asked Champagne, you would have given them La Brie besides; but in four months I will conquer peace, or I shall be dead. You advise! how dare you debate on such high matters (de si graves interêts)! You have put me in the front of the battle as the cause of war. It is infamous (c'est une atrocité). In all your committees you have excluded the friends of the Government, extraordinary commission, committee of finance, committee of the address, all, all my enemies. M. Lainé, I repeat it, is a traitor; he is a wicked man, the others are mere intriguers. I do justice to the eleven-twelfths; but the factious I know and will pursue. Is it, I ask again, is it while the enemy is in France that you should have done this? But nature has gifted me with a determined courage—nothing can overcome me. It cost my pride much, too,—I made that sacrifice; I—but I am above your miserable declamations. I was in need of consolation, and you would mortify me,—but, no, my victories shall crush your clamors; in three months we shall have peace, and you shall repent your folly. I am one of those who triumph or die.

"Go back to your departments. If any one of you dare to print your address, I shall publish it in the Moniteur with notes of my own. Go, France stands more in need of me than I do of France. I bear the eleven-twelfths of you in my heart. I shall nominate the deputies of the two series which are vacant, and I shall reduce the legislative body to the discharge of its proper duties. The inhabitants of Alsace and Franche-Comté have a better spirit than you; they ask me for arms. I send them, and one of my aides-de-camp will lead them against the enemy."