IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON: HIS LIFE \\1) [TS I \ Mol'S S< I A ES THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NSW YORK • BOSTON • CHICACO • DALLAS ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., Limited LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO Napoleon as Gexeral-ix-Chief of the Army of Italy, by G. Levy IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON HIS LIFE AND ITS FAMOUS SCENES BY JAMES MORGAN AUTHOR OF "ABRAHAM LINCOLN. THE BOY AND THE MAN." ETC. ILLUSTRATED IRew HJorfe THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1915 All rights reserved Copyright. 1914 and 1915 By JAMES MORGAN Copyright, 1915 By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY Set up and electrotyped. Published, September, 1915 OCT -7 1915 ©CU410883 To the Dear Memory of a Friend, EDWARD FRANCIS BURNS, 1859-19H, who proposed my journey in the path of Napoleon THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD Before writing this biography of Napoleon, I made a jour- ney of nearly twenty thousand miles to the famous scenes in his life and along the line of his celebrated marches. The drama of history is as much entitled to its proper stage setting as the plays of the theatre, and my aim has been to see and portray the man in his various backgrounds, to bring closer his habita- tions and battlefields, to simplify the geography of his cam- paigns. It chanced that on the eve of the "War of the Nations, my errand took me from Corsica through France and Italy to Egypt, the Holy Land, and Syria ; over the Alps and through Austria, Germany, and Poland into Russia, and finally to Elba and Waterloo. The Russians and Germans had only lately commemorated their liberation from Napoleon's empire, and the British and other peoples were preparing to celebrate the centennial of his final overthrow at Waterloo, when an- other great European war suddenly burst upon the same fields where the same powers had struggled for mastery 100 years before. The War of the Nations is the tragic sequel of the Na- poleonic wars. Some of the parties may have changed sides for the moment; but in their motives and their strategy, the two wars are strangely alike, and I have depicted the earlier as the forerunner of this later conflict. The centenary of Napoleon's downfall, moreover, seems to offer an appropriate occasion for telling again the story that never grows old, and for telling it in the light of our own times. An effort has been made, therefore, to find in his rise and fall something more than the miraculous vicissitudes of a legendary superman, or the meaningless sport of blind for- tune. I have tried to present him simply as a man of the THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD people who, in a period of chaos, was called out of the crowd to embody and vindicate the race of common men against the privileged few, to sweep away ancient systems and wrongs, and, as the incarnation of the Great Revolution, to be en- throned above monarchs of long descent. In short, I have represented him as the servant of a mighty power not of him- self that o'er him planned and which, with the pitilessness of nature, cast him away when, blinded by personal ambition, he was no longer faithful and useful to its purpose. This is the Napoleon who, after the lapse of a century, retains his dominion over the imagina- tion of the world, supreme in the admiration and the disap- pointment, in the applause and reproach of men. Since my wife shared my travels and my labours in the preparation of this volume, I hope I may be permitted grate- fully to acknowledge her joint authorship. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I Birth and Birthplace 3 II Schooldays in France 13 III Before the Dawn 22 IV The Man on Horseback 31 V A Love Story 38 VI The Little Corporal 46 VII In the Cockpit of Europe 52 VIII Conquering Austria 60 IX Nations at the Feet of a Youth 65 X The Descent upon Egypt 73 XI The Battle of the Pyramids 82 XII Into the Holy Land 91 XIII His First Retreat 100 XIV Ruler of France 110 XV Crossing the Alps 118 XVI Marengo Lost and Won 127 XVII The Law Giver 135 XVIII Selling Louisiana 143 XIX A Day at Malmaison 147 XX How the Republic Died 159 XXI Twice Crowned 167 XXII The Unconquered Sea 178 XXIII The Fall of Vienna 184 XXIV The Sun of Austerlitz 193 XXV The Matchmaker 206 XXVI The Kingmaker 213 XXVII Crushing Prussia 218 XXVIII Eylau and Friedland 226 XXIX At Tilsit 238 CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE XXX Napoleon's Marshals 247 XXXI Victories of Peace 252 XXXII Fortune Turns 264 XXXIII His Last Victory 272 XXXIV The Unconquered Sex 282 XXXV The Divorce 292 XXXVI The Second Marriage 301 XXXVII The King of Rome 310 XXXVIII A World at War 320 XXXIX On to Moscow 329 XL The Torch That Fired the World .... 339 XLI The Great Tragedy 350 XLII The Rising of the Peoples 361 XLIII The Battle of the Nations 369 XLIV At Bay 382 XLV The First Abdication 392 XLVI Emperor of Elba 402 XLVII The Return from Elba 413 XLVIII The Hundred Days 425 XLIX Waterloo 433 L The Captive Eagle 448 LI St. Helena 458 LII L'AlGLON AND THE BONAPARTES 473 LIII Across a Century 485 Chronology of Napoleon's Life 495 Index 505 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Napoleon, as General-in-Chief of the Army of Italy, by G. L eV y , Frontispiece FACING PAGE Napoleon's Mother and his Birthplace 6 Statue of Napoleon, the Schoolboy, and the Gate of his old School at Brienne le Chateau I 6 An Early Portrait of Napoleon, by Bailly 34 Josephine, by Prud'hon 40 The Little Corporal at the Bridge of Lodi, and With Josephine at a Fete in Milan 62 At the Fete of Mahomet in Cairo 84 In the Saddle, by Bellange 114 Welcomed by the Monks of St. Bernard 120 Napoleon with his nephews and nieces, by Ducis 144 Napoleon Crowning Josephine, by David 170 The Emperor in the Midst of his New Aristocracy . . . .130 At Austerlitz, by Gerard I 98 The Emperor and Empress at the Marriage of Jerome Bona- parte to the Princess Catherine, by Regnault 208 Princes of the New Imperial Family 214 The Conqueror, by Meissonier, with his Hat and his Camp Washstand 22 ° LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS FACING PAGE The Emperor of the West and the Emperor of the East Meet- ing on the Raft at Tilsit, and Napoleon Greeting Queen Louise of Prussia 240 Some Portraits of the Emperor 254 Some Napoleonic Autographs 258 Women of the Imperial Family 286 The Divorce of Josephine, by Sartain 296 Marie Louise and the King of Rome, by Gerard 304 Napoleon and his Son, by Steuben 314 "Bad News from France," by Verestchagin 342 In Retreat 364 The Adieu to the Guard at Fontainebleau 396 The Fallen Monarch, and his Elban Retreat 406 Waterloo, by Steuben 440 On the Bellerophon, by Orchardson 452 Longwood, and the Nameless Grave at St. Helena .... 462 The Last Days of Napoleon, by Vela, and the Camp Bed on which he died 468 Two Portraits of Napoleon at St. Helena 478 The Hotel des Invalides at Paris, and the Tomb of Napoleon . 488 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON: HIS LIFE AND ITS FAMOUS SCENES IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON CHAPTER I BIRTH AND BIRTHPLACE BORN AUGUST 15, 1769 THE strange, eventful history of Napoleon, the strangest and most eventful in human story, must forever start at Ajaceio, the quaint, out-of -the- world capital of Corsica. Sailing out of the Mediterranean into the Bay of Ajaceio, between Capo di Muro and the blood red lies Sanguinaires, the eye of a traveller is enchanted by a scene of beauty prob- ably unsurpassed in all those waters except by the larger and grander Bay of Naples. Behind its hoary grey citadel, the town glistens like a white city where the green slopes of snow- capped Monte d'Oro come down from the blue sky to meet the blue sea. The fast little steamer, which makes the 210 mile voyage from Marseilles in about 12 hours and the 150 mile journey from Nice in nine, ties up side-on to a stone dock, where the passengers step ashore as from a train at a railway station and are at once in "la cite Napoleonienne, ' ' with mementoes of the immortal Ajaccian on every side. Tall palms at the end of the quay surround a wide, shady square which opens the way up town. At the top of this short Place des Palmiers a street leads into the older town back of the citadel. It is the Rue Napoleon. Three streets on the right from this is the narrow, almost sunless Rue St. 3 4 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON Charles, and there at the end of the first block stands a four story, square stone house at the corner of a still narrower street. Above the door there is a marble tablet with this in- scription in French: Napoleon was born in this house August 15, 1769 On that August 15th, the Feast of the Assumption, ever the greatest day in the religious calendar for the Corsicans, was being celebrated in Ajaccio. The little town had given itself over to the holiday and the country people had been swarming in afoot and on mule back since early morning. The bells were ringing, the houses were green with boughs and the cathedral altar was abloom with wild flowers from the mountain side. In the middle of the forenoon the beautiful young Signora Bonaparte — a girl of nineteen — leading by the hand her six- year-old half-brother, Joseph Fesch, and followed by her hus- band's uncle, Luciano, and her husband's sister-in-law, Gel- truda Paravacini, came out of that front door over which the tablet now rests and made her way down the street two blocks to the cathedral. While she was among the kneeling wor- shippers at the mass, she received the painful warnings of maternity. Calling for the aid of her companion, she was assisted to her feet and led out of the crowded church to her home. There she sank upon a sofa and, at eleven o'clock in the morning, Napoleon entered the world. No physician had been summoned. No midwife was in at- tendance, and that office was fulfilled by Signora Paravacini, aided by the maid of all work, Mammucia Caterina, for his- tory has treasured all this time every name connected with the opening scene in the great drama. There was, moreover, a stirring prologue to this drama some fifty miles away in the wild heart of the then half-barbarous island, and the savage Corsican mountains are the first back- ground in the life of Napoleon. His prenatal environment appropriately was a scene of war, crowded with moving acci- dents by flood and field. For forty years a primitive and BIRTH AND BIRTHPLACE 5 liberty loving people, only 160,000 in all, Italian in speech and by tradition but Corsicans at heart, had been struggling for their independence, first against the rich republic of Genoa and at last against the great kingdom of France, to which the Genoese had pawned the sovereignty of Corsica, with its less than 4000 square miles of wild mountains and fruitful valleys. Ajaccio being a seaport, the French invader had readily captured it, and the patriotic Bonapartes, men and women together, fled the town to join the patriot army, where Signora Bonaparte's husband was the secretary of Paoli, the Corsican general-in-chief. A year and a half before the date on the tablet the signora had taken refuge in an old house in the little mountain town of Corte, then the capital, where she gave birth to a son. The house stands to this day, and inscribed amid the many battle scars on its walls is the announcement that it is the birthplace of King Joseph Bonaparte of Spain. The next year, when the despairing band of Corsicans was making its last stand before the guns of Louis XV, the brave young mother was the companion of her husband in the field. Holding her baby boy, Joseph, in one arm, she drove her saddle mule with her free hand, while, as she said, "under my heart I carried my Napoleon, with the same calm pleasure that I felt afterward when I held him in my arms and fed him at my breast. ... I heard the balls whistling round my ears, without a shadow of fear, as I trusted to the protection of the Holy Virgin." Often the expectant mother slept in the open in the midst of the soldiers. On the long, swift marches up and down and around the rugged mountains she rode beside or behind her husband and sometimes was obliged to trudge afoot with the hunted army, pursued everywhere by overwhelming forces. In next the last battle she was present on the field, and after the final crushing defeat was among those who fled from the conquering French and hid in the fugitives' grotto, which is still shown in a wilderness of granite far up the side of Monte Rotondo. Some three hundred Corsicans, who were determined never to wear the yoke of the French, gathered around their General- 6 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON in-chief and sailed away on an exile to England. Signora Bonaparte 's husband was eager to go with them. But "for the objections of the wife, who was to be a mother again in three months, London and not Ajaccio would have been the birth- place of Napoleon and he would have become perhaps a British soldier. Yielding to her counsels, the husband decided to re- main in the island and he took the lead in making peace with the French commander. The subjugation of Corsica was complete — and France had annexed Napoleon Bonaparte ! A bride before she was fourteen, Letizia was nineteen at the birth of Napoleon, who was her fourth child. The first two having failed to lay hold on life, and remembering that sad experience and her recent struggles and privations with the army in the field, there was a natural anxiety about the new- comer. She nursed him while she could and then her place was taken by a sailor's wife, Camilla Ilari, another name im- mortalised by association with this infant, her ' ' Nabulionello, " as the good woman fondly called her charge. In a land of lovely women, Letizia had worn from girlhood the challenging title of the "most beautiful woman in Cor- sica." According to the standards of a race of low stature, she was of medium height and of graceful carriage, with the small hands and feet and ears, the regular teeth, the chestnut hair, the noble forehead, the brilliant eyes, the long, well- formed nose, the fine mouth and strong chin which Napoleon was to inherit as he developed into manhood. It is certain, however, that he was not hailed as a pretty baby or one worthy of a beautiful mother and a handsome father, and for a long time the family was troubled because his big head was so out of proportion to his really frail body. Napoleon, as well as his mother, testified that he was a wild, unruly boy, whose inseparable companion was no other than his foster brother, his ' ' brother of the milk, ' ' Ignazio Ilari, the son of a sailor and a nurse. Long years afterward, when he sat down on another island to gaze across the gulf of a life- time, and this island of Corsica swam into view, he said of his childhood : BIRTH AND BIRTHPLACE 7 "I was self-willed and obstinate; nothing awed me; nothing disconcerted me. I was quarrelsome, exasperating; I feared no one. I gave a blow here and a scratch there. Every one was afraid of me. My brother, Joseph, was the one with whom I had the most to do; he was beaten, bitten, scolded. I had put the blame on him almost before he knew what he was about, was telling tales about him almost before he could col- lect his wits. I had to be quick. My mamma, Letizia, would have restrained my warlike temper; she would not have put up with my defiant petulance. Her tenderness was severe, meting out punishment and reward with equal justice ; merit and demerit, she took both into account." The rod was not spared by the stern and exacting mother. A cuff or two on the ear were sometimes required to get the boy started to church even on Sunday. When he persisted one day in following his mother against her orders, she turned and calmly gave him such a vigorous slap that he rolled down a hill, where she left him to pick himself up while she went on her way without looking back. Even when the time came for him to flatter himself that he was "too big to be whipped," he learned his mistake. Because his old grandmother walked with a cane he called her a witch in spite of all her pampering of him. The mother simply waited until he was changing his clothes for dinner, in expectation of guests, and catching him out of his armour, gave him one more and his last parental chastisement. To an American seeking dramatic effects in the plebeian origin of the Emperor, his birthplace is a disappointment. It is too large and too nearly palatial for the purpose of contrast. While Napoleon was a parvenu among kings, he was an aristo- crat among Corsicans and belonged to one of the first families of Ajaccio. His father was "the noble Signor Carlo di Buona- parte" in the record of his marriage, and by the same evidence his mother the daughter of "the noble Signor Jean Jerome Ramolino. ' ' The old family mansion at Ajaccio has hardly been occupied since the Bonapartes were banished from Corsica — to fame and fortune. Napoleon's mother willed it to the King of Rome, 8 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON but she outlived the King, and at her death it came into the possession of King Joseph Bonaparte. Now it is the property of the ex-Empress Eugenie. Across the street, is the tiny Place Letizia, where once stood the girlhood home of the mother, the site of which Eugenie has bought and sown with flower seed. On the second floor of the Bonaparte home, joining the salon de visite where the inevitable register now awaits the tourist's autograph, is a large chamber with one window overlooking the side street. This is the veritable shrine of the temple — the room in which Napoleon was born. The low, narrow sofa on which the young mother lay in the clothes she had worn at church still stands against the wall. There is little in the birthroom now except memories, but they crowd it. A Bible scene is there, carved in wood, a gift that Napoleon brought his mother when he came home for the last time after his Egyptian campaign. A bust of Eugenie's Prince Imperial is on the mantel where she placed it with her own hands when she was Empress of the French. On the wall above the sofa is a simple engraving in a cheap frame. It is a picture of the child grown to young manhood but still looking very boyish, the "Little Corporal" waving the tricolour flag of France on the bridge of Arcole. It is like a picture of him at play and in keeping with the scenes of his j^outh, where on the red tiled floor he stamped about, a wooden sword on his thigh. The house as a whole is now scantily furnished, but the birth chamber and its sofa, the veritable nest in which the eagle was hatched, is enough for the most eager pilgrim, and this, with the house itself, should appease the greediest curiosity. Then there is Napoleon's back bedroom, where the boy's wild dreams did not equal the realities of the life ahead of him. Moreover, this room has a trap door, and the trap door has a legend of young Napoleon dropping through it to escape from pursuing enemies in the Revolution. If the largeness of the exterior takes the visitor by surprise, he will be astonished by the imposing interiors of the house, the drawing room, the dining room, the smoking room, and the BIRTH AND BIRTHPLACE 9 cabinet or study of the father, all with their mantels of Car- rara marble. The grand drawing room, the salon des fetes, its floor of shining parquetry ready for a ball and its walls hung with mirrors and candelabra, suggests the labours of a restorer, for when Napoleon early in. his fortunes ordered the old home repaired, Joseph, to whom the duty was intrusted, is said to have touched up and embellished the ancestral background of the newly arisen family. However that may be, a sympathetic observer, with a mind for practical things, cannot but be sorry as he wanders from room to room, each opening from the other, to think of poor Letizia taking care of this big house and her eight children with only one servant to help her ! Among the rare keepsakes of the birthplace is the book of ritual which the priest, who was a Corsican, employed when he prepared Napoleon for death at St. Helena. Perhaps the richest treasure of all, which is kept in the house of the cus- todian, is a laurel wreath or crown of gold, costing $7000, which some enthusiasts ordered for the centenary of the Con- sulate when it was celebrated in 1902. Everywhere Ajaccio echoes the memories of her greatest son. The very dock at which the steamer lands is the Quay Na- poleon, and bending down to the shore from a terraced height runs the Boulevard du Roi Jerome, recalling the youngest brother of Napoleon. Farther up the leafy Place of Palms, where the flowing water ripples in a fountain, rises a white marble statue of the First Consul, sheeted like a Roman and with a rudder in his right hand. Although he followed his star by land and not by water, the Ajaccian naturally thinks of his immortal fellow islander as at the helm. Behind the back of that marble effigy, the shady square comes to an end. Or rather it merely narrows into the still spacious Avenue du Premier Consul, lined by more palms, and continues straight on for two blocks where it is intersected by the Rue Bonaparte and by the most important street in town, the Cours Napoleon, along which the throngs saunter beneath the wide-spreading orange trees. From the Rue Bonaparte, the Rue du Roi de Rome winds its 10 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON way to the old cathedral, built before 1600, and where Na- poleon's parents were married with all possible pomp. At the right of the door stands the baptismal font, surmounted now by an elaborately carved bronze canopy with a crown at the top. Under the crown, ' ' The glory of God and the glory of the world" is engraved with the names of the Bonaparte princes and princesses who were baptised by the priests of the cathe- dral. But the most conspicuous object is a red marble tablet on a pillar whereon in letters of gold are these words at- tributed to Napoleon's will : If my corpse should be proscribed in Paris as I have been, I wish to be buried among my ancestors in the cathedral of Ajaccio in Cor- sica. This modest plain old village church well may boast, there- fore, that it stood only second to the magnificent Hotel des Invalides in the choice of the imperial exile. How nearly it came to being both the burial place and the birthplace of Napoleon ! If Ajaccio, however, is not the sepulchre of the Maker of Kings, it guards the dust of the Mother of Kings. In the courtyard of the College Fesch in the Rue Fesch — named for the young uncle who taught Napoleon his a, b, c's and who was rewarded with the red hat of a cardinal — is the Chapel Im- perial, which, although erected only in 1860, looks as venerable as the ancient mausoleum of the Bourbons at St. Denis. Com- ing out of the glare of the street into the dusk of the chapel, the visitor sees at first no other epitaph than that of "Mater Regum," but drawing nearer the engraved roll of Letizia's princely offspring becomes legible. Her silent companions in the chapel are her half brother, Cardinal Fesch, and two princes and a princess among the lesser known of the Bona- partes. When Letizia's remains were enthroned there, having first been brought from Rome and placed in a chapel of the cathe- dral, the star of the Bonapartes was risen again and was shining gloriously on the Second Empire. But to-day Ajaccio, BIRTH AND BIRTHPLACE 11 alone in a faithless world, remains faithful to the memory of the vanished empire and its dynasty. Some lightning- impressionist has described the town as ' ' the shade of Napoleon, with houses built around it. " It is a com- munity of idol worshippers ; it is all a big Napoleonic museum, where every trinket of the Bonapartes is sacredly cherished. There is only one Napoleonic object in town which the Ajaccians do not take seriously. This is the group of statuary in the Place du Diamant, at the edge of the sea, where Na- poleon in Roman toggery sits in bronze on a horse poised atop a block of granite, with his four brothers afoot at the corners. Even the idolatrous smile at the stiff group, which is derisively called "the inkstand." More interesting is the big, wide square itself, for it was the playground of Napoleon and his first battlefield; Whether it was all Austerlitz and no Waterloo for him in those youthful engagements we are left to wonder. Ajaccio then was a little walled town, with a gate and bastion. Between the wall and the citadel at the point of the peninsula the 3500 inhabitants were packed in eighteen or twenty streets. The nobles and merchants, and their retainers, lived in the old houses within the wall, while the sailors, mechanics and laborers dwelt in the hardscrabble village outside. Between the boys of those two communities there was a ven- detta bequeathed from generation to generation of boyhood, and Napoleon first got into action as the champion of his side in this inherited quarrel, marshalling his troops, armed with sticks and stones, to drive the invaders out of the town gate and to meet hostile reinforcements under the wall. The boy sprang from a fighting race and was bred to war in an age of strife. His earliest lesson in history was of the Forty Years' War, which ended at his birth. "I was born," he once said, "when my native land died." As the stirring story of the long and unequal struggle of his people dawned upon his understanding, he adopted Paoli as his model and his little breast was filled with patriotic zeal. Friends of the family, seeing him eating soldiers' bread in 12 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON the streets, were shocked by his presenting a spectacle so un- becoming his parentage and reported it to his mother, who found it was a habit of the boy to swap his home-made bread for the coarser kind issued to the garrison. "lama soldier, ' ' he insisted, ' ' and I intend to eat what the soldiers eat. ' ' CHAPTER II SCHOOLDAYS IN FRANCE 1778-1785 AGE 9-16 A FORLORN, sallow-faced boy, not yet ten years old and small for his age, alien-looking and speaking broken French, climbed down from a two wheeled cart and followed a priest through the gate of the school kept by the Minim friars at Brienne le Chateau in France one day in May in the year 1779. There he was registered as Napoleone de Buonaparte, although he called himself after his native Cor- sican fashion, Nabulione Buonaparte — ' ' Nah-bool-ee-ony Bona- party." Among the few more than 100 pupils in the school, all of noble birth, there were sixty poor boys of the nobility who were educated on the bounty of the King, now Louis XVI. Thanks to the efforts of Napoleon's father as a seeker of government favours and his mother's hospitality to the French conqueror of Corsica, he was admitted to this group. Carlo Bonaparte had submitted proof of eleven generations of noble Bonapartes be- hind his son and filed a "certificate of indigence," in which four Corsicans declared that he was too poor to educate Na- poleon in accordance with his birth. Carlo's memorandum when he went home, after placing Napoleon in school, was characteristic: ... "I started for the court of France, deputy noble of the estates of Corsica, taking with me 100 louis. I received while in Paris 4000 francs in gratifications from the King, and 1000 ecus in fees ; and I returned without a sou." He had, however, brought back from Paris twelve beautiful suits of silk and velvet for himself. As fast as the younger children grew up they were regularly 13 14 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON and promptly transferred by Carlo to the care and keep of a generous government, while he himself was on the payroll as assessor of the royal court of justice in Ajaccio and drew his emoluments as the deputy of the Corsican nobility in Paris. A lawyer by profession, he seems to have had hardly any other client than himself. While a talented man and industri- ous enough, he laboured hard and constantly all his days to support himself and family by some more respectable means than earning his living. With his father away much of the time and his mother ignorant of books, Napoleon received no education at home. From his uncle, Joseph Fesch, he learned the alphabet and he was taught the catechism by his great-uncle, Luciano Bona- parte, the archdeacon. At six he was sent to a girls' school to receive lessons from nuns and next he passed to a brothers' school, Abbe Recco's, where he gave the first sign of his apti- tude for mathematics. The boy was only nine when he bade good-bye to his home to enter upon a six years' school course among strangers in a strange land, never again to know throughout the tender years of youth the loving care of a mother or the affections and comforts of a family circle. Sailing away from Ajaccio on a winter's day, with his father and Joseph and his uncle Fesch, he first set foot on the soil of France at Marseilles. For three months he stayed with Joseph at Autun, in order that he might be instructed a little in the French language, as he still spoke only the Italian dialect of Corsica. When the time came for him to leave for Brienne the elder brother wept loudly at the parting, but only one tear escaped Napoleon's self-repression, and that evidence of weakness was quickly brushed away. Joseph might cry ; he was going to be a priest, but a soldier must have a stout heart. The boy would need at Brienne all the stoicism in his nature. The discipline there was prescribed by the war department as suited to the breeding of soldiers. In some respects it would have been equally suitable for a prison and it would be looked upon to-day as a cruelly severe regime to impose upon a boy as young as Napoleon. SCHOOLDAYS IN FRANCE 15 He Wore a bine uniform with red facings and white metal buttons on his coat, and he had to do his own mending. His hair was cut short until he had reached the age of twelve, after which he was privileged to sport a pigtail, but it must not be powdered except on Sundays and saints' days. He slept by himself in a six-foot cell, but ate with the other boys in the mess hall and knelt with them in the chapel at morning mass and evening prayer. He had no vacations nor hardly an opportunity to see the in- side of a home. He saw his mother only once, when, yearning to look upon her boys, she persuaded herself to leave her family cares and join her husband on a journey to France, where she was shocked to find Napoleon so thin and worn. The little Corsican had found himself a mark for the boys of Autun at the outset of his life in France and never was permitted to forget that he was an alien. He was greeted with the same mischievous hostility in Brienne and had to contend with bitter disadvantages. His appearance and his foreign accent moved his young comrades to laughter. His Corsican nobility was not taken any more seriously by these children of the old nobles of France than if he claimed descent from some tribal chief among the American Indians. Corsica to their understanding was a savage country and they knew of it only as a scene of rebellions and vendettas, regarding it perhaps as our world to-day regards Albania in the scale of civilisation. The paying pupils made him feel his poverty. With the thoughtless and unsparing cruelty of boyhood, they chose the friendless, unsocial stranger as a target for all manner of taunts which drove the moody boy in upon his moods and sometimes threw him into fits of ungovernable rage. For a time he led a gloomy, solitary existence on the prairie of northeastern France, far from his kindred and in what seemed to him by comparison with his sunny island a bleak and wintry land. He did not get along much better with the friars than with the boys when he first went to Brienne. He was not unruly, but his air of sullen defiance and his aloofness troubled the 16 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON priests. "While corporal punishment had been forbidden by the government, he seems to have received at least one flog- ging. Again, for some infraction of a rule, he was ordered to do penance before all the boys by eating a meal on his knees at the door of the refectory. He protested vehemently that his mother had told him to kneel only to God, and that he would kneel to no man. His indignation finally running into a wild tantrum he had to be carried off to bed. Plainly the King of France was nurturing a very rebellious subject. One of the friars reminded him of the debt of grati- tude he owed the King, but the boy was steadily forming the purpose to employ the education the nation was giving him as a means of promoting the liberty of Corsica rather than the glory of France. "I will do these French all the mischief I can, ' ' he muttered, according to the report of one of his class- mates. A priest reproving him at confession for his denuncia- tion of France, he ran out of the confessional, shouting : "I do not come to this place to talk about Corsica, and a priest has no mission to lecture me on that subject." Probably with the idea of bringing him into line, the friars gave him a post of honour in the corps, but the boys court- martialed him as "unworthy of our esteem since he disdains our affections." His independence, however, was piquing them at last, and this, with his uncomplaining acceptance of their verdict, served to bring him more into their favour. At any rate, he found himself after a while on better terms with his surroundings, and with one of the boys, Louise Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne, he formed a close friend- ship. In Napoleon's last winter at Brienne, there was a heavy snow, which brought him an opportunity, the only recorded one, to be a leader among his school fellows. The snow was so deep in the big courtyard that the boys were snowbound. Napoleon proposed that they get shovels, build snow forts, and dividing up, engage in sieges and attacks. "I," said the strategist, ' ' I will direct the movements. ' ' The boys took hold with enthusiasm, the forts were erected and were furiously stormed until the contending forces had delved so deep that SCHOOLDAYS IN FRANCE 17 gravel was mixed with the snowballs and the casualties grew serious. The school as a school seems to have been rather poor. It failed utterly to discover Napoleon, and there is no record that this world-beater won a single prize at Brienne. He re- ceived dancing lessons, but did not learn to dance. He took German, but seems not to have remembered any of it in man- hood. He read Latin authors with a real hunger for knowl- edge, but never got beyond the fourth class in his Latin studies. He received writing lessons, but his penmanship is perhaps the worst in history. The library was his favourite haunt. In the recreation periods he was more likely to be there with a volume of Plu- tarch in his hand than on the playground. He had found for himself the combination of the lock on the storehouse of knowl- edge — a desire to read books, the habit of reading them and a capacity to understand them. He had been at Brienne more than five years and was a few months past his fifteenth birthday when he was promoted to the Ecole Militaire at Paris. Probably the only person in town who marked his departure, the only soul who cared whether he stayed or went was Bourrienne, who rode with his friend as far as the stage line for Paris. The charmingly simple village of Brienne to which Napoleon came again after twenty years and still again after ten more, lies in the bosom of France some one hundred and twenty-five miles to the east of Paris and near Troyes, the ancient capital of Champagne. It is to-day only a dot on a gentle rolling, well wooded plain, where the red roofs that shelter its 1800 inhabitants cluster about two cross roads. Those are really the only streets, with a few little lanes straying off from them into the pretty countryside, while crowning, dominating all is the chateau. This is not, how- ever, one of the old French chateaux; it was new when Na- poleon went there to school, but on its hill the counts of Brienne have had their seat for 900 years. At the cross- roads in the centre and almost in the shadow of the great man- sion of the count, is this street sign : 18 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON BRIENNE LE CHATEAU. Beneath the newer lettering is barely discernible an older sign: BRIENNE LE NAPOLEON. The fickleness of fame ! Brienne had been proud one day to link her name with that of the little Corsican she once despised, after which there came another day when she painted out his name as if it never had been. But there it still is, shining through the unavailing effort to eclipse it. Beyond a block of idle village shops on the other main street is the sightly Hotel de Ville. There stands in bronze the immortal schoolboy of Brienne, with golden eagles and a crown at his feet, but yet only a long-haired, lean and hungry boy. Behind the statue is the door of the Hotel de Ville and over it in marble the head of Napoleon the man, with fame and victory crowning him. A little farther on in this street rises an old wall and here behind this wall stood the school of the Minim friars, the first perch of the eagle in his flight from the mother nest at Ajac- cio. The school is no more; it was closed by the Revolu- tion in 1793, when there was no longer a king of France to pay for the education of the sons of poor noblemen and when noblemen and friars alike were banished from the coun- try. The one survivor, the one spared monument of the school, is the convent in which the friars lived. It still stands under the shade of a noble tree and there the soldiers of the Republic, a little garrison of sixty men, have their barracks, its name printed on the gable end of the old convent, "Caserne Bona- parte, 1896." The memory of the boy who went to school there is more graphically preserved by a weatherstained marble statue of SCHOOLDAYS IN FRANCE 19 him above the gate, with the inscription, "Napoleon 1779- 1784." The statue stands on an arch beneath which the sol- diers come and go on their dull routine, and on which is in- scribed "Ancienne Ecole Militaire, 1776-1793," while one of the stone gate posts bears the roll of the more famous schoolboys of Brienne: Bonaparte, Bourrienne, Pichegru, Davout, Nansouty, D'Haupoul, Gudin, Sorbier, Marescot' La Bretcheche, Bruneteau, Vallee. Back at the crossroads stands the old church, bare and still within, where the family of the count worship on red cush- ioned pews in a special reservation. On a level with its belfry where now hang three bells— not, however, the ones which long resounded in the ear of Napoleon— sits the chateau which once no doubt seemed to frown down upon the little Corsican, but where the Beauffremonts, proud of their long descent, were made prouder still when they welcomed him back to Brienne in 1805, for then he wore the crown of France and was pausing there in his imperial progress to his second coronation at Milan. He came back to Brienne once more in 1814, and there again he led the French in battle— but this time not with snowballs. He was fighting now to save his two crowns, and like a wounded eagle fluttering to its nest, he ran into the vil- lage with all Europe in pursuit of him. He found no wel- come at the chateau, for Blucher held it, but he took it by storm and slept once more in the castle whose showroom to this day is the "chambre a coucher de Napoleon," with every- thing in it carefully kept, just as he left it January 31, 1814. It was as a fifteen-year-old schoolboy from the village of Brienne, following at the heels of a Minim friar, that Na- poleon, in the month of October, 1784, made his first entry into the capital of France where he was delivered to the authorities of the Ecole Militaire. The old building, which is still standing and belongs to the army, is not far from the Eiffel Tower— and the Hotel des Invalides. There Napoleon was entered as a gentleman cadet and there he was confronted with a still prouder aristocracy, for the first families did not send their sons to Brienne. 20 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON The French military training as a whole was now the envy of other nations and attracted many foreign pupils. While Napoleon was at the Paris Ecole, there was in another French school at Angiers an Irish boy, Arthur Wellesley by name, but better known to history as the Duke of Wellington. In the first months of Napoleon's stay at the Ecole his father was in France once more, but this time for his health. He came to see a Paris physician regarding a severe stomach trouble which had been afflicting him for some time and it was found that he had cancer. Leaving Paris, he was at Montpellier, in southern France, when his disease overcame him, and there he died, in the thirty-ninth year of his life. Carlo's days, though few, were yet crowned with a success which he coveted above any gains for himself; an opportunity for his children to take the position in the world to which he thought their birth entitled them. Like most men of great force, Napoleon was the son of a weak father and a strong mother. Yet there was something truly Napoleonic in Carlo Bonaparte's bold assurance and restless ambition, and this may have been his legacy to Na- poleon. As a whole his character was a vain and futile one, but his very weakness fitted him to play a certain useful part in the drama of his son's life. At the Ecole, Napoleon had a roommate, Des Mazis, who became his bosom friend and his only real friend in all Paris. There, too, he made an enemy who was destined to cross his path in after years. This was a boy named Phelippeaux. Picot de Peccadeuc sat between the two boys for a time, but when his shins were black and blue from their wild kicks at each other he asked to be moved from the firing line. The most important thing that happened to Napoleon while at the Ecole was a new course of reading he took up soon after entering the place. Paris was then sitting on the vol- cano of the Revolution, and the boy's mind passed under the influence of the revolutionary philosophy which was swaying the thought of the capital. In the ten months that he was at the Ecole he won no special marks. He never was an officer of the corps or SCHOOLDAYS IN FRANCE 21 head of the mess. He got along well with his teachers and some of them he never ceased to remember with gratitude. In after years there were those who boasted that they had recognised his genius, but poor Baur, the German teacher, never could live down a remark he made one day in Septem- ber, 1785. "Where is M. de Bonaparte?" he asked, as he looked over the class. "In for the artillery examination," some one replied. ' ' What ! Does he know anything ? ' ' "Why, he is one of the best mathematicians in the school." "Oh, I have always thought that only idiots were fit to study mathematics." Napoleon was examined by LaPlace, the celebrated mathe- matician and astronomer. And among the fifty-six young men who passed, he stood forty-two from the top ! His long and hard apprenticeship in the trade of the sword was finished at last and he was now at the threshold of another six years' apprenticeship, which held privations more bitter still, an apprenticeship in the great school of life. CHAPTER in BEFORE THE DAWN 1785-1793 AGE 16-23 AFTER graduating from the Ecole Militaire, Napoleon received an officer's commission, but he had to borrow from his classmate, Des Mazis, the money to enable him to join his regiment which was in garrison at Valence, 400 miles south of Paris. Valence is an attractive old town of almost 30,000 popula- tion, close to the upper border of Provence, where, seated well above the banks of the River Rhone, between Lyons and Avignon, it looks across a vine-grown plain to the Alpine foothills of Dauphiny on one side and the gentle mountains of Cevennes on the other. It is but a step from the new to old Valence, where the little streets twist and turn and tumble down to the wide, swift river. In the centre of it stands the cathedral, and nearby at the corner of the winding Grande Rue and the still nar- rower Rue Croissant is No. 48, a shockingly modern four- story business block without an identifying tablet or even a street number on its front. Yet there the eaglet perched for awhile and gave Valence its admission ticket to the pages of history. Apparently the present tenants are unconscious of the re- flected glory in which they dwell, and it is difficult to recall to their memory the days of 1785-86, when a melancholy stripling came and went in their winding lane of a Grande Rue. For at No. 48, Mile. Bou, a spinster who kept house for her old father, lodged Second Lieut. Bonaparte at some- what less than $2 a month. As sub or second lieutenant of 22 BEFORE THE DAWN 23 the regiment of La Frere, his monthly income was $20, which after all deductions, left him $7 for clothes and extras. Poverty was one of his best teachers in those days, when he pulled in his belt at mealtime and feasted on Rousseau, Voltaire and other nourishers of his mind. When he ate a real meal, which generally was only once a day, he walked along the Grande Rue into the Place des Clercs, and thence turned into the little Rue Perollerie, where he used to dine at the Three Pigeons restaurant, with one eye on the bill of fare and the other on the few cents to which he limited his appetite. He remained as unattractive in appearance as he had been from birth, with a presence almost uncanny. Visiting a Cor- sican in a nearby town, the earliest existing portrait of him was drawn by his young host. It is a crude piece of art, but it serves as evidence of his uncomely youth. The only social life he could afford was the simplest, which, however, is always the best. He brought a letter from the Archbishop of Autun, nephew of his old benefactor, Count Marbeuf, the French Governor of Corsica, introducing him to the abbe of St. Ruff at the old abbaye, now the prefecture for the department of the Drone, down near the foot of the Grande Rue. The abbe was a man in touch with the prog- ress of thought and the Abbe Raynal, whom the boy officer also came to know there, ranked at the time among the fore- most philosophers of France. At the abbaye, too, this youth of sixteen, who had left home at nine and been brought up in a monastery, formed an ac- quaintance with a hitherto unknown species of the human race, a girl, Mile. Colombier, and the shadow of this little French lass was caught for all time on the films in the mov- ing picture of Napoleon's life. Her mother invited him oft, and while he said afterward that he was in love with mademoi- selle we have no other detail of their brief romance than that they picked and ate cherries together in her orchard. Woman's looks never were to be Napoleon's books. The Maison des Tetes stood opposite Mile. Bou's lodging house and the hoary heads sculptured on its front still grin and glower on the wayfarer by the Grande Rue. There used to 24 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON be a bookseller in that house of the heads, and the gaunt shade of the second lieutenant haunts the old place to this day. We may see him. with covetous eyes still bending over the book stalls and calculating how many weeks he must wait to save enough out of his $7 of spare money each month to buy some work which he longed to carry to his lonely den across the street. Those were the brave and ingenuous days, as he afterwards confessed, when he would have died to uphold the social doc- trines of Jean Jacques Rousseau and when he read Goethe's "Werther" five times, while he lived these mournful lines in "Wilhelm Meister:" Who never ate his bread in sorrow, Who never spent the darksome hours Weeping and watching for the morrow — He knows ye not, ye gloomy Powers. In his first spring time at Valence, while the cherries were red on Mme. Colombier's trees, Napoleon, already gloomy and peculiar, but yet far from grand, sat down in his bare room at No. 48 and thus poured forth upon the pages of his diary the bitterness of his soul: Always alone when in the midst of men, I return to my room to dream by myself and to give myself up to the full tide of my melan- choly. What, forsooth, am I here for in this world? Since death must come to me, why would it not be as well to kill myself? . . . Since I begin life in suffering misfortune, and nothing gives me pleasure, why should I endure these days when nothing with which I am concerned prospers? Nevertheless he did not jump into the Rhone. On the con- trary, he went on reading, reading, writing, writing, study- ing, studying, tracing out the institutions of all ages and lands and training his mind for the hidden future. If he had read his destiny in the book of fate he could not have chosen a better mental preparation for it. "When he had been with his regiment less than a year, he received a leave of absence and went home taking two trunks, BEFORE THE DAWN 25 but the larger one was filled with books. After having been away nearly eight years, he came back a Corsican of the Corsi- cans, but to find the fortunes of his family at low ebb, his mother without a servant and much of the time her own laun- dress and seamstress. He did not rejoin his regiment until he had been absent from it more than twenty months. It was now at Auxonne, much farther north and between Dijon and the Swiss frontier, where again his one diversion from the irksome regimental routine and his galling poverty was afforded by his unfailing friends, his books and his pen. "Heaven knows what privations!" he exclaimed when, in after life, he looked back on those days at Auxonne. "Do you know how I managed it? It was by never setting foot inside a cafe or appearing in the social world. . It was by eating dry bread. ... I lived like a bear. . . . When by dint of abstinence I amassed the sum of twelve livres, I turned my steps with the joy of a child toward the shop of a bookseller." The less he had and the less he ate, the more he read and wrote, the harder he worked. Going to bed at ten, he was up by four and at his littered table. The half-fed genius was in a frenzy of literary composition, turning off nearly thirty papers on as many different subjects, only to be rebuffed by the publishers of three cities. He wrote historical and philo- sophical essays, novels and plays, but none ever achieved the triumph of the types. Then the Bastille fell. The great Revolution was on and, spreading like a prairie fire, it was at Auxonne in five days, where it took the form of a riot. The stirring events aroused Napoleon from his literary dreams. He must have a part in the new era of action. But not in Auxonne, nor in Paris, nor anywhere in France. No, he must hasten to the one object of his thoughts, Corsica. Turning his back upon France in the midst of her history- making and going to Ajaccio, it might almost be said that he carried the Revolution with him. He restlessly promoted the formation of revolutionary clubs and machinery, while he stalked the floor of his room at night reading and declaiming 26 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON Cesar's Commentaries and other narratives of heroic action. He returned to his regiment at Auxonne, after an absence of a year and three quarters. If he had found it hard to live on $20 a month when alone, he must now endure greater hard- ships, for he had brought his twelve-year-old broth?r Louis with him. He hoped to get the boy into a military school, but while waiting to have the government take him off his hands he must be his teacher. The desertion of aristocratic officers from the army thrust upon Napoleon a promotion to a first lieutenancy and he re- ceived orders to return to Valence, where he went back to his old lodgings at Mile. Bou's and became the secretary of a revolutionary club. This was the period of Louis XVI 's at- tempted flight and arrest. The tide was moving with increas- ing swiftness — but Napoleon once more returned to Corsica to seek martial glory with the new island militia which was organising as a part of the national guard. "The post of honour of a good Corsican," said this lieutenant in the army of France, ' ' is in his own country. ' ' After a long and exciting struggle he won the election to the lieutenant colonelcy in the Corsican national guard. At the same time, he raised up a life-long enemy in the person of Carlo Andrea Pozzo di Borgo, whose family homestead stands to this day on the Rue Napoleon, near the Bonaparte house. All Europe became the theatre of the vendetta between those two young Corsicans, Pozzo proving to be Napoleon's most relentless nemesis. Echoes of their feud still are heard in Ajaccio, whither descendants of Pozzo have brought stones from the demolished palace of the Napoleons, the Tuileries at Paris, and with them have erected a country house, the most conspicuous structure on the mountain side above the Bay of Ajaccio. In his absorbing ambition to lead the Corsican national guard Napoleon had ignored the peremptory order for all army officers to return to their posts, and ignored as well the peril of the nation exposed to foreign invasion. "Bonaparte, first lieutenant, . . . has given up his profession and been replaced on Feb. 6, 1792," so ran the records of his regiment. BEFORE THE DAWN 27 Going to Paris to recover his abandoned place in the army, he entered the capital, out of a job and a man without a coun- try. His coming was well timed for his further education. For he saw Paris in the midst of the painful travail that at- tended the birth of the first Republic. Falling in with Bourrienne, his old chum at Brienne, they shared their poverty, but Bourrienne has insisted that Na- poleon was the poorer and had to pawn his watch. With the rising tide of the Revolution already up to their ankles, this well met pair were so little stirred that they could coolly dis- cuss over their six-cent dinners, which Bourrienne says he generally paid for, the opening of a real estate agency and a prosaic business partnership. One day in the Rue des Petit Champs, Napoleon met "a crowd of hideous men," according to his description, bearing aloft a human head on a pike. They demanded that he cry "Vive la Nation," and he has assured us, "I did it without difficulty, as you may believe." The young disciple of Rous- seau was being introduced at close range to the terrible reali- ties of the Revolution which to him had been only an ab- straction. He and Bourrienne followed the mob in its first attack on the Tuileries in June, 1792, and, from the terraced bank of the Seine, viewed a riotous assemblage swarming in the palace, chopping its way through the doors with hatchets and com- pelling the King to put on the red cap of liberty. Bourrienne reports his companion indignantly shouting, "Why have they let in all that rabble? They should sweep off 400 or 500 of them with the cannon ; the rest of them would then set off fast enough." In a letter to a brother, Napoleon solemnly com- mented on the occurrence, "All this is unconstitutional and sets a very dangerous example ; it is difficult to see what will become of the Empire under these stormy circumstances." When the palace was sacked in August, Bourrienne was gone from Paris, but his friend was loitering in the streets as usual and was caught up in the swirling tumult. There were shops in those days between the Louvre and the Tuileries, where Napoleon's Arch of the Carrousel now stands, and 28 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON Bourrienne's uncle kept one of them. Thither Napoleon has- tened to watch the storming of the palace, the deadly battle between the people and the Swiss Guard, and the flight of the royal family to the national assembly in the tennis court, whose site is now occupied by the Hotel Continental. While in Paris Napoleon not only succeeded in having his name restored to the army lists, but also received promotion to a captaincy. Yet, with the Germans on French soil and Paris passing into the dark shadows of the Reign of Terror, he begged another leave and returned once more to the little island out of the world. He had now been in the army seven years, and absent from duty more than half the time ! In the course of the following winter in Corsica, he took part for the first time in a military campaign as commander of the artillery in an expedition designed to carry the Revo- lution into the neighbouring island of Sardinia. In the long period of preparation he was at Bonifacio, a weirdly pic- turesque Corsican port, where he lodged opposite the old house in which Charles V stayed more than two centuries before. The expedition resulted in a fiasco, and the Bonapartists, ac- cusing Paoli of desiring the failure of the campaign, the breach between the young Corsican and the old grew wider still. While both were fervent Corsicans, one had received his political training in England and the other in France. As the Revolution developed, Paoli was steadily driven back upon the English moderation which he had acquired in his exile among a people who always believe in going ahead slowly. In the veins of the younger man the warm blood of Italy coursed untamed. He was still Italian and something more intense than that, a Corsican, and not yet the calculating man of the great world. When early in 1793 war was declared between France and England, Corsicans had to choose between the French who held the forts of the island and the British whose warships lay at the harbour mouths. Turning with a shudder from France under the Terror, Paoli naturally looked to his Eng- lish friends and welcomed an English protectorate. Napoleon, BEFORE THE DAWN 29 on the other hand, chose a broad path and became a French- man at last. After various adventures he joined the representatives of the French revolutionary government in the island and en- gaged in a footless expedition organised to capture Ajaccio from the Paolists. Despairing of the success of this move- ment he sent a courier to warn his mother. ''Prepare your- self, ' ' he wrote, ' ' this country is not for us. ' ' Letizia was lying on a couch in the Bonaparte house one evening when the courier and a band of faithful followers burst in upon her. As she sprang up she feared she was in the hands of the Paolists, but by the light of their pine torches she recognised the rough but friendly mountaineers who had come to save her. "Be quick, Signora Letizia!" cried the leader. "Paoli's people are hard on our heels. There is not a moment to lose. We will save you or die with you ! ' ' With the Abbe Fesch, her son Louis and her daughters Elisa and Pauline she fled along the shore, having been obliged to leave behind two of her children, Caroline and Jerome, who were too young to endure the hardships of such a journey. Before morning the Paolists had broken into the homestead in the Rue St. Charles and by smashing and burning they laid waste the interior of the house. Plainly the fortunes of the Bonapartes were at an end in the island. They had been driven from their home and de- nounced by formal resolution : ' ' It is beneath the dignity of the Corsican people to trouble themselves about the families of Arena and Bonaparte; they abandon them to their own private remorse and to public opinion, which has already con- demned them to perpetual execration and infamy." The proscribed Bonapartes gathered under a friendly roof at Calvi and watched for an opportunity to escape from their native land. As Calvi was their last refuge in Corsica, so it became the last refuge of all who resisted the transfer of the island to England. Climbing up from the harbour, cun- ningly hid in the mountains, to the old town, a civic mummy sealed in its two or three casings of stony battlements, the 30 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON traveller finds Calvi's two proudest boasts inscribed on its time-scarred and bullet riddled walls. The first is engraved above its gate: "Always Faithful," and the second is carved on a heap of ruins which purports to have been the birthplace of Christopher Columbus. While Calvi has not established this latter boast to the sat- isfaction of history, it made good its other boast before it sur- rendered to the English ships in 1794. For it held out until 25,000 bullets, 6500 bombs and 1500 shells had rained upon it, and it looks to-day as if it had as many scars as that to show for the long siege. Besides Horatio Nelson paid an eye — the historic eye, which afterward won the Battle of Copenhagen — for his part in the subjugation of this stubborn old town. The British frigates were already gathering off Calvi when the prow of a little boat, with its cargo of future sovereigns and princes cut through the waters on Napoleon's first exile and bore him from the mountainous shore to his destiny. Cor- sica never has ceased to repent her banishment of him or wearied in bringing forth works meet for repentance. Long ago she unanimously ratified his choice of nationality and is to-day as French as France. The Ajaccians indeed are still voting for Napoleon. The island as a whole may have been more or less won over to the Republic. At least candidates bearing the republican label are elected to sit in the chamber of deputies at Paris, although some of them never overcome the suspicion of the ministry that they are Bonapartists in disguise. Ajaccio does not stoop to dissemble. She is Bonapartist first, last and all the time. An Ajaccian returns from a pil- grimage to Prince Victor at Brussels like a Mahometan from Mecca, and the glasses clink at the Cafe Napoleon on the Cours Napoleon to the health and success of the pretender to the throne of the Bonapartes. Every man in the street seems to be saying to the passing stranger: "Behold, I am of the Napoleon breed, and Napoleon was nothing more than a Corsi- can who had a fair chance in the world!" CHAPTER IV THE MAN ON HORSEBACK 1793-1795 AGE 23-26 BANISHED from Corsica, the Bonapartes landed in France in June of 1793, with hardly more than the poor clothes they wore and without a door opening to welcome them. Yet even as they stepped ashore at Toulon, opportunity, though unseen, waited for one of the penniless refugees across only a mile or so of water by the grassy ram- parts of La Seyne. Had Napoleon's career, however, ended beneath the waves of the Mediterranean in his flight from Calvi to Toulon, the Corsican historians could have dismissed him in a line as a rashly importunate young man who died at four and twenty after having failed in every undertaking whether with the pen or the sword. A prolific author without a publisher, a sol- dier for nearly eight years who in the midst of great wars never had been in battle, failure was writ large on his gloomy brow as he stepped ashore at Toulon and led his mother and brothers and sisters to official headquarters where they threw themselves on the charity of the government. As refugees from the enemies of France the family received rude shelter in a village on the side of Mt. Faron, which rises back of Toulon. The gossips of history say they slept at first on straw piles and cooked in a broken pot the raw rations issued to them by the commissary. Afterward they were in- stalled in comparative comfort under a peasant's roof in a village on the shore. Robespierre was at the height of his ruthless power that red summer, defying the armies of allied Europe at the fron- tiers and beating down the Girondists in a civil war at home. 31 32 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON After Napoleon had drifted about, unattached and doing odd jobs for the army, he returned to Toulon and asked his fellow- Corsican, Salicetti, to let him. take part in the siege there. Thus at the end of summer, he was back at his starting point, but this time he was not in the bread line. He had come now to inscribe the name of Toulon first on the list of his victories. The obscure little artilleryman at once felt his superiority to the amateur talent engaged in the siege, and he quickly saw that the rebellious town, floating the white banner of the Bourbons, was enabled to maintain its resistance to the Re- public only by the assistance of the warships of England and other nations which lay in its two harbours. His strategic eye lighted on this single fact and ignored all else. Gen- eral Carteaux, the commander, in hurling his soldiers against the forts in the rear of the town had only been pulling the coat-tails of Toulon. Napoleon, like a good anatomist, saw that the one and only thing to do was to take Toulon by its harbour throat and choke it into submission. While the ships remained, it was as absurd to capture the place as it would be to capture a red-hot stove. It could not be held ; it would have to be dropped. When a council of war was held to listen to some lengthy instructions from the parlour strategists of Paris, telling just how Toulon should be taken, the lean and sallow captain of artillery rose to dissent. Stepping to a military map, he placed his finger on a point of land at the mouth of the har- bour, several miles from the fortifications of the town, and said in a truly Napoleonic epigram, "Toulon is there!" Napoleon's startling announcement that Toulon is not at Toulon may be verified to-day. It is really at the next station, La Seyne, a busy ship-building town of 20,000 population, with ferries and street cars running between it and the larger place across the harbour. The fierce wind which tears down the valley of the Ehone, blows through the town in a whirling mistral, past sidewalks littered with empty cafe tables, past the high wall of a shipyard to l'Eguillette. There a green hill rises from the road ; there Napoleon received his real bap- tism of fire and there he first tasted success. THE MAN ON HORSEBACK 33 The British had also recognised the vital importance of this promontory and before Napoleon could set up a battery they landed and strongly fortified the point, naming their princi- pal fort, "Little Gibraltar." But they very kindly left him a commanding height close by and there he immediately began to erect his batteries. One of his forts was almost within pistol shot of "Little Gibraltar" and by no means an inviting place. But its builder nailed to it a sign on which was rudely printed in big letters this legend : THE BATTERY OF MEN WITHOUT FEAR That was enough, and volunteers swarmed into the perilous place. Their commander daily showed his contempt for dan- ger. Once while he was dictating a report to a sergeant a shell burst on the earthworks above their heads and covered with dirt the undried ink. The soldier only smiled at this close call and coolly said as he shook the sheet: "Good! I shan't need any sand to blot this." The admiring commander recognised a man after his own heart and in that lucky moment Sergeant Junot had bound himself for life to the fortunes of Napoleon. On a wild and stormy night in December, 1793, nearly two months after Napoleon's arrival at Toulon, when the wind was howling and blowing the rain in sheets and the lightning cracked and flashed in the darkness, his plan of campaign was put to the supreme test. Against the advice of the commis- sioners and notwithstanding the fears of most of the officers, the French made a dash at "Little Gibraltar." They were beaten back again and again. But the fight continued until three o'clock in the morning, when with his men behind him, Captain Muiron, to the undying admiration of Napoleon, climbed the slope of the enemy 's fort, rushed through a breach 34 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON in its wall, and cut down the English and Spaniards at their guns. "Little Gibraltar" lost, the other shore batteries of the British were useless. Their defenders leaped into the water and swam to the ships. Just as Napoleon had predicted weeks before, the town of Toulon fell without receiving a shot. The fleet hurried away, the magazines were blown up in a terrific explosion, and the flames from the burning stores lit the sky, while the population of Toulon struggled to escape by sea from Robespierre's avenging messengers. The historic hill rising from l'Eguillette bears to this day the name of Fort Napoleon. Among its bushes still may be traced the earthworks where stood the men of the "Battery Without Fear," while high above its grassy summit the flag of France rides the gale. Down at the foot of the hill is an old grey fort which Car- dinal Richelieu constructed, and beyond are the green parks and red roofs of the villas of ship builders and merchants in the pretty seaside suburb of Tamaris, in one of which ' ' George Sands" wrote her romance of that name, while on the other hand, the mountainous side of Six Fours forms a background. Standing on Napoleon's hill it is plainly to be seen that 1 ' Toulon is here, ' ' and that the French have not forgotten the lesson taught by Napoleon. For to-day the entire shore is the hiding place of modern batteries for the protection of the great naval port of France. His first battle brought the little artilleryman the rank of brigadier general and an assignment to the Army of Italy, as the French force destined for an Italian campaign was called. As the youthful brigadier passed along the lovely Riviera on his various missions to and fro, he looked up the narrow passes, the open gates in the great, high walls of the Maritime Alps, which, like huge breakwaters, rise almost sheer from the ivory shore of the Mediterranean. It was while peer- ing through those gateways to Italy that a plan of campaign far greater than that of Toulon started in his mind. Just then there came another revolution in Paris. It was Robespierre's turn at the guillotine, and as his head fell in the An Early Portrait oi Napollon, r.v Baiixx THE MAN ON HORSEBACK 35 sack, the new party in the government at once began to mark out for the same fate all the chief associates of the fallen Terrorist. Napoleon quickly found himself in a cell and under orders to report in Paris, whose other name was the guillotine in those days. Fortunately for the prisoner, the guillotine was weary at last, and after eight days in confinement he was liberated, but only to meet troubles no less annoying. Ordered to join the infantry in the Army of the "West, he went to Paris to remonstrate against his transfer from the artillery. The orders were not changed, but he contrived to go over the head of the bureaucrat who had assigned him to the infantry and he gained the attention of more powerful men in the government. The dream of the Orient, which was long to haunt him, came to him now and he induced the authorities to order him to Turkey for the purpose of training and strengthening the army of the Sultan as a possible ally of France. On the same day that he obtained this favour from one department, his name was erased from the list of generals by another depart- ment because he had disregarded no less than three orders to join the Army of the West. While he was in this plight, busily striving to have his name restored and to get together a staff for his Constantinople trip, the real opportunity of his life came to him in the very streets of Paris. All American visitors in the French capital have seen, but probably few have observed the battlefield where Napoleon won a victory as important and decisive as any that ever fell to his sword. For there he took Paris. This field lies in the very heart of the city, in the familiar Paris of the tourist, between the boulevards and the river, with the Tuileries as the focal point. The broad steps of the Church of St. Roch in the Rue St. Honore are a famous landmark on this battlefield. There, with his "whiff of grapeshot," the little artilleryman really brought the great Revolution to an end. The people longed for repose and a peaceful adjustment to the new conditions. But scheming politicians and plotting 36 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON Bourbons would not let the Republic rest and once more Paris was threatened with an uprising. The government of the day naturally enough turned to the friendless young officer out of a job. The attempted revolution came one day in early October, in the year 1795. It was by no means a ragged mob which moved through the streets toward the old royal riding school — where the Hotel Continental now is — on the 13th Vende- miaire, according to the republican calendar. This Bourbon and revolutionary uprising might properly be called a broad- cloth mob, but it really was not a mob at all. It was an army whose main force consisted of no less than 30,000 or 40,000 armed and drilled troops of the national guard. Napoleon's forces, on the other hand, numbered only 5000 or 6000 sol- diers, or regulars, as we would say, but they had the cruel advantage of artillery. As the insurrectionary troops from various directions drew near their goal, they were met always at the vital point by the cannon of the much smaller but more soldierly forces of regular and veteran troops. Everywhere they were con- fronted by a plan of campaign in which nothing had been left to chance. Napoleon had treated the square mile of city streets surrounding the Tuileries like a chess board, and the defensive forces had been posted at all the vantage points by a master of strategy. For hours the two forces had stood stock still, facing each other, in the Rue St. Honore, when late in the afternoon some one fired a wild shot from an upper window of a house close by the Church of St. Roch. That shot was the lighted match in the powder and a fusillade instantly followed, the echo of which, floating through the streets, was the signal for an outbreak at other points. Soon the crackling reverberations of the muskets were lost in the awful boom of the cannon, which shook the windows of Paris. The musketry wavered, rallied for a moment and then fled in a wild rout. In an hour it was all ended, with 200 dead lying in the streets. When the bells in the towers of the great capital struck twelve at midnight their peals rang THE MAN ON HORSEBACK 37 over a city as quiet as a countryside after a thunder shower. After years of turbulence Paris had met her master. In that crowded hour, she had seen him here, there and every- where, his long hair falling over his shoulders, his thin boyish figure wreathed in the smoke of his cannon, but not yet know- ing even the name of Napoleon Bonaparte, she spoke of the mysterious stranger only as "the man on horseback." CHAPTER V A LOVE STORY WHILE all Paris was bowing before the victor of Vendemiaire in 1795, the conqueror himself was conquered and the little artilleryman was van- quished by the little bowman. Piloted by fortune from opposite ends of the earth, one from the old world, the other from the new, one from an island in the Mediterranean, the other from an island in the Caribbean, a boy and a girl, a Corsican and a Creole, Na- poleon and Josephine, landed on the shore of France in 1778-79, the boy to enter a school for the youthful nobility, the girl to be the bride of a nobleman. After five years both were in Paris, but as effectually di- vided by the narrow Seine as when in childhood the wide seas rolled between them. Leaving the capital, the Corsican returned to his native land, the Creole to hers, only to be caught, both of them, in the wide-spreading whirlpool of the Revolution and drawn together at its centre. Once more in France, but still unknown to each other, they drifted about for two or three years without crossing paths. The Reign of Terror came, and while Napoleon was winning his first laurels under Robespierre at Toulon, Josephine was thrown into prison and her husband sent to the guillotine. With Robespierre's fall they changed places, the prison door swinging open for Josephine and closing in upon Napoleon. Thus for fifteen years did prankish fortune sport with this pair. Josephine's life was filled with vicissitudes not less strange than Napoleon's. She was descended from a family of the poor country nobility of France which had emigrated to the 38 A LOVE STORY 39 island of Martinique less than forty years before her birth. Her father, a plodding, unambitious sugar planter of Trois Islets, across the bay from Fort de France, compromised with his disappointment when a girl was born to him by giving her a half boyish name: Marie Joseph Rose Tascher de la Pagerie. But her mother called her Yvette. When the little Creole was only three, a West Indian hurri- cane swept away her home while the family hid in a cave, and nothing was left but the kitchen wing to mark her birth- place. The father could not afford to rebuild and, picking up such pieces of furniture as he could find in the wreckage, he moved his family into the loft of his sugar mill. There Josephine grew up, care-free and happy as her black playmates, a troop of little slaves arrayed in the livery of the burnished sun. Books and lessons troubled her not at all, and her only schooling was received in two or three terms at a convent in Fort de France. Trois Islets had no social life to restrain her with its for- malities and vanities. "I ran, I jumped, I danced from morning till night," was her own description of her girlhood. Not even the prophecy she had heard pronounced in the hut of a fortune teller cast a shadow upon this daughter of the sun. Yet had she not been warned by the black prophetess that one day she would be greater than queen and after hav- ing two crowns, lose both? Before Josephine was born, the Marquis de Beauharnais was the royal governor of the Island of Martinique, and in the government house at Fort de France his son, the Viscount Alexandre de Beauharnais, was born. Josephine had an aunt, Mme. Renaudine, and no doubt it was her matchmaking am- bition which inspired the Marquis with the idea of marrying his son, the Viscount, to a daughter of the poor and undistin- guished colonial planter of Trois Islets. After he had re- turned to Paris, the Marquis wrote back to the Taschers pro- posing the marriage, but the hand of a younger daughter was requested, because Josephine was too near the boy 's age, which was seventeen. While that letter was on its slow way this second daughter 40 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON died, but M. Tascher rose to the emergency like a born diplo- mat. After recording her death in his reply to the Marquis he affected to offer the third daughter, who was not yet twelve. Then he added in a sly postscript that he feared Josephine would be put out by her omission from the journey to France and that he wished he could send both girls. "But how can I separate a mother from her two remaining daughters, so soon after the third has been snatched from her by death?" By this time the Marquis notified M. Tascher to send over whichever girl he pleased and even sent authority for the announcement of the banns at Fort de France, generously leaving a blank line for the name of the bride. Of course Josephine's name was inserted, and on this left-handed invi- tation, she sailed for France in the company of her father, landing at Brest with her doll in her arms. This not being a love story it is well to finish it speedily. Alexandre and Josephine were married and went to live in the town and country mansions of the Beauharnais. Utterly unsuited and useless to each other, the Viscount happily could stay away much of the time with the army, while Josephine took captive all her new and distinguished relatives, including the Rochefaucaulds, the Montmorencys and the Rohans. Al- though she never had entered a drawing room or dined in state, her native grace and taste, with a little coaching by her aunt, saved her. The birth of a son, Eugene, and later the coming of a daughter, Hortense, did not recall Alexandre to his fireside for long. After seeking diversion in the army, in Italy and even in Martinique, where he said very disagreeable things about his wife, there came a legal separation and the dividing up of the children. The father took Eugene, and Josephine with her baby girl returned to the loft of the sugar mill of Trois Islets. While she was renewing the memories of her childhood there, the Revolution burst upon France and the Viscount plunged into the movement. In the awakening of his emo- tions, he felt a desire to be reconciled with Josephine, who, although he had branded her a "vile creature," listened as a Josephine, by Prud'hon A LOVE STORY 41 wife and mother to his appeals for her return to him and Eugene. Against the protests of her father, who was already in his mortal illness, and to the lasting displeasure of her mother, she sailed for France. The reunited family shared the fortunes of Citizen Beau- harnais through three stormy years. Twice he was chosen to be president of the national assembly, and he rode the wild waves of political agitation very well until he was sent out as commander-in-chief of the Army of the Rhine. His campaign failing, he was recalled to Paris and cast into prison. While Josephine was interceding for his life, at the height of the Great Terror, she herself was arrested and locked up as a disloyal aristocrat. The Terror had converted the palaces and monasteries into prisons and crowded them with the proudest and meanest of France. Beauharnais was confined in the palace of the Lux- embourg and his wife was almost across the street in the Car- melite Monastery. Between the Luxembourg and the familiar Theatre de l'Odeon on the Rue Vaugirard rises still the chapel of Jo- sephine's prison, the Church of St. Joseph des Cannes. Down in its crypt one may see to-day mementoes of the horrible massacre of the prisoners which took place at the monastery in the September before her arrest, and many tombs of those who were butchered in the Hundred Hours of bloody memory. Beauharnais was permitted to pay a parting visit to his wife. Then his last day came, and he bought back from the barber who prepared his head for the guillotine, a lock of his hair to send to Josephine and the children. The wife made ready to follow her husband to the scaffold, and she wrote her farewell letter to Eugene and Hortense. But just then Robespierre himself was flung into the tumbril of death and the prison doors swung open. Josephine returned to the world as from her grave, the widowed and penniless mother of two children. Almost noth- ing really is known of her eighteen months of widowhood, though much has been told, mostly in such a venomous spirit that a prudent person dare not touch it. From the beginning 42 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON to the end of that precarious period she was continually draw- ing upon her mother, now a widow like herself. She threw herself upon her bounty as ' ' my sole support, ' ' and again she wrote her as her "poor Yvette:" "I know too well your regard for my honour to have the least doubt that you will supply me with the means for subsistence." At last came the day of Vendemiaire, big with fate, when from the cannon's mouth the little artilleryman spoke to re- bellious Paris and it paused in the presence of its master, ' ' the man on horseback." The wilful city was commanded to give up its arms as a guarantee of good behaviour in the future, and the soldiers went from house to house to take away the weapons of the insurgent population. The widow Beau- harnais, wishing to keep her husband's sword as a heritage for her fourteen-year-old son, sent Eugene to headquarters to beg its return. So the tale was told by both Napoleon and Eugene, and if it is too good to be true it is also too good to be spoiled by sceptics who have no story to take its place. The boy wept at the sight of his father's sword and kissed its hilt. Napoleon was touched and patted him on the head. Eugene's enthusiastic report at home of the General's kind- ness excited the gratitude of his widowed mother, who has- tened to call and express her thanks. Although she was announced as "the Citizeness Beauhar- nais," the rustic nobleman from Corsica did not miss the im- pressive fact that his caller was the Viscountess de Beau- harnais, a resounding name of the ancient regime. He saw in her the graceful impersonation of the great aristocracy of old France, and felt that for the first time he stood in the presence of a grande dame. Did she not look the part to perfection? Regally tall and charmingly slender, not even a girdle was needed to support her dainty bosom; her eyes were soft and appealing; her sensitive little nose was retroussee, or turned up, as we ungal- lantly say in English. Parisian art had cleverly repelled the assaults of time, and her arching mouth was so small that it did not permit her unfortunate teeth to obtrude themselves A LOVE STORY 43 upon her enchanting smile, while in her every motion there was the languorous ease of the Creole and the highly polished grace of the French salon. The enraptured Corsican did not yet know that she was only a little islander like himself, and as fast as his new car- riage could take him on the field of action, the strategist of Toulon opened a campaign in which a widow's strategy was to leave him as helpless as a child. The tide in his affairs was swiftly swelling to the flood. Already he was General-in-chief of the Army of the Interior, and, as the commandant of Paris, he dwelt in an old palace on the Rue Capucine, where he had a salon of his own. In his bearing, dejection had given way to confidence. Slapping the sword at his side, he boasted to Josephine that it would carry him far. She smiled at his self-assurance as something drolly boyish, and the wild outbursts of his natural egotism, which he had so long been obliged to repress or restrain, must have kept her oscillating between suspicions of his genius and his madness. After her observation of the evanescent quality of military reputations and the transitory character of personal success under the Republic well may she have hesitated to hitch her wagon to the star of this youth. Had she not buckled on the armour of one General-in-chief only to see him march straight to the guillotine whither half her friends had gone? The attempts of her wooer to carry the fortress of her affec- tions by storm were a tactical failure. Her heart when it was young had been impervious to the assaults of passion, and now at thirty-two it was untouched by the Corsican 's frenzied attacks upon it. In fine, she seems to have been at once terri- fied and fascinated by her pet eagle. But if she let him fly away she knew how to call him back, as in this example : You no longer come to see a friend who loves you ; you have quite forsaken her ; you are very wrong ; for she is passionately devoted to you. Come to-morrow and breakfast with me; I want to see you and to chat with you upon matters concerning your interest. Good night, my friend, I embrace you. Veuve Beauharnais. 44 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON The courtship went forward at an ever quickening pace. It took the high speed as the Directory, moved toward its decision to make the wooer the General-in-chief of the Army of Italy. Aunt Renaudine and Aunt Fanny Beauharnais and Josephine's father-in-law, the Marquis, filed their approval of the alliance, and then it was time to call in the lawyer, which is always the signal in France that the love making has come to a crisis. Napoleon was with his sweetheart when the lawyer arrived. But Maitre Raguideau paid no attention to the insignificant young man, who was idly looking out the window as he passed into Josephine's chamber, where she was still in bed, and the lawyer remonstrated with his client so earnestly that the lover standing by the window heard through the partly open door some of his exclamatory protests : ' ' You are very foolish ! You will regret it ! It is madness ! You are going to marry a man who has nothing but a cloak and a sword. Surely you can make a much better match than this ! ' ' But Josephine had passed the stage of argument, and she laughingly called in Napoleon, who rose to the occasion by complimenting Maitre Raguideau on his frankness and promptly retaining him as their joint lawyer! Yet in the making of the marriage settlement he frankly confessed that he had no real estate and no personal estate other than his military uniforms and trappings. When the wedding night came, the couple drove to the mairie, unattended by a representative of either the bride's family or the groom's. The wedding place, which is the one spared monument of the marriage of Napoleon and Josephine, has become a bank and is as unromantically fiscal in its ap- pearance as any bank could be. But this long, low, greyish yellow building around the corner from the Avenue de 1 'Opera, in the Rue d'Antin, has seen gayer days, for it has not always been the Paris and Nederlands Bank. It was a palace in the gilt age of the Grand Monarch and until it was confiscated in the Revolution. Then it became the mairie of the second arrondissement, the municipal building of the sec- ond ward. A LOVE STORY 45 On the walls of the bank office on the second floor the cupids still frolic in a golden frieze. They danced at the mating of the widow when the soldier endowed her with all his worldly possessions, to wit: One sword. One cloak. For that room, in which now are only desks and office stools, was the salle des marriages when Napoleon led his betrothed up the stairs at ten o'clock of a March evening in 1796. The little bridal party was late for its appointment and the Mayor had fallen asleep in his chair. Napoleon went over to him and shook him by the shoulder. ' ' Wake up ! Wake up, Mr. Mayor, and marry us!" he commanded. The marriage rite appears not to have been taken very seri- ously but to have been an occasion for some merry pranks with the facts. The bride gave her age as twenty-eight, in- stead of thirty-two plus, and the groom met her half-way in a gallant effort to bridge the gulf of years between them by vowing he was born in the same year. From the Rue d'Antin, the bride took her husband to her rented house, a modest place set in a garden in the Rue Chantereine, which he would soon turn into the Rue de la Victoire. And it was only six or eight squares to the Tuile- ries ! The Rue de la Victoire to-day is one of a thousand streets of Paris, with its shops on the ground floor and its flats above. Josephine's little hotel, the first home Napoleon knew after leaving his mother's roof, is gone; but around every lamp post in the Rue de la Victoire cluster the memories of the victor of Italy and his drawn battle with the widow, not to dwell upon his inglorious capitulation to her dog, Fortune, who disputed with his teeth the invasion of his mistress' boudoir. After a honeymoon of only two days the bridegroom ex- changed the pursuit of happiness for the pursuit of glory, leaving his bride twirling her second wedding ring, within which were engraved the watchwords, "Au Destin!" CHAPTER VI THE LITTLE CORPORAL 1798 AGE 26 FOR a week before his wedding, Napoleon had carried in his pocket his commission as General-in-chief of the Army of Italy. When his honeymoon was only two days old, opportunity and fame refused longer to be put off and sternly commanded him to quit the path of dalliance. As he went sighing to his new post of duty in March, 1796, he scattered a shower of love letters along his way for 760 miles. At nearly every change of horses the young General- in-chief hurried to a tavern table and sought to relieve the inflammation from cupid's wound which was consuming his breast, by writing a fiery message to the bride he had left behind him. At the same time, his orders were flying on ahead of him and falling like snowflakes on his army, whose veteran gen- erals were shocked when the frowzy headed little commander presented himself at headquarters and with juvenile ardour showed them the portrait of his bride. ' ' But a moment after- wards the boy put on a general's hat and seemed to have grown two feet," said Massena, who had been a soldier seven- teen years. "He questioned us as to the position of our divisions and as to the effective force of each corps, told us the course which we were to take, announced that he would hold an inspection* the next day and attack the enemy the day after." Why should the Republic of France have staked its for- tunes in a war with the greatest empire of the time on this youth of twenty-six in the throes of his first love? Why should it have chosen for the highest command a young man 46 THE LITTLE CORPORAL 47 who had preferred philosophy, literature, politics, business, anything to military service, who had been absent from duty more than half the ten years he had held a commission in the army, and been twice dismissed? Why should it have ele- vated above his seniors an officer who never had held a com- mand and who never had been in an active campaign or seen more than one battle ? Simply because he had an idea! His commission as General-in-chief of the Army of Italy had been won not by his sword, but by the keen edge of his wits; not by his whiff of grapeshot on the 13th Vendemiaire nor yet by his cannonading at Toulon, but with pen and paper at his desk in Paris, where he had drawn up a brilliant scheme of war and statecraft combined. An Austrian army was ready for the invasion of France and operating with the army of the most martial of the Italian states, the kingdom of Sardinia, whose territory stretched from the Lake of Geneva over the Alps and down into the Plain of Piedmont. Napoleon proposed that the French forces, which held only that narrow strip of Mediterranean coast which is known as the Riviera, should proceed through a pass in the mountains that lay between them and the enemy, divide the allied armies, compel the Sardinians separately to make peace and then drive the Austrians out of Lombardy, which they had held for eighty years. Arrived at Savona he found an army of some forty thou- sand men in rags, their feet on the ground and many of them without bayonets, confronted by a well set-up enemy with 60,000 soldiers. The new French commander, without means to feed or clothe or equip them for a campaign, sought at once to distract the thoughts of the men from their wretched condition by promising them the spoils of victory. That first ringing proclamation disclosed the "lion's paw" that some one has said marked all his messages to his troops : Soldiers: You are naked, badly fed; the government owes you much ; it can give you nothing. Your long suffering, the courage you show among these crags are splendid, but they bring you no glory; not a ray is reflected upon you. 48 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON I wish to lead you into the most fertile plains in the world ! Rich provinces, great towns will be in your power; there you will find honour, glory and riches ! Soldiers of Italy, can you be found lacking in honour, courage or constancy"? From Nice to Genoa there rises a long mountainous range with its head in the clouds and its feet in the surf of the Medi- terranean. This is the wall of Italy. In all that wall there are only four or five gates, one of which opens at Savona. But Napoleon fooled the enemy by noisily demanding from the government of Genoa a free highway through another pass twenty miles to the east. Beaulieu, the seventy-one-year-old Austrian commander, when he heard of that demand on Genoa, nattered himself he saw through the young man's scheme as clearly as through the rungs of a ladder. The boy was trying to steal around him, and the veteran commander at once began to move his main force toward the east to head off the French. Then Napoleon shot his main force like a bolt at the weakened centre of the allied armies. Riding out of Savona at midnight, he climbed twelve miles in the shadows of the towering crags of the Ligurian Alps, crowned by church steeples and ancient villages, each a refuge of civilisation in the dark ages when the corsairs of the Sara- cens were the terror of the shore. That steep road is the first section in Napoleon's ladder to fame. As the day broke that April morning over the heights of Montenotte, the soldiers of the Austrian right opened their eyes upon the blue coats of France before them in overwhelm- ing force. The clash of battle reverberating among the moun- tains reached the ears of Beaulieu, miles away, where he was leading the left wing of his army toward the pretended point of attack. He awakened too late to the humiliating fact that the boy had played a trick on him. In vain he put forth every effort to unite his forces, join his ally and present a solid front to the French. ' ' My nobility dates from Montenotte, ' ' Napoleon boasted in THE LITTLE CORPORAL, 49 all the after years, as he looked back upon that first battle and first victory under his generalship. Like an agile boxer sparring with two antagonists at once, he fell upon the Sardinians the very next day, and drove them back. His army now stood like a wedge between the two allies and stronger than either alone. In strict accordance with the schedule he had drawn up at his desk in Paris, he had separated the Austrians and the Sardinians. ' ' Hannibal crossed the Alps, ' ' he reminded his troops ; "we have turned them. ' ' Always with a lesser force than the enemy, he won his Italian victories by his ability to send more men into battle than his opponent. If he adopted Voltaire's cynical remark that ' ' God is on the side of the heaviest battalions, ' ' he really meant no more than that God is on the side of the man whom he has endued with the wisdom to assemble the heaviest bat- talions at the point of attack. "An army should be divided for subsistence and concentrated for combat." That was the keynote of his success throughout all his campaigns. After pushing the Sardinian army back on Turin, Napoleon had hardly sat down in the fine Salmatori Palace at Cherasco, thirty-five miles from the capital, when an old Sardinian marshal made his appearance, and announced to the little commander of the French that his King was thinking of pro- posing terms of peace. "Terms," roared the young man, as he pounded a desk, "it is I who name terms; accept them at once or Turin is mine, to-morrow ! ' ' When the Sardinians tried to haggle with him he pulled out his watch, and tapping its face with his finger commanded them to sign at once. ' ' I may lose battles, but I will not lose minutes." It was not long before Murat was speeding on the way to Paris with the complete surrender of the kingdom of Sar- dinia — and with a letter to Josephine, clamorous and threat- ening, because she had not taken wings and flown across the Alps. "Why do you not come to me?" the bridegroom de- manded. " If it is a lover that detains you, beware of Othello 's dagger!" 50 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON This outburst of the twenty-six-year-old Corsican amused the thirty-two-year-old Creole immensely, and she read the passage to the poet Arnault — she delighted to show Napoleon's love letters — and Arnault said in his old age: "I seem to hear her once more say, with her Creole accent, while she smiles, ' How funny Bonaparte is. ' " Sardinia pledged herself to forsake the alliance with Austria and to disperse her army, and she ceded Savoy and Nice to France outright. Napoleon loudly insisted on stipulating also that in pursuit of the Austrians he should be permitted to cross the River Po at a certain point. Beaulieu, of course, heard of this just as he had heard of the demand on Genoa for a free road through the easterly pass and he rose to the bait with the same eagerness, while Napoleon marched his army 100 miles down stream and crossed where there were only 200 or 300 Austrians to be frightened off the scene. He was not only over the river, but getting in behind the enemy, who hurriedly fell back. From the Po, he pressed on to the Adda and its now cele- brated bridge at Lodi. This little city which lies twenty miles from Milan seems little changed by time. There is only a picturesque vestige of the old town wall with its mossy bricks and the grass growing on its top. But even when this barrier stood intact, it did not prove a serious obstacle to the French, who fairly took the town with their bare hands, the rear guard of the Austrians fleeing out the other side by the bridge over the Adda. On the narrow but pleasant and clean main street of the village, which now has a population of 20,000, still stands the big old Pitletti palace where Napoleon made his headquarters. The historic bridge, however, has been replaced by a somewhat wider structure, 300 or 400 feet long, but a tablet on a wall near by records the deed which immortalised its name. The Austrians intended to destroy the bridge after crossing the river, but the French were so close on their heels that they could only turn and resist with their artillery the passage of their pursuers. The clock tower of the church of the Magdalena rises by THE LITTLE CORPORAL 51 the river side unchanged since Napoleon climbed to its top and looked across the shallow stream which dribbled between him and the Austrians that May afternoon. While he stood in the tower, watching the futile cannonading between his own forces and the enemy, the clock clanged five, again it sounded six, and then he determined to take the bridge by storm. The grenadiers, with shouts of ' ' Vive la Republique, ' ' dashed upon it behind a battalion of carbineers and into a hail of grape and canister from the Austrian guns. The carbineers fell in heaps, and the grenadiers paused before this ghastly barricade. While they hesitated, several officers, Lannes, first of all, and then Massena, Berthier, Cervoni and others with waving swords, rushed by them, leaped over the stricken car- bineers, and led the grenadiers into the very mouths of the Austrian guns. The gunners were bayoneted, every gun was captured and the enemy put to flight. It was in the twilight when Napoleon rode out of the town to visit the camp of his army. Dismounting, he sauntered up to a group of captured officers. They did not recognise the young French officer, who asked them how their army was get- ting along. An Austrian captain replied, "Not very well. But then this young general of yours is violating every rule of military operations. We never know where to find him. Sometimes he is in front of us, sometimes in our rear and again on our flank. We can't tell how to place ourselves. This way of making war is outrageous. ' ' Napoleon passed on from the prisoners to his grenadiers, who cheered him fervently. Plainly he had touched their imagination when he hurled them upon the smoking cannon of the foe. They had promptly held a council, as they were in the habit of doing when anything was happening, and they decided to promote him. Wherefore they acclaimed him now by the new title which they had admiringly conferred upon him, "The Little Corporal!'' CHAPTER VII IN THE COCKPIT OF EUROPE 1796 AGE 26-27 WHEN the passenger on the train from Milan to Venice has looked out for an hour or more upon a quiet and fruitful plain, where the stately poplars of Lombardy stretch skyward to rival the noble bell towers of the village churches, he sees the landscape abruptly change from smiling peace to frowning war. Ugly wrinkles suddenly disfigure the face of the countryside where many redoubts furrow the earth, and grey, moated forts and battlemented citadels lift their scowling fronts on every hand. One long chain of fortifications stretches seventy-five miles to Legnano and southward twenty-five miles from Verona and Lonato to the mouldy walls of Mantua. Within that roped arena lies the great battleground of Italy, which Freeman christened "the cockpit of Europe." When he had dashed across the bridge of Lodi in May, 1796, Napoleon stood in that cockpit, and there he cast his gauntlet at the feet of Austria on the Lombardy plain. Fooling his ever gullible foe, he passed over the Mincio as he had crossed the Po and the Alps, by making a pretended movement in almost the opposite direction to his real line of advance. Beaulieu's resistance thus was brought to an end, and the young chieftain entered upon the siege of Mantua with its garrison of 13,000 or 15,000 Austrians. This was an irksome task for his impetuous nature. ' ' The success of a siege, ' ' he scornfully remarked, "depends upon nothing but luck, a dog or a goose. ' ' Leaving a patient watch dog among the generals to sit down in front of Mantua, his restless spirit turned to the more congenial work of preparing to meet a new army which Austria was hastily organising to send against his wearied troops. 52 IN THE COCKPIT OF EUROPE 53 Between the Austrian frontier and Mantua there stretched in those days the territory of the old republic of Venice. Across that supposedly neutral ground Austria had a right of way into Lombardy, but Napoleon had none into Austria. She was free to descend upon him unmolested, but he must not go forth to meet her. Catching some Austrians straying off their prescribed path through Venetia, however, he ignored the jug-handled neu- trality of Venice and soon both armies overran the land of the Doges. Seizing the Venetian city of Verona, which is seated on both banks of the Adige, he held the key to the Austrian Tyrol and, spreading his army along the shapely foot of lovely Lake Garda, he reported to the Directory, ' ' Our outposts are on the hills of Germany." For the Austrian ruler was the German Emperor in those days and Austria was the head of the German world. Meanwhile Napoleon brought the King of Naples to sue for peace, sent an expedition to seize vast stores in the port of Leghorn belonging to English merchants, captured Bologna, Ferrara and Urbino in the Papal States, and made a truce with the Pope ; ran off to Pavia, where he converted the castle of that town into a factory for the making of 2000 hospital beds, and to Tortona, where he assembled all manner of muni- tions for his campaign. As he was dressing one morning at Tortona he broke the glass over the miniature of Josephine, which he had car- ried in his bosom all the way from Paris. His yellow counte- nance blanched with fear. ' ' My wife is ill ! " he cried out to Marmont; ''or," the jealous Corsican lover darkly added, "she is unfaithful." He sat down at once and wrote: You know that I could never endure to see you in love with any one, still less endure that you should have a lover; to tear out his heart and to see him would be one and the same thing, and then, if I could raise my hand against your sacred person — No ! I should never dare, but I should at once abandon a life in which the most virtuous being in the world had deceived me. ... A thousand kisses on your eyes, your lips ! Even a more passionate love and a more heroic nature than 54 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON the Creole bride's might have hesitated to obey his summons while Napoleon's headquarters were in the saddle. Now that he held Milan and had a roof to offer her, she left Paris at his bidding, but full of tearful regret for the festive scenes in which she had been the central figure. Arriving in Milan with Joseph Bonaparte, Colonel Junot — and her dog Fortune — there was another two-day honeymoon in the Serbelloni pal- ace, and then the soldier bridegroom was off to the war again. Napoleon was now in a desperate situation. Fifty thousand Austrians bore down apon him, where he stood between them and their big garrison in Mantua, and he was surrounded by hostile Italian states. To combat the foe in his front and rear, he had hardly more than 40,000 men, and many thousands of these were besieging the fortress. While waiting to grapple with the new Austrian army, under the command of Marshal Wurmser, he induced Josephine to come to Brescia, and she always boasted that it was her presence there and her intuition which saved her husband from falling into the hands of the stealthily advancing enemy. The governor at Brescia, with a show of cordial hos- pitality, proposed a great entertainment in her honour, but she suspected a trap and at her urgent suggestion, Napoleon left the threatened city to join his army, while she went to Salo, on Lake Garda, where, however, she found herself under fire from a flotilla. Leaping from her coach, she fled afoot until nearly exhausted, when she was picked up in a peasant's two-wheeled cart and conveyed to Castiglione, where she rushed weeping into the arms of her husband, who in a spirit of Corsican vengeance vowed, "The Austrians shall pay dear for those tears ! ' ' Josephine weeping was a spectacle Napoleon never could view unmoved. Often it was to leave him weak and irresolute. Now it set the youthful lover afire with an ambition to win another victory, to console and dazzle Josephine with a new triumph. For five August days, he did not take off his boots while he smashed right and left at two Austrian armies until he had IN THE COCKPIT OF EUROPE 55 beaten and divided them. In the course of that running fight which bears the name of the Battle of Castiglione, he rode five horses to death and nearly fell a captive in the hands of the foe. Nothing but his audacity saved him. Twice in the course of that summer he was in imminent peril of being taken prisoner. He was far from well at the time. His health having been undermined by poverty in his youth and more lately by exposure in the earthworks at Toulon, he was still suffering from blood poisoning which he contracted by handling an infected artillery sponge in the siege of that city. Symptoms of tuberculosis also had developed. He hated the loathsome drugs in the pharmacopoeia of that day, and resisted them like a stubborn child. The only thing his physician could do to relieve his frightful headaches was to plunge him into a tub or barrel of hot water. As he had taken off a shoe, preparatory to undressing for such a bath in a palace near Verona, he was almost captured, but saved himself by fleeing through the garden of the palace with only one shoe on. That experience led him to form a body of Guides for his personal protection, a corps which even- tually developed into the famous Guard. Bessieres was their leader, and every man among them must have seen at least ten years of service. Another day neither the Guides nor flight and nothing but his own audacity could save him from falling into the hands of the enemy. The Austrians had been so confused by the blow they received in a battle at Lonato that 4000 of them wandered about the country in a body, without knowing which way to go. In their wandering they strayed back to the lost battlefield of the day before, where they stumbled upon and surrounded 1200 French. The officer demanding the surrender of this little force was blindfolded, as usual, before being conducted to headquarters with his flag of truce. There Napoleon had quickly mounted his staff and drawn his Guides around him in an imposing array. When the bandage was removed, the eyes of the Aus- trian opened wide with amazement as he found himself lief ore 56 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON the General-in-chief of the French, who, having put on his most terrifying expression, addressed the messenger in an indignant tone : "What means this insult? Have you the insolence to bring a summons of surrender to me in the middle of my army? Say to those who sent you that unless they lay down their arms within eight minutes, every man of them shall be shot." And it did not take eight minutes for the 4000 to surrender to the 1200 ! It is strange that it should have been among the very hills where Napoleon won the victory of Castiglione, that Victor Emmanuel and Napoleon III fought the Battle of Solferino sixty-three years afterward when Austria was driven out of Lombardy forever. The tall tower of San Martino commemo- rates that triumph, and on its inner walls are inscribed, in bronze, the names of no less than 650,000 Italians who took part in the wars for the liberation of Italy. Marshal Wurmser, defeated at Castiglione, retired to the mountains of Tyrol but only long enough to reinforce his shattered army. Again, however, he divided his force, which numbered 45,000, and in September he moved southward in two columns. As he advanced, Napoleon went to meet him and the clash came in the narrow Tyrolean passes. At the end of a swift, hot campaign, the Austrians, with only a fourth of their original strength, made their way down into Italy and Wurmser hastened to shut himself up in the fortress of Mantua. Another army of 50,000 was gathered by Austria the next month and placed under the command of General Alvinzi. He, too, divided his forces, but the little band of French was so reduced by this time that Napoleon could not show a supe- riority of numbers at any point. With his small, worn-out army, he met Alvinzi in Novem- ber at Caldiero where the mountains of Venetia come down to the plain. It is a beautiful and fruitful land, the grape- vines stretching in garlands from tree to tree in the orchards. This affords a pretty decorative effect for tourist eyes, but the Austrian and French scouts failed to enjoy it because those IN THE COCKPIT OF EUROPE 57 festoons broke the view and baffled them in their work of watching the movements of troops. Napoleon lost at Caldiero the opening fight in that autumnal campaign of 1796. There, for the first time, he left the enemy on a field of battle. Prudence dictated his retirement toward the Adda. But courage counselled a bolder stroke. The night he moved in silence out of Verona, the crestfallen troops felt they were in retreat until by a sudden turn they found themselves marching along the River Adige. Their com- mander had determined to stake everything on an effort to get around Alvinzi and cut his communications. And he chose one of the strangest battlefields in the geog- raphy of warfare. Where the little River Alpone flows down to join the Adige, near the village of Ronco, there is a big marsh lying between the two streams, across which there are only two diked causeways, and an army cannot move except by those roads. When Napoleon came down from Verona, he put that marsh between him and Alvinzi, where the enemy would lose the advantage of greater numbers, for no more Austrians than Frenchmen could advance abreast on those two narrow roads. It was a clever choice of ground, and the only means of avert- ing a disaster. The French marched out of Ronco by both causeways, but to accomplish their main purpose and get in the rear of the Austrians they struggled for three days to cross the fifty-foot bridge over the Alpone. At one end of the famous little bridge to-day sits the village of Arcole, several miles from a railroad or even a highroad. From the other end stretches the marsh, which is now drained and converted into well- tended fields as level as the prairie farms in the Mississippi Valley. Off across the fields rises the church tower of Ronco, from which Napoleon saw the enemy holding the bridge, while the crags of the bordering mountains on the north stick out as sharp as the barbs on a wire fence. It was through those rough passes that the Austrian monarch poured the blood of Austria and Hungary in torrents to ransom his rich Italian province from the French. 58 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON On the little Arcole bridge the two great nations of conti- nental Europe fought for three days like dogs over a bone. It is as rude a structure as that which arched the flood, where, their flag to April's breeze unfurled, the embattled farmers stood and fired the shot heard round the world. By Concord bridge a people passed to independence and greatness. By Arcole bridge Italy, too, passed to independ- ence, but, alas, she had many more rivers still to cross. High banks had been thrown up along the Alpone to con- fine its waters and the road reaches the bridge at either end by a steep grade. The French officers rushed to the head of their column when it wavered before a detachment of Aus- trian troops who defended the bridge. They hoped to repeat the dash at Lodi. But their show of bravery was lost and Lannes and several other generals were wounded. Augureau, seizing a flag, leaped upon the bridge and taunted his men as they bent under the storm of the enemy's guns, "Cowards, do you fear death too much?" Alas, they loved life too well. Then Napoleon himself took the lead, while Lannes, for- getting his wounds, rose from his hospital cot to follow him. The little General sprang upon the bridge, where he was caught in a furious swirl of fighting French and Croats. Brave Muiron threw himself before him to cover him with his body and was struck dead at the feet of his chief. The bridge could not be taken by storm. The General-in- chief was whirled back with his men and pushed off the steep grade of the road into what was then a quagmire. The Little Corporal literally was stuck in the mud, close by where a stone shaft, a piece of graveyard art, now commemorates his desperate battle for the bridge. Marmont and Louis Bona- parte were foremost among those who ran to his assistance and rescued him from the enemy. Lannes was wounded again and Napoleon lamented all his life the death of the devoted Muiron. The third day of hard fighting about Arcole was drawing to a close with both armies unnerved and sick of battle, each only waiting for the other to quit from exhaustion. Then Napoleon, who had been unable to win with blood and powder, IN THE COCKPIT OF EUROPE 59 gained the victory by an absurd ruse. Placing trumpets in the hands of twenty-five horsemen he sent them across the river farther down and they galloped around behind Arcole in the waning of the November day. The noise of the trumpets struck terror to the fainting hearts of the Austrians. At the thought of their left wing and rear being ambushed by what they imagined must be a column of cavalry, their last drop of courage left them, and soon Alvinzi's entire army was in full retreat on the moun- tains. Italy had been saved by the blare of twenty-five trumpets. "One must make for the flying foe," Napoleon said, "a bridge of gold or oppose to him a barrier of steel." He gladly gave the fleeing Alvinzi a golden bridge, while he him- self flew to Milan on the wings of love and burst open Jo- sephine's door only to find she had gone on a merry excursion to Genoa. Sitting down in the lonely palace he wrote her as if his heart were breaking. From a series of chiding and despair- ing letters written by him in that period, these sentences are taken : I had left all to see you, to press you to my heart — you were not here. . . . For me, to love you alone, to make you happy, to do noth- ing: that can annoy you, that is the lot and aim of my life. . . . When I ask you for a love like mine, I am wrong; why expect lace to weigh as much as gold? . . . Il is my misfortune that nature has denied me qualities that might fascinate you. ... I open my letter to send you a kiss. Ah, Josephine, Josephine! CHAPTER VIII CONQUERING AUSTRIA 1797 AGE 27 WHEN Napoleon had driven the Austrians off the Lombardy plain four times, another army of 40,000 white coats, under General Alvinzi, started down the denies of the Tyrol in the depth of the winter of 1796-7. Napoleon was in doubt where to find and meet the main column of the enemy until late of a January night when he divined that Alvinzi 's own command was headed straight for Verona along the banks of the Adige. Ordering reinforce- ments to follow him at full speed he raced to Rivoli, seventeen miles north, where 10,000 French were recoiling in the pres- ence of 28,000 Austrians. Fairly flying on his horse through a cold, white night he arrived at the French position at four o'clock in the morning and with his cheering assurance that 13,000 men were coming to the support of the sorely beset 10,000, he was just in time to avert a retreat. The battlefield of Rivoli is a classic in military topography. It is a broad, fairly level plateau, with mountains rising be- fore and behind it; the Adige rushes along one side, and a range of hills on the west runs down to Lake Garda, six miles away. On that drill ground Napoleon found the French en- camped. Off toward Monte Baldo, on whose snows the moon glistened, he saw the wide-flung line of camp fires of the sleep- ing Austrians. "The air was aflame with them," he said. But the enemy to gain a footing on the plateau must climb up steep, crooked and icy roads, and those zigzag paths were to determine the result of the battle. Without waiting for the Austrians to open the attack or for 60 CONQUERING AUSTRIA 61 the French reinforcements to arrive, Napoleon at once took the aggressive. In the earlier hours that followed the sun- rise, the Austrians drove in their foes at every point of con- tact and threatened to catch them in the rear as well as to climb up on the plateau and break through their front. Napoleon sat on his horse as calmly as at a review while his lines wavered and with anxious eyes his generals watched his face. He was only waiting for the Austrians in front to climb up and show their white coats above the edge of the plateau, for his artillery to catch them on either side while his infantry dashed at the head of their column and tumbled them down the slope. As for the white coats in his rear they, too, were just where he wanted them, ready to be caught in their own rear by the French reinforcements coming up from Verona. When he heard the gloating shouts of the Austrians behind him, where they fondly believed they had him and his army enclosed within a wall of steel, he chuckled softly, "Now we have them!" Every man of that flanking column was cap- tured, while the artillery smashed and the cavalry dashed to pieces the columns that scrambled up the northern steeps of the heights of Rivoli. Alvinzi took flight from the scene with much less than half the men he had led down from Trent. Napoleon, in less than ten months, had vanquished the fifth army which Aus- tria had sent against him. Like a circus showing in one-day towns, the main body of the French broke camp as soon as the battle was won. Not long after midnight they were on the march southward, to prevent the Austrian division, which had moved down the other side of Lake Garda, from relieving Mantua. The re- inforcements at Rivoli had marched fourteen miles the night before the battle. After fighting all day they were now on a thirty-mile march toward Mantua, most of them without lying down. They arrived on the new field of conflict in time not only to avert the junction of the marching Austrians with the Mantuan garrison, but to catch all of the 9000 of them in a net. 62 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON Mantua was tottering to its fall. The men hemmed within its walls could no longer receive even their half rations of salted horse meat. Disease as well as famine threatened their extermination. One night in early February, Wurmser sent an officer to the tent of Gen. Seurrier, the commander of the besieging force, to find out what kind of bargain could be made. The messenger boasted, as usual, of the strength and endurance left in the garrison, and of its rich stores, sufficient bountifully to supply the men for three months more. He had no thought that the young French officer who, wrapped in his cloak, was sitting in a dark corner of the tent, scribbling on a sheet of paper, was the famous General-in- chief. At last the little man in the cloak ceased his scribbling and, walking to the table, threw the paper upon it. "There," said Napoleon, "are the conditions which I will grant. If your marshal had provisions only for three weeks and talked of surrender he would deserve my contempt. I know the extremities to which he is reduced, and I respect his valour, his misfortune, and his age. Whether he sur- renders to-morrow, in a month, or in three months, he shall have neither better nor harder conditions. He may stay as long as his sense of honour prompts him to hold out." When the Austrian army hobbled out of the Verona gate of Mantua the next morning, expecting to see their venerable commander humbled before his youthful conqueror, Napo- leon had left the scene, and the a^ed Wurmser was spared that humiliation. The 30,000 French now had 40,000 cap- tives to their credit within less than a month. When not an Austrian remained in arms on Italian soil, Napoleon at last received reinforcements from the Directory and the spring found him with 80,000 men under his com- mand. Taking half of that force with him, he set out in March on the road to Vienna, where, by threatening the Aus- trian capital, he hoped to bring the Emperor to terms of peace. But Austria, victorious against the Army of the Rhine, if so often overwhelmed by the Army of Italy, called the young, royal commander, the Archduke Charles, from his field of victory in the west to try his lance with the young The Little Corporal at the Bridge of Lodi — . u^iMdA Wini Josephine at a Fete in Milan CONQUERING AUSTRIA 63 republican commander and save the capital of the Haps- burgs. Age had not proved to be a match for youth. Beau- lieu was seventy-one and Wurmser seventy-nine. But Charles was even younger than Napoleon, only twenty-five, and the new campaign was to be a competition between generals who had no more than entered manhood. It is 530 miles, as the railroad runs, from Verona to Vienna. But there were no Vienna expresses, no trains de luxe for Napoleon through the wildly picturesque passages of the Eastern Alps. Part of the way over which he led his troops, with their cannon and supplies, was no more than a mule track, where a cart never had been. They climbed and stumbled and pulled and hauled up the sleety mountain sides. They laboured over the heights through three feet of snow, where there was not a guiding footprint before them. They waded and leaped the torrents in the valleys. The French came upon the Austrians in the Tyrol, but the Archduke Charles, longing for reinforcements, refused to make a stand, and fell back from height to height, Napo- leon giving him no resting time. At Tarvis, Charles turned in earnest for the first time and faced his relentless pur- suer. Tarvis sits on the summit of the Noric Alps at the head of a valley where a bronze soldier stands to-day on the brow of a cliff, a feather in his Austrian hat and a gun in his hand. This statue does not commemorate an Austrian victory in the campaign of 1797, however, but in another and later struggle with France twelve years afterward. For Tarvis, in spite of its commanding position, could not check Napo- leon's advance. The pass here is at its deepest and narrow- est measure, with barely room for the swift flowing, silvery Kanal and the highroad beside it. Through all the beautiful valley above Tarvis, the people have taken flight from savage man to savage nature on the mountain sides and even on the mountain tops, where on seemingly inaccessible crags of the jagged Alpine heights they have pitched their towns. An army must have to crowd closely together to keep from rubbing against the stony walls 64 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON that shut in the path. And at every angle there is an old castle to threaten the invader of those wild fastnesses. The retreating Austrians were speedily melting away un- der the hot onslaughts of Napoleon and he found the road strewn with their sick and wounded, whom they abandoned in their flight to the mercies of the elements and the foe. De- scending into the valley of the Drave, he sent on ahead from Klagenfurt to the Archduke an appeal for peace, saying : Brave soldiers make war and desire peace. Has not this one lasted six years'? Have we not killed enough men and inflicted enough evils on sorrowing humanity? Even a prince of the oldest royal house of Europe could not take exception to the lofty tone of that communication from the Corsican republican. Charles returned a courte- ous reply and referred the letter to his brother, the Emperor, who, himself, was already fleeing from the oncoming foe. The imperial family abandoned their palaces in Vienna and abandoned their capital in terror at the approach of the re- publican hosts. Among the fugitives, running away from Napoleon, the ogre of every royal house, was a six-year-old princess, the Archduchess Marie Louise! After more Austrian defeats and when the French were at Leoben, only 117 miles from Vienna, as the railroad now runs, and more than 400 miles from the starting point of their campaign just four weeks before, Austria cried enough and laid down her arms. Her envoys came to Leoben, in its pretty vale, and choos- ing a garden as neutral ground, they met the conqueror there in a summer house. As they started to write in the pre- amble of the armistice the statement that the Emperor of Germany recognised the French Republic, Napoleon com- manded, ' ' Strike that out ; the Republic is like the sun ; none but the blind can fail to recognise it." CHAPTER IX NATIONS AT THE FEET OF A YOUTH 1796-1797 AGE 26-27 MILAN was Napoleon's first capital, his training school in the trade of empire. From the fields of his mili- tary victories, where he vanquished four Austrian generals and five Austrian armies, winning his way in a year twice across the Alps and from the shores of the Mediter- ranean to the valley of the Danube, he dashed into the city between battles to negotiate treaties and create states. Across the square from the famous cathedral stand the walls of the first royal palace in which he ever slept. It is a big, sprawling, dreary pile which cumbers an acre or so of earth and which in silent gloom remains untenanted now- adays except for a rare visit from the King of Italy or some member of the reigning family. When Napoleon first entered Milan in his brand-new glory after the dash across the bridge of Lodi in May, 1796, he strode into this palace as the Austrian Archduke fled out the back door. Climbing into the viceregal bed of a Haps- burg prince, he who had never known a roof of his own must have proudly contrasted his new lodgings with his $2 a month den at Mile. Bou's in Valence only four years before. The people, however, did not think this abiding place of the Visconti, the Sforzas and the Spanish and Austrian viceroys, this home of despotism for 600 years, was a suitable dwelling for their republican liberator, the young scourge of tyrants. When he came again a patriotic aristocrat invited him to ac- cept his house and he went to live in the Serbelloni palace — on the Corso Venezia, a few squares behind the cathedral. 65 66 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON The Serbelloni is far more beautiful than the royal palace and probably the most beautiful of all the palaces of Milan. The passerby on the street car may see only its severe ex- terior, with the marble tablet commemorating Napoleon's tenancy, and might not suspect its inner beauties, its great columns and noble courtyard, its royal halls adorned by the brushes of Titian, Velasquez, Salvator Rosa and other masters. There in the Serbelloni, Josephine was installed by Na- poleon when she came on from Paris and it was their honey- moon nest. There they served their apprenticeship in the art of reigning, requiring neither a royal palace nor a royal crown for their rehearsal. Napoleon, indeed, hardly needed to study the part. Na- ture seems to have cast him for it. In the obscurity and poverty of his youth there was something imperial in his bear- ing and temper, something that marked him apart and held him aloof from his fellows. The world only called him queer then, but the instant he gained power it acclaimed him great. The transition came in a day. Veteran generals of the Army of Italy were transformed at once from his critics into his courtiers and he had no more than sat down in Milan than a court spontaneously formed around him. While the populace stood by the hour on the Corso Venezia waiting to catch a glimpse of him as he entered or left the palace, his officers and the members of the Milanese aristocracy sat in the grand drawing room with their eyes on the big folding doors, watching for them to swing wide and for him to appear before them. The moment they saw him, every one of them, men and women alike, French republicans equally with Italian aristocrats, sprang to their feet and bowed in silent homage beneath the eagle-like glance of his deep-set grey eyes. As yet his eyes were almost the only feature that men re- marked in the personal presence of this little, long-haired, pinched face General-in-chief. His lean, frail, girlish figure might have been that of a poet starving for a publisher. His stooping, almost round shoulders and pallid countenance sug- gested the study room of a scholar rather than the camp of a conqueror. NATIONS AT THE FEET OF A YOUTH 67 Success and glory had yet found no reflection in his visage and it was still as sorrowful as when it bent over the plate of a six-sou dinner in a cheap restaurant of Paris or in suicidal meditation gazed longingly upon the Rhone at Valence. The one soldierly thing about his appearance was his uniform and that was as plain as the army regulations permitted. The artist Gros has described, but should have painted, a pretty scene at the Serbelloni when he came from Paris to paint his celebrated picture of Napoleon on the bridge of Arcole. Never finding his subject at rest long enough to en- able him to start the picture, the only sittings he obtained were directly after breakfast when, for his benefit, Josephine sometimes obligingly held the Little Corporal on her knee. Out on the old Como road, only a few miles from Milan, stands another monument of Napoleon's Italian reign in the melancholy form of a lunatic asylum. This bedlam once was the lovely villa of Montebello, and the walls that now echo back the chatter of a colony of poor, demented creatures re- sounded in other days with the mirth of youth rejoicing in the first harvest of its ambition. In his second and last summer in Italy, after the armistice with Austria, Napoleon left the heat of the city, for Milan is one of the hottest places in Italy, and took up his residence at this villa, which time has changed beyond recognition. It was then a great country palace, sitting far back from the highroad in a large park, with cool, shady avenues, pretty fountains, ingenious grottoes, and all the exquisite loveliness of an Italian retreat. Two flights of steps led up to the broad, high terrace that ran along the front and sides of the villa from which the Alps could be seen on the one hand and the lace-like turrets of the Milan cathedral on the other. In that sylvan refuge the young arbiter of nations gath- ered about him the families of his military and civil officers, and thither the envoys of suppliant states followed him. There, too, with a Corsican loyalty to the ties of blood, he assembled most of his family and was reunited with them for the first time since the flight of the Bonapartes from Corsica. A picturesque guard of 300 Polish soldiers was stationed 68 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON in the park and the band of the Guides played for dinner, where like a Bourbon monarch, apart from his courtiers, Na- poleon ate, while a mob of privileged persons stood and watched the eagle feed, their awed gaze disconcerting him no more than if he had been born and bred at Versailles. As the company sipped its after-dinner coffee on the ter- race, Mme. Leopold Berthier, wife of the younger brother of the chief of staff, sang in the drawing room, or there floated out the deeper-toned melody of General Kilmaine, the brave Dublin man and veteran of the American Revolution, who delighted in singing the airs of Erin. Another man of Irish blood but of French birth, General Clarke, was the favourite story teller of the terrace. But when the circle had gone indoors and left the outer air to the fireflies, Napoleon himself sometimes practised his dramatic gifts. As he enacted a Corsican ghost story, with only a candle or two to light up his face, the women rewarded his efforts with screams of horror. The court of Montebello were a merry lot, hardly more than boys and girls and giddy with their sudden rise from poverty and obscurity. If they could have foretold the strange for- tunes that awaited them, if they had prophetically anticipated the future by ten years and hailed one another as emperor and empress, kings and queens, princes and princesses, dukes and duchesses, counts and countesses they would have seemed more mad than their present unfortunate successors, the insane in- mates of Montebello. Napoleon had taken care to share his prosperity with his family at each upward step in his swiftly changing fortunes. Nearly all the $10,000 that the Directory voted him for put- ting down the revolt in the streets of Paris went at once to his impoverished mother, who had seen with dismay her daughters growing up wild and neglected in patched shoes and clothes, robbing orchards like tomboys and flirting with gallant Frenchmen in the streets of Marseilles. With their changing lot in life the Bonapartes changed their names, dropping their Corsican nomenclature for more French-sounding prenomen. The mother, Letizia, was Latin- NATIONS AT THE FEET OF A YOUTH 69 ized into Letitia, Guisseppi became Joseph; Luciano became Lucien, although for a while he adopted the name of Brutus; Luigi was made over into Louis. In her devoutness Letitia had christened all the girls for the Virgin, but now Maria Annunziata was transformed into Caroline, Maria Anna into Elisa, and Maria Paoletta into Pauline. Napoleon disliked his own name as too foreign in France but fame overtook it and glorified it before he could change it. He dropped the u from Buonaparte, however, when he took command of the Army of Italy, and Gallicized the pronunciation by silencing the final e. Napoleon at twenty-six and twenty-seven not only found himself with a court, but in the full exercise of nearly all the powers of an absolute sovereign. Under his multitude of cares, he sent for Bourrienne, his old schoolmate of Brienne and companion of his poverty in Paris. The new secretary found his desk buried in neglected letters, but Napoleon told him to open only those that came by special couriers and pitch all the rest in a basket for three weeks. It was discovered then that time had answered four-fifths of them, and the inventor of this labour-saving device laughed heartily over its success. A man must be more than warrior to win the highest fame. The sword was but a single tool in the kit of Alexander and Caesar, Charlemagne and Napoleon. The combination is always and everywhere irresistible. Happily the American Revolution found it in Washington, and happily the American Civil War did not find it in any of its generals. As soon as Napoleon arrived in Italy he proceeded to act as soldier, diplomat and law giver. He found nearly 20,- 000,000 Italians separated into a dozen nationalities, and half of them under alien conquerors. Patriotism was only a dream, and the dreamers were in prison or exile. Napoleon aroused this long repressed passion, and with a large and generous vision, disregarding and defying his government, he laid the corner stone of united Italy. In one short, crowded year the peninsula was revolutionised and republicanised from the summit of the Alps to the summit of the Apennines 70 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON with only the kingdom of Sardinia and the duchy of Parma standing as the spared monuments of the old order of things. Everywhere Napoleon was the Republic. He convoked the Italians in a great assembly for the first time. He brought the best minds and spirits of Italy into the govern- ment, recalling many exiles to share in the upbuilding of a nation, the Cisalpine Republic. But he himself was the law- giver, and constitutions were drafted under his eyes. In all his pulling down of thrones, there was one that the young conqueror shrank from laying hands on, the venerable throne of Peter. He invaded and dismembered the Papal States, but, although continually urged by the Directors to seize Rome, he spared the eternal city and scrupulously re- frained from stepping foot in it. No such compunction as the Holy See inspired in him, re- strained him in dealing with Venice, which, notwithstand- ing the virtuous outcry of many historians, was perhaps the least deserving state in all Italy. The Venetian territory lay between the French and the Austrian frontier, and its rulers did not sufficiently conceal their hostility to France. At last, while Napoleon was away on his campaign in Aus- tria, a bloody massacre of the French, which did not spare even the sick in the hospitals of Verona, took place on Vene- tian territory, and the fate of Venice was sealed. "I will be an Attila to you," he stormed at the Doge; "the lion of St, Mark must bite the dust." Thus a despotism of a thou- sand years fell with as sudden a crash as we have seen its Campanile fall in our day. As Napoleon stirred the emotions of the Italians with hopes of national independence, he fired his army of French re- publicans with the zeal of liberators and made them "play and laugh with death," as he said, while they marched and battled for the liberation of men. It is true he no longer shared his soldiers' simple faith in the Republic. He had been behind the scenes in Paris and the illusions of his youth were gone. The nightmare of the Reign of Terror had re- placed the beautiful dreams of his barrack days and a gen- erous faith in humanity had withered into a bitter cynicism. NATIONS AT THE FEET OF A YOUTH 71 Already he had made the fatal mistake of his career — he had mistaken for mankind the plotting politicians of the French capital. "What an idea," he exclaimed, "a republic of 30,000,000 men! Give the French people a rattle and they are satisfied." He held no higher opinions of the Italians: "Good God! There are 18,000,000 people in Italy and with difficulty I have found only two men." If, however, his republicanism was now only a pretence, he was still as true as any man in the ranks to what he re- garded as the great, original purpose of the Revolution. He had no use for the Bourbons. He was intensely loyal to the new France. Other commanders of the armies of the Re- public had sold out. But his sword was without price. Naples and Venice, Austria and the Bourbons offered him rich bribes in cash and honours. Money never is the tempter of the Alexanders and the Caesars, the Charlemagnes and the Napoleons. It cannot buy what they want. Great ambitions can have no alloy of avarice. The eagle cannot soar with bags of gold tied to its feet. Napoleon appears to have kept his hands clean while the foremost savants of France were joying in the robbery of the galleries, and her naturalists ravaged the gardens and museums of Italy. The Romans never exulted more proudly or loudly at the triumph of a returning conqueror in his chariot with his long procession of human spoils than the Parisians as they watched the parade of carts piled high with the looted art of Italy on its way to the Louvre. The coming of Raphael's Transfiguration, of the Apollo Belvidere, of the Capitoline Gladiator, of the Laocoon, of the bronze horses of Venice and the winged lion of St. Mark, of the immortal creations of Titian, Correggio and the rest of the old masters symbolised to the popular imagination better than any other trophies the flattering thought that Paris was mistress of the world and that France had succeeded to the grandeur that was Rome. Napoleon's final achievement in Italy was the negotiation of a treaty of peace with Austria, a power that had relent- lessly fought the Republic from its birth. In this work he 72 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON confidently matched himself alone against Count Cobentzl, one of the most renowned diplomats of Europe, supported by a distinguished staff of Austrian experts. Going with Josephine into the Friuli above Venice, in Octo- ber 1797, they settled down at Passeriano, in the country villa of the overthrown Doge of Venice, while the Austrian nego- tiators established themselves in the neighbouring town of Udine. The veteran and eminent diplomat met the young soldier with an easy air of familiar badinage, but Napoleon with one look established their relations on a different basis. Then the game began. History has a startling picture of him seizing from a table in Count Cobentzl 's quarters a rare and costly vase which Catherine of Russia had given to the Count, and lifting it above his face convulsed with rage dashing it in a hundred pieces on the floor as he roared : ' ' See ! So will I smash your monarchy before another month has passed." It is true that after a wild scene of some kind, he rushed out of the room, loudly shouting to his staff to notify the Archduke Charles that hostilities would be reopened in twenty-four hours. But the Austrians hurried after him and laid down their hand to the winner in the great poker game which both sides had been playing. As a consolation for her loss of Belgium and Lombardy, Austria accepted Venice and most of Venetia, including the Trentino and the Dalmatian coast, which never had belonged to her and which form the "Italia irridenta," the unre- deemed Italy for which Italians have sighed so long. The instrument was signed at Passeriano, but it was christened the Treaty of Campo Formio for a little village on the neu- tral ground lying between the houses of the two parties to the compact. The people of France welcomed the end of the more than five years' war with Austria, and the Peace of Campo Formio was hailed as the crowning victory of the Army of Italy, whose flag bore the boast of 150,000 prisoners and 610 pieces of artillery captured in eighteen pitched battles and in three times as many minor engagements. CHAPTER X THE DESCENT UPON EGYPT 1797-1798 AGE 28 RETURNING to Paris after an absence of twenty months, Napoleon found himself the hero of a city whose streets in days not long before he had tramped hungry and out at the elbows. Only thirteen years had passed since he first shyly peeped at the great capital from behind the hooded and belted robe of the Minim friar of Brienne who had led him to the Ecole Militaire. It was only five years since he had come as a cashiered lieutenant to beg back his place in the arm}', and it was only two since the populace had fled from him as the unknown "man on horseback." Now his name was on the myriad lips of the city as they acclaimed him the deliverer of France and the pacifier of Europe, and his modest honeymoon street was re- christened the Rue de la Victoire. The applause of Paris disturbed him more than her neglect in the days of his poverty and obscurity. "Bah!" he said. "These people would crowd to see me just as hard if I were on my way to the guillotine. ' ' While the Republic now had conquered peace throughout the continent, it still was defied by the island kingdom of Great Britain, and the British navy continued to shut the gates of the sea against French commerce. The Directory, early in 1798, commissioned Napoleon General-in-chief of the Army of England, but in ordering him to strike Great Britain anywhere while she remained mistress of the seas, they were simply commanding him to make bricks without straw — and he chose to undertake that impossible task in the land of Joseph and Pharaoh. 73 74 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON As he had found Toulon at LaSeyne and as he had found Vienna at Mantua, he said now that London was not in Eng- land but in India. Rather than try to cross the twenty-five miles of channel crowded with British warships, he preferred to take his chances of dodging the enemy in a sail of 1400 miles through the Mediterranean. Instead of a headlong lunge at England, he chose to "take her in the rear," by landing an army in Egypt, marching across Asia and seizing the British possessions in India, which the French imagined were the true source of Britain's wealth and power. Still styling himself the Commander-in-chief of the Army of England, although it had been privately rechristened the Army of the Orient, he hastily assembled his military and naval forces and a great fleet of transports in the Mediter- ranean at Toulon. While he advertised it as an expedition against the British, he kept its direction and destination a close secret among a very few. Nearly all the ships of the British navy were guarding the English coast and blockading the northern ports of France. There was not a warship of that power left in the Mediter- ranean until Nelson arrived off Toulon two days before the sailing time of the French fleet, but — and this is only the first line in a chapter of unfortunate accidents that were to befall him — he was blown away in a storm. Notwithstanding the secrecy in which Napoleon had en- veloped his purpose, all adventurous spirits were eager blindly to follow his star. Every bright and shining lance in the army was proffered him. He gathered besides a whole regiment of geographers and geometricians, astronomers and chemists, mineralogists and geologists, botanists and zoolo- gists, linguists and orientalists, architects and draftsmen, actors and singers, poets and chroniclers. For the third time in a little more than four years, Napo- leon thus found himself in Toulon ; in* the earliest instance as a penniless exile from Corsica, then as an artillery cap- tain at the siege of the town, and now as the General-in-chief of the first military expedition the west had ventured against the east in the 500 years since the failure of the Crusades. THE DESCENT UPON EGYPT 75 His flagship, L' Orient, loaded down with 2000 passengers, freed herself with difficulty from the mud, and rounded the point of L'Eguillette, where the flowers of May were bloom- ing on the earthworks of the Fort of Men Without Fear. As she passed out into the great harbour he stood on deck with a spyglass to his eye, watching the fluttering handkerchief of Josephine, who leaned on the balcony rail of the port intend- ant's house, and continued to wave a farewell, not only to him but also to the manly youth by his side, her own spyglass dimmed with tears at her parting from her son as well as her husband. Out of Toulon streamed the mighty armada of France. When it was joined by reinforcements from other ports, it ploughed its way through the ivory-crested waves of the blue sea with the prows of thirteen ships of the fighting line, four- teen frigates, seventy-two corvettes and nearly 400 transport vessels, carrying 35,000 troops of the Kepublic, who no more knew where and why they were going than the weeds that danced in the wake of their boats on the bosom of the waters. No shadow of doubt crossed the mind of their General-in- chief as he strode the quarter deck of L 'Orient. At last he was on the high road to empire. Alexander and Hannibal, Pompey and Cassar, the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Cartha- ginians, the Romans and the Saracens sailed the Mediter- ranean on their conquests of the earth, and Peter and Paul on their conquests of the soul. It was the theatre of the war of the Titans, where Jupiter won the sovereignty of the world and Neptune ruled the wave; where Hercules laboured and Jason cruised, Ulysses wandered and ^Eneas voyaged. For on the Mediterranean, mythology and history are as one and fables are facts and facts are fables. The gods are as real as men, and Homer and Herodotus, Virgil and Plu- tarch are equally historians. In this age of steam and the wireless Napoleon's expedition would be smashed and sunk in a week. Even in those days of sails and no telegraph it was only by the most incredible good luck that he and his big fleet floated safely over the Mediterranean for six weeks with the greatest of British sail- 76 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON ors chasing back and forth and ransacking the sea to find him. Fortunately for him the enemy did not know where he was going or what course he was taking. "While Nelson was fly- ing up and down the European coast, on the assumption that the French were headed for Naples or Sicily, Napoleon was steering toward the African shore, passing outside of Corsica, Sardinia and Sicily and making for Malta, whose outlying island of Gazo rose to view after a sail of nearly three weeks. In the dusk of a June evening the French fleet came to anchor within a gunshot of the great grey heap of masonry which the Knights of St. John had piled up for the defence of Malta against the Turk. These last of the Crusaders, after having been driven from Jerusalem to the rock of Acre and from Acre to the Island of Rhodes, had found refuge from the Saracens behind the bastions of this barren island. From the battlements of St. Elmo the eight-pointed cross had waved defiance to the crescent in stubborn and disas- trous sieges. Challenged now by a nation of the west, which had torn down the crucifix from its churches and did not hold itself bound by the agreements of Christendom to re- spect this outpost of the Christian world, those soldiers of the Maltese cross, who had followed it for nearly 800 years, furled their banner before Napoleon and gave him the keys of Malta. As Napoleon sailed on from Malta and entered the Ionian Sea, Nelson raced in on the more northerly course. Both were now heading straight for Alexandria, for the Admiral at last had suspected that the French were going to Egypt. One day there was nothing but the horizon and sixty miles of water between them. That night, indeed under a moon- less sky, Nelson probably ran through the fleet without seeing it. With the impetuosity of despair, the Briton flew on the wind so fast that he sailed past the huge, slowgoing armada and hauled up at Alexandria. Next he raced off toward the Syrian coast on his wild hunt. As the English Admiral had been forty-eight hours too early for Napoleon at Toulon, he was again forty-eight hours THE DESCENT UPON EGYPT 77 too early for him at Alexandria, and the long voyage was finished in safety. The sheik of Alexandria commanded the French to go away, but Napoleon did not go. For he was in the port of his ambition, within a few pulls of the oar from the cradle of empire and the nursery of fame. Before him lay the low crescented shore, where at Alexander's bid- ding a magnificent city rose to be the treasure house of his conquest of the universe, but where now only a miserable hamlet huddled amid the noble ruins. Beyond, stretched the magic east. Napoleon's star had not led him unharmed through the perils of the sea for him to turn back at the command of an ex-slave, the sheik of Alexandria. He assembled his ships just beyond the town, where the sands of the Libyan Desert roll down to the sea. There in the night, despite wind and weather and the caution of the naval commanders, he and a detachment of his army swung from rope ladders into the small boats tossing in the surf and waded dripping to the shore of Egypt. The first thing he did on landing was to stretch himself on the sand beside a clump of date palms and sleep for an hour to the surging of the waves. Before daybreak he was at the walls of Alexandria, on top of which the townspeople had noisily swarmed to repel the invader, chiefly with Arabic prayers and curses. The French, however, quickly scaled the walls and took the town. Napoleon was the first man of modern times to see that Egypt was the greatest prize the sword could win. Ceesar, Alexander and the ancient conquerors had made it the key- stone in their arch of conquest. For 500 years before Napo- leon's expedition, Egypt had been abandoned to the Arab and the Turk, and all but forgotten by Europe, which with the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope was no longer de- pendent upon the humpbacked ships of the desert. For five centuries a twilight rested upon the land of the Pharaohs and that half a thousand years of Egyptian history is almost as blank as the era of the Pyramid builders. It remained for the strategic eye of Napoleon to penetrate 78 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON that dusk and to see that Egypt still was the centre of the world. And when he rapped at the gate of Alexandria he startled her out of an age long sleep. Over her hoary head the centuries had rolled since she drove the Crusaders from her shore and, lying down to rest on her sandy couch, yielded herself to the dreams of the Orient. The Christian dogs had been beaten off and the European barbarian had disappeared into his native wilderness. Egypt thought no more about hiin than we think of the grasshoppers when they are gone. When, therefore, the long-haired boy of France rudely in- vaded her slumber she knew nothing of the Great Revolu- tion which had roused the sleeping nations of Europe and which at last was bidding her wake again. Egypt hardly remembered there was a France and could not imagine what the French could want of her. To Napoleon's command for her to rise, therefore, she only yawned and begged, "Please go away and let me sleep." The Alexandria of to-day is as changed from the town Al- exander built and Napoleon captured as anything can be in the unchanging land of Egypt. Out of the desert of water in front of it and the desert of sand behind it, the minarets and marts of a modern city of 400,000 rise on the shore where Napoleon found only a squalid village of 5000 people huddled amid the ruins of a splendid imperial capital which before the opening of the Christian Era boasted a million inhabitants. Those -figures reflect the vicissitudes of Alex- andria in a period of more than 2000 years. Pompey's Pillar, which still springs above the roofs and towers, is the one landmark that has survived most of those centuries. But the famous lighthouse of Pharos no longer casts its beams on a wondering world ; instead, a useless fort cumbers its site. The hill which rises from among the ware- houses close by the custom house is still called Fort Napoleon, and the Oriental imagination sometimes insists that Napoleon built it in a night. Its summit is now crowned by the signal station of the port, set in the midst of trees and flowers, and with its pennants of many colours fluttering in the breeze be- neath the Sultan's flag. What really gave the elevation its THE DESCENT UPON EGYPT 79 name was the fort which Napoleon established in a night. It lay outside the little town of that day and commanded the place as it now commands an excellent view of the sea. From another mound near by, where Pompey's polished shaft rises nearly seventy feet in a solid column of red granite, Napoleon watched and directed the assault upon the town wall in the dawn of his first day in Egypt. He prom- ised to inscribe on the pedestal of the pillar the names of those who fell in the attack, but he failed to do it and the poor youths of France missed immortality. However, they fared no harder than the man to whom this column was raised. He is utterly lost in the vulgar herd of conquerors and his pillar has been misnamed for Pompey, who was dead hundreds of years before it was sawed out of the quarry at Assouan. Napoleon gave hardly more time than the conventional traveller spares for Alexandria. Most of his army did not even see the city, but were marched around it toward the Nile, where he himself hastened to overtake them in their ad- vance on Cairo. While the tourist to-day is enjoying as comfortable and interesting a train ride of three hours and a quarter over the 129 miles of rail between Alexandria and Cairo as he could wish, the unchanging landscape of Egypt passes before his car window like a reel of moving pictures in a photo play of the reign of Pharaoh. For time has altered nothing in all the 200 generations and more since the first faint light of history twinkled in the Egyptian darkness. The same patient race of blue-skirted fellahin are still seen, scratching with their wooden ploughs the narrow strip of rich soil between the two deserts that lie in full view on either hand, or laboriously turning the ancient water wheels. Their lives and ways seem to be no more touched by progress than are those of the heavily burdened strings of camels which hump along. All that countryside remains as desolate to-day as before its fields first were gleaned. For the most fruitful soil in the world is cursed with the worst land laws and the most un- just system of taxation. Nowhere else is nature so bountiful 80 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON and hardly anywhere else is man so mean as on those banks of the Nile. No wonder Napoleon's 20,000 soldiers as he marched them through that impoverished region were exasperated almost to the point of mutiny. They had sailed into the harbour of Alexandria with their mouths watering for the fabled flesh- pots of the land of Egypt, while their commander had confi- dently looked for the Egyptians with joyous acclaim to wel- come him as their deliverer from tyranny. Alas, the soldiers found the flesh-pots empty and Napoleon found that the people preferred their old yoke to a new one. Liberty, fraternity and equality, the magic watchwords of the French Revolution with which he had conquered the hearts of the Italians, were as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal in the dull ears of the wretched dwellers in the delta. The country nominally was under the Sultan of Turkey but the martial Mamelukes really ruled it in that day as the British are its real rulers in our day. After long ages of grinding despotism, hope was dead beyond revival in the breasts of the Egyptians. The miserable habitations of the people only mocked the hunger of the foraging soldiers who found nothing in the lean larders fit for the French palate. To set an example of self denial Napoleon himself slept with- out a tent in the midst of his army and at meal time limited his fare to a dish of lentils. Instead of living off the fat of this land for which the children of Israel sighed and murmured when Moses had led them out of Egypt, the invading army advanced with its supplies jealously guarded in its centre for fear of losing even what it had brought from home, assailed as it was by Mamelukes and Bedouins, who forever hovered on the hori- zon. When Napoleon left Alexandria he said that St. Louis, the latest French commander to invade Egypt, took four months to march to Cairo but that he would do it in two weeks. In spite of all the hardships that presented themselves he kept the schedule to the hour. The morning of the 14th day was just breaking over the Mokattom hills when three great heaps THE DESCENT UPON EGYPT 81 of yellow limestones rose to view on the edge of the Libyan desert and he fired the fainting spirits of his tired and home- sick soldiers with the memorable reminder that from those Pyramids of Ghizeh forty centuries looked down upon them. CHAPTER XI THE BATTLE OF THE PYRAMIDS 1798-1799 AGE 28-29 AS Napoleon marched to the conquest of the Egyptian capital in midsummer of 1798, the streets of Cario resounded night and day with the shrill pipes and mo- notonous drum beats of the dervishes, made familiar to us by midway imitations. At the first warning of the enemy's ad- vance the ulema, or wise men, marshalled the children in long processions, and led them again and again through the nar- row, winding lanes of the city, their young voices chanting an appeal for divine deliverance from the unbelieving hosts of France. Napoleon, on the other hand, invoked neither Allah nor Jehovah, but the spirit of the ages, when he reminded his troops that from yonder Pyramids the centuries looked down upon them. What a wonderful view point those centuries enjoyed atop the great cairn of Cheops, that memorable July morning in the year 1798, what well chosen reserved seats ! The journey out from Cairo to Ghizeh and its Pyramids is no longer made by ferry down the Nile and thence by camels or mule as in other days. On the contrary, it is only a twenty-minute spin in an automobile or a forty-minute ride in the company of sheeted Egyptians aboard a trolley car, with a curtained section for the veiled, dark-eyed sorceresses of the Nile. Handsome bridges arch the most historic of rivers, the veritable stream of time, first to a parklike island, and then to the farther bank, where the town of Ghizeh sprawls in the sun. Beyond Ghizeh a broad, almost straight avenue, five miles long, with the trolley tracks running be- neath a row of shady lebbakh trees, stretches across a plain, 82 THE BATTLE OF THE PYRAMIDS 83 where little irrigating rivulets run about to refresh the soil in its never ending hand to hand struggle with the desert. The road itself is Bonapartist, having been laid out by the Khedive as an honour and convenience for the Empress Eu- genie at the time she visited Egypt to open the Suez Canal. Buffalos are by the roadside and little white herons are fly- ing over a mud village of the fellahin. Beyond that clump of huts, the Pyramids lift their bulk above the billows of sand which have beaten against their foundations nearly 5000 years and which roll upon them like the engulfing waves of the sea. Indeed a real sea wall five feet high is necessary for the protection of the road as it approaches its destination and is all that saves it from being submerged. Its last section is no more than a pier or diked causeway, with a big hotel and pretty garden rising at the end like a pier head out of an ocean of sand. There still remains a long, steep climb to the Pyramids in a walled and paved trench with the burning sun above and the burning sand all about. But the automobiles and trol- leys stop at the hotel and deliver their passengers over to the mercies of the desert and its children, a tribe of howl- ing Arabs with a herd of camels and donkeys. The visitor is well rewarded for his momentary trials. Surely Cheops is the most wonderful grandstand from which a battle ever was seen or a battlefield reviewed. Overhead bends the splendid blue vault of the Egyptian sky. Behind rolls the tempestuous desert. Below flows the Nile. Beyond the river, the domes and minarets of Cairo rise toward the cloudless heavens in white and gold against a background of bare yellow hills. These stand out on the eastern horizon like videttes guarding the green and slender valley from the oncoming sands of Arabia, forever striving to join forces with the sands of Libya and bury valley and city and river in one vast and desolate waste. Off in front some eight miles away there is a cluster of date palms about the village of Embabeh by the riverside. At the edge of that little grove the celebrated Battle of the Pyra- mids was fought. There the west met the east in combat for 84 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON the first time in 500 years, when the Mamelukes made their one and only stand against the advancing French. On that plain 10,000 turbaned horsemen, each mounted man with three or four footmen to serve him, were drawn up to challenge Napoleon, their shirts of steel and their gay, ori- ental accoutrements glistening in the sun. Behind this line of brilliant cavalry there were thousands of janissaries, while within the earthworks of Embabeh there were gathered more thousands of raw conscripts with many cannon. But the Mamelukes in their self-confidence relied on them- selves alone to strike down and trample the French beneath their horses' hoofs. Macaulay says that their commander, Mourad Bey, could not believe that his little antagonist who rode like a butcher was the greatest warrior in Europe, while the Mamelukes felt nothing but contempt for infantry. A man was no soldier in their eyes who did not have a horse, and they laughed as they saw Napoleon's troops trotting toward them like dogs. When the French came within striking distance, the Mame- lukes, with their weird war cry, dashed at the foot soldiers of France to find themselves beating against solid squares of steel and fire. Dazed at first and then enraged they rode again and again to the slaughter. But when they saw their army broken into two parts and the irresistible French squares wedging in between, they fled in mad panic. One division galloped over to the Pyramids and vanished into the desert, while another raced into the village of Embabeh, from behind the guns of which they sal- lied forth once more only to fall before the unwavering squares like grass before a steam mowing machine. Those who escaped from the French leaped from their useless horses into the Nile, along with a mob of other fugitives. Most of them swam to safety; but history makes the grew- some record that after the victors had finished robbing the thousands of dead bodies that bestrew the plain they amused themselves by angling for the drowned, who numbered 1500. The character of the conflict is established by the number of French killed, which was 30. THE BATTLE OF THE PYRAMIDS 85 Such was the Battle of the Pyramids, a combat between the middle ages and modern times. In a military sense, it was not above the level of a massacre, but it was a great battle in its consequences. It shattered forever the despotism of the Mamelukes, those alien slaves who, revolting against their masters, had ruled Egypt for nearly six centuries. And it did far more than that. When the blue squares of France broke through the Mameluke line on that plain down by the little grove of date palms, they opened the lane by which the west passed through to the east. From the field of the Battle of the Pyra- mids, Occidental civilisation started on its eventful journey round the earth to the banks of the Ganges, to the shore of the Sea of Japan and over the Great Wall of China. Napoleon himself was not to realise his dream of empire in the Orient, but there by the Nile his sword cut the first breach in the barrier with which Islam had so long shut in the peoples of Asia and shut out Christendom and the modern world. Here, as in Italy and everywhere, that sword of his was only the highly efficient instrument of the Great Revo- lution, on whose red anvil it was forged, for opening the way to new institutions and the unity of mankind. When night fell on the field of Embabeh the camp fires of Napoleon lit up the Pyramids of Ghizeh, and from the lofty summit of the tomb of Cheops the astronomers of France be- held, though faintly, the constellation of the southern cross, while French sentries patrolled the shadow of the Sphinx in its haunted hollow. There is a tradition among the Arabs of the Pyramids that all the scars of time and the wounds of a hundred wars, which the Sphinx carries, were inflicted by Napoleon's soldiers, who used its mystifying and majestic countenance as a target. That, however, is only a legend for the tourist. Long before the discovery of gunpowder, the Arabs had laid iconoclastic hands on the beard of this god of the desert — for the Sphinx of Ghizeh is not a woman — and it was the Mame- lukes themselves who made a target of his inscrutable face and shot away the nose. 86 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON It was more than a week after the battle when Napoleon himself crossed the river and entered Cairo. He had no more than established his headquarters in the midst of an un- friendly city, cowed by fear in the presence of ' ' the sultan of fire," than he was called away to the desert to beat back the Mamelukes who were gathering again. There, while in Mar- mont's tent on the dreary waste, the staggering news came to him that the French naval fleet which conveyed him to the East had been utterly destroyed in the Battle of the Nile on August 1st. He had dodged Nelson all the way from Toulon to Alexandria, but the British Admiral had found the hiding place of his fighting ships in the Bay of Aboukir, which is one of the forty mouths of the Nile, and had cap- tured or sunk them all. The folly of the Egyptian expedition had received a ter- rible crown. Only two really serviceable French warships remained afloat in all the Mediterranean. The mistress of the seas literally had marooned Napoleon on the sands of Egypt. A sorrier plight could hardly be imagined in the chances of war. To a man of his force, however, difficulties and disasters are only hurdles to be leaped. He concealed his feelings, even from those who looked on in the moment he received this hard blow, and at once turned toward all a confident front. "This is the hour," he said, "when characters of a superior order should show themselves. An obligation to do great things is laid upon us. Seas which we do not command separate us from France, but no seas divide Africa from Asia. Here we will found an empire. ' ' Knowing that the Cairenes would be emboldened by Nel- son's victory, he hastened back to his headquarters in the home of Elfi Bey by the shore of a pond at the edge of the old town. That pond is now the principal square of the city, the Ezbekiyeh, which is the very heart of modern Cairo. Tourists, rejoicing in their first white helmets, and smoking Egyptian cigarettes in wicker chairs among the palms on the broad porch of their hotel, while they watch the passing show of the Orient, have the romantic sense that they are charac- THE BATTLE OF THE PYRAMIDS 87 ters in some one of the many six biggest sellers whose authors have worked up this scene on the terrace at Shepheard's. Probably few of them are aware that the first party of tour- ists to find quarters where this hotel now stands was per- sonally conducted by Napoleon Bonaparte, and that where a European bookseller has his shop near by, the palace walls of Elfi Bey rose when Egypt was ruled by the Little Corporal. Over beyond the Ezbekiyeh, where the plashing of the waters among the tall palms is drowned by the clangour of trolley cars, there was an open field in other days. There Napoleon planned a grand balloon ascension to distract and impress the public mind, for he had brought from France the first balloon ever seen in Egypt. But the air like the sea failed the conqueror of the land. The amazement of the Egyptians was quickly succeeded by amusement, their ex- clamations of awe by shouts of derision as they saw his gas- bag collapse and tumble to earth. He tried also to move the sheiks and wise men to wonder by an exhibition which his French scientists gave, of elec- tricity, chemistry and other strange experiments in natural science. He succeeded with the more advanced minds in his audience, but many of his guests viewed the demonstration with stolid indifference as unequal to the marvels of eastern magic. "Let them make me be in Morocco and here at the same time, ' ' was a challenge which one of the sheiks gave. When the scientific men told him such a thing was impossible the sheik stroked his beard and turned away with contempt for the sorcerers of the west who could only do tricks with bottles and wires but could not make a man be in two places at once. Still another effort to show the people the usefulness of western science was made at the nilometer on the Island of Rhoda in the oldest of old Cairo. This is the ancient gauge of Egyptian prosperity, which for nearly 1200 years has measured the rise of the Nile and indicated the lack or abundance of water for the overflowing of the thirsty delta. "When Napoleon found that the Mamelukes were accustomed to fixing the tax rate the moment the nilometer indicated a 88 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON good supply of water, lie ordered an investigation by his engineers, who dug down and unearthed a fraudulent device for manipulating the gauge in the interests of higher taxation. Only the few with more advanced minds, however, wel- comed the labours of the scientists from France, and the lab- oratory, the Egyptian institute and the library which they established. The multitude hated everything that was new. The construction of a canal across Egypt was part of Na- poleon's Oriental dream, and he carried with him the engi- neers to plan it. The idea was by no means original. For those narrowly divided seas had been united by Darius 500 years before Christ, and the Macedonian Ptolemies had wid- ened the Persian's canal and erected a system of locks. But by the reign of Cleopatra, Darius' ditch had silted up, and it remained for the Romans under Trajan to restore it once more in the first of the Christian centuries. The heedless Arabs, however, left the canal to the winds and the sands and the desert swallowed it again. When Napoleon came, the Egyptians had forgotten even its course, and his engineers from France invented one of those impossibilities with which the cautious and the judicious were forever fettering his eagle flights. The learned academicians somehow made the discovery, apparently without the trouble of taking measurements, that the Red Sea was nearly thirty-three feet higher than the waters of the Mediterranean. They warned the young Gen- eral-in-chief that if he dug a simple sea-level canal he would drown Egypt, and he dropped the project, leaving it to be carried out in the reign of another Napoleon, nearly three quarters of a century afterward, when Ferdinand de Les- seps, an unscientific French consul, a cousin of the Empress Eugenie, found that the two seas were virtually on a level. Napoleon was the first to undertake the heavy and thank- less task of cleaning up and stirring up the slothful east. The easy-going, disorganised Egyptians were exasperated by his passion for cleanliness, order, precision and efficiency. Every innovation for the purpose of improving their lives THE BATTLE OF THE PYRAMIDS 89 and easing their labours was resented and resisted. Work- men who were engaged to carry bricks on public construc- tion indignantly rebelled against the wheelbarrow as if it were the vehicle of evil. The Egyptians had carried their bricks on their heads since the strike of the children of Israel, and any other method was to them an invention of the devil, an impiety which they refused to endure. Religious differences were the most prolific source of trou- ble. Napoleon had done his best to avert them by all manner of flirtation with Mahometanism. He promoted and partici- pated in the fete of Mahomet; he even ordered an Oriental costume for himself and did everything short of becoming a Mahometan, as some historians have accused him of doing. The French had, however, most stupidly outraged the feel- ings of the faithful by stabling their horses in the mosque of el Azhar. This Oamia el Azhar, the greatest university in all Islam, is still one of the most interesting sights of Cairo. Within its walls the lamp of learning was first lighted when Oxford and Paris and Heidelberg yet sat in primeval dark- ness, and its priests have kept the wick trimmed for upwards of 900 years. Napoleon himself surely was too wise to have desecrated the venerable mosque, and when the priests complained that it had been turned into a stable he immediately restored it to them. All his efforts to bridge the gulf between himself and Islam were unavailing, however, when six weeks after the Battle of the Nile, Turkey took sides with the British and declared a holy war on the French. The circle of his mis- fortunes was now complete. The Sultan being the spiritual head of the Moslem world, his declaration of war aroused the religious fanaticism of the Egyptians. "From the minarets of Cairo, maledictions were called down upon the French in a language they could not understand, and in October the people rose in a frenzied out- break against the foreigners. Cairo was no more than beaten back into sullen obedience when the gathering of an army in Syria, beneath the crescent of the Sultan and under the com- 90 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON mand of the Pasha of Acre, who had merited the name of Dejezzar, or "the Butcher," again gravely threatened the French occupation of Egypt. Thus at twenty-nine, Napoleon was alone with his heavy responsibilities and his youthful ambitions in the vast alien world of the east. If he turned back it was only to look across 1500 miles of sea, with Britannia ruling the wave. If he stood still in Egypt it was only to give the Turks, in alli- ance with the British, an opportunity to swarm down upon him and overwhelm him at their leisure. To avoid being caught in a trap, he must hasten to surprise the Sultan be- fore he could marshal his hordes. Although he could invade Asia with a little band of only 12,000 men, he was not with- out a glimmer of hope that after whipping the Butcher of Acre, he might be able to march across Persia, conquer Eng- land in India and still "take Europe in the rear." The old caravan route to Syria is marked at every step by footprints in the sands of time. As Napoleon set out upon it in February, 1798, he was thrilled by the thought that at last his feet were in the path of Alexander. Notwithstanding the disappointments that had crowded upon him since the day he landed on the shore of the Orient he still cherished the dream that this might be his own pathway to an eastern em- pire which would rival the great Macedonian's and make him the master of the world from the Ganges to the Seine. CHAPTER XII INTO THE HOLY LAND 1799 AGE 29 THE traveller from Egypt to Palestine goes to-day by rail through the land of Goshen to Port Said and thence by boat to Jaffa. For Napoleon there was no iron road, only a trail in the sand, and no safe passage by water, where British ships were scouting along the coast. After more than a century had passed, the situation was strangely changed at the outbreak of the war in 1914. In this later instance, England occupied Egypt, and France was her ally, while Turkey in declaring war upon her, had the support of Germany. And the Turco-German forces, in their plans of an Egyptian invasion, were confronted by the same problem that troubled the French in the matter of mov- ing their big guns. Napoleon was obliged to send his heavy siege artillery by sea, because it could not be dragged across the desert. It was enough for his army to drag its feet over the more than 150 miles of hot sand drifts and for the long camel trains to bear the burden of food and ammunition. For a week and more, in February, 1799, his soldiers marched in a land that offered not a morsel of food and where there was only an occasional bunch of desert weeds for the hundreds of beasts with which they advanced. For there is hardly an oasis in all the miserable desert of El Tih. En- gineers went ahead to clear the wells, which were merely holes in the sand. But the army had to march in divisions a day apart lest the wells be drunk dry at a single gulp, and the bitter brackish water was measured out like brandy to the thirsty mouths of the soldiers. In the skirmishes Napoleon had developed the camel as an 91 92 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON efficient aid for Murat's cavalry. With two armed men on the back of this steed of the desert it became a thing of terror even to the Arab horsemen. Fortunately they did not molest the Syrian expedition and the army encountered no human enemy on the long, silent, burning road through the desert, which Napoleon said "was the image of immensity to my thoughts. It had neither beginning nor end. It was an ocean for the foot of man. ' ' Out of a vast waste El Arish, the first outpost of Asia, rises in the valley of the Biblical "River of Egypt." Before it stretches a beautiful irrigated plain where date palms and fig trees cast their cool shadows and where the shining green of the vines is a most welcome sight to eyes long blinded by the glare of sky and sand. El Arish is so old that history cannot count its years. Its camels and mules drink from a stone trough that was once the sarcophagus of a proud Egyptian, and it was only the day before yesterday, in its reckoning of time, when Baldwin I, King of Jerusalem, lay down to die within its walls. It is to-day a town of livid white houses and perhaps 7000 people, who plunge about ankle deep in its sandy streets as they go to bend their heads to Mecca in the mosque or to swell the chaffering hubbub of the bazars. When Napoleon stood before its gate he had no artillery with which to bombard the garrison behind the walls. There- fore, he set up behind his earthworks twenty cross sticks and hung a soldier's coat and hat on each. History asks us to believe that the simple Turks blazed away at those scarecrows three days, until their ammunition was nearly exhausted, when they surrendered. Napoleon resumed his toilsome march in the desert from El Arish, an experience made doubly vexatious by Kleber's division missing its way and wandering about for forty-eight hours without coming upon a well. Some of the men, dis- gusted and discouraged, had angrily broken their muskets. When they came up, the General-in-chief only gently ehided the poor, half -crazed mutineers. "It would have been bet- INTO THE HOLY LAND 93 ter," he told them, "to stick your heads in the sand and die with honour than to give yourselves up to disorder." Soon the weary men of France looked upon the verdant and fertile plains of the Philistines, smiling a spring-time wel- come, while the storied mountains of Judea loomed blue against the eastern horizon. At last the desert was left be- hind, with all its strange trials, not least among which was the necessity of messing on camels, asses and dogs. Before the French, rose the walls and mosques of Gaza, the proud city of the Philistines, the doors of whose gates, gate- posts, bar and all, Samson carried off on his stalwart shoul- ders, after having slain his thousand with the jawbone of an ass. There, too, at Gaza the lusty Danite grew his second head of hair in place of the locks Delilah had shorn and, there, with his strength thus renewed, he pulled down the pillars of the house while 3000 Philistines stood on the roof to mock him. After having been sacked forty times, Gaza still is an im- portant and busy place of 40,000 population. Alexander had to besiege the town two months before he could enter its gates, but its latest captor, Napoleon, took it without tiring a shot. Then he marched on toward Jaffa, across the renowned battlefields of David, where the ark of the covenant was the prize of victory. Up on the bordering mountain side is the scene of the duel with Goliath, where with the pebbles of a brook that armoured giant of Gath was laid low. When the beauty of Israel lay slain upon the high places, and David wept for Saul, he saw, even through his tears, this land of his hated enemy filled with exultation over his loss, and he cried out : ' ' Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Ascalon, lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice." There are few indeed to be told in Gath to-day, for a wretched huddle of Arab huts is all that is left of the once warlike city, while orchard trees and onion patches cover the streets of Ascalon, the birthplace of Herod the Great. The French marched over the fields of Philistia in early 94 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON March and their beauty took Napoleon by surprise. He lik- ened the scene to the landscape of Languedoc, about Toulouse, in southern France. It is indeed a lovely land, a veritable garden of wild flowers and a riot of colour. Napoleon steered his course toward the tower of the forty martyrs at Ramleh, where the Franciscans welcomed him to their convent, which stands on the traditional site of the house of Joseph of Arimathea. Now the good fathers not only show their visitors the altar dedicated to the rich man who came among the poor Galilean outcasts at the foot of the cross and, taking the body of Jesus, laid it in his own tomb, but they exhibit also the room of the young General-in-chief of France. Through the town of Ramleh runs one of the two railroads of Palestine, that from Jaffa to Jerusalem, where the pil- grims to the Holy City are drawn up into the mountains by locomotives that were first built for the use of the French in the construction of the Panama Canal. The ancient high- way to Jerusalem also passes by the town, and Bourrienne suggested to Napoleon that he march to the city of David. But his chief turned aside from Jerusalem as he had from Rome. "I am not ambitious for the fate of Cassius," he said. With his back to the Judean Mountains, he marched on Jaffa, past Lydda, at whose gate, according to the prophecy of Mahomet, Christ will slay Antichrist on the last day. Lydda boasts above all that it was the scene of the martyrdom of St. George, the Christianized soldier of Rome who rescued the maiden from the dragon, and it was there by his tradi- tional grave that Richard Coeur de Lion adopted St. George as the patron saint of England. When Napoleon arrived before the walls of Jaffa he found a garrison of 4000 Turks, with forty guns, determined with Moslem fanaticism to resist his entry into the town. While he was directing the assault on the place, a musket ball carried away his hat and struck dead a colonel who stood behind him, and who was five feet ten inches tall. "That is the second INTO THE HOLY LAND 95 time," the Little Corporal remarked, "that I owe my life to my height." After two days of bombardment, the French rushed into Jaffa with orders to kill all persons in arms, when some Al- banians shouted from the windows of a big khan, or Arabian inn, that they with 2000 other survivors of the Turkish gar- rison had taken refuge in the khan and would fight to the death or surrender only on condition that their lives be spared. Notwithstanding the orders were to "take no pris- oners" in a town that had to be carried by storm, and whose governor had cut off the head of a messenger, the terms were accepted. "Why in the devil's name have they done this?" Napoleon exclaimed as he saw from his tent the band of captives ap- proaching. He was without food for prisoners, without ships to send them away from the theatre of war, and even without men to spare for a prison guard. If he set them free they would hasten on to join the army of Dejezzar, at Acre. In- deed many of them, he said, were men he had paroled at the capture of El Arish. "What do you expect me to do with them?" he angrily demanded. Their fate was inevitable. In a conflict between civilisa- tion and barbarism, the civilised force sinks to the level of the barbarian. It is the old familiar story, heard around the world, of fighting the devil with fire. If it had remained for him whose own nation was without sin of a like nature to cast the first stone, Napoleon might not have been assailed so viru- lently for the horrible Jaffa massacre. The prisoners were marched down to the beach and shot. Some leaped into the sea and swam for their lives to the rocks which make the harbour of Jaffa famous — or infamous — the fabled rocks to which the virgin Andromeda was chained. But the appetite of the firing squads had grown by what it fed on. Not to be cheated of their full measure of blood, they rested their muskets on the beach and by making an Oriental sign of reconciliation they enticed the miserable fugitives from the perils of the foaming sea, to shoot them down as they were about to swim ashore. 96 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OP NAPOLEON Jaffa is the portal of the Holy Land. Thousands of pil- grims every year jump from their steamers into the arms of Arab boatmen, who row them between the jagged rocks and land them on the shore of the strange, tumultuous east. The dragomans of the town are overflowing with amazingly minute information about the exact landing place in this ancient Joppa of the cedar of Lebanon which the King of Tyre sent for the building of Solomon 's temple ; the veritable point of de- parture whence Jonah, fleeing from the presence of God, sailed hence into the storm, only to be flung overboard to the whale ; the precise site of the house of Simon the tanner, where Peter tarried many days, and the tomb of Dorcas, the woman full of good works and alms deeds, whom the apostle raised from the dead. But they are less definite and voluble about the more re- cent ways and habitations of Napoleon. After holding a pro- longed conference on the subject, their chief spokesman could offer no better excuse for their ignorance than by saying: "You see, Napoleon did not get into the Bible." And of course, that was his fault, not theirs. The fathers of the Armenian monastery, however, qualify in profane history by showing the very cell in which Napo- leon slept while he made their monastic home his own. Their tall, imposing cavass, or "shooting man," also conducts the curious down into the cavernous and pillared place which, after Napoleon's departure, became the celebrated pest hos- pital of Jaffa. From Jaffa, Napoleon marched up over the Plain of Sharon, with the Mediterranean on the one hand and on the other, first the mountains of Judea and then the mountains of Sa- maria. He passed the fallen temples of Caesarea, rounded the base of Mt. Carmel and followed the beach of Haifa to Acre. The highway that to-day leads to Acre, to Nablous, to Nazareth, and to Damascus, rough though it be, is one of the three of four real carriage roads of Palestine. The good roads movement there dates only from the pilgrimage of the German Emperor in 1898, when the Sultan ordered some INTO THE HOLY LAND 97 road building for the Kaiser's convenience, and the work has been continued fitfully for the benefit of the tourists. The natives naturally take no interest in the subject, for while Judah could not overwhelm the men of the valley and the plain because they had chariots of iron, few chariots have they to-day, these men of the valley and plain. The ass and the camel and the immemorial trails and paths suffice them. There were lately only two automobiles in all the country, and they were owned by foreigners. Haifa, which sits at the foot of Mt. Carmel across the Bay of Acre, is one of the two ports of the Holy Land and it is a terminus of one of the two railroads of Palestine, that which runs up from the Mediterranean to Damascus. Like Jaffa, Haifa, too, is receiving the stimulus of progress from a prosperous German religious colony. The colonists live by themselves in modern houses and broad, shady streets. To step from their leafy, flowery quarter into the stony, squalid, noisy old town is like passing in a minute from Europe to Asia, from Christendom to Islam, from the twen- tieth century to the tenth. The road from Haifa to Acre probably is the best example of road building in the Turkish Empire. Not the Sultan, however, but old Neptune was its builder. It lies on the hard beach which borders the curving bay and runs through the ford across the brook Kishon, by which Elijah slew the prophets of Baal. Over the shells where the Phoenicians used to gather the materials for their Tyrian purple, it now plunges into the little stream whose waters trickle across the sands where, according to Pliny, glass was discovered, and finally it comes to a halt before the gate of Acre. That gate, at which Napoleon pounded for two months in the spring of 1799, has, through all recorded time, been the tollgate on the highway between Africa and Asia, between Egypt and Constantinople, between the Holy Land and Syria — and blood has been its toll. If the bones of the mul- titude who have been slain at that cruel portal could be gath- ered in a heap, Acre would sit in the shadow of a mountain of dead. 98 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON In the Crusades, to go back no farther, it was the gate to the Holy Land, and hundreds of thousands of Crusaders and Saracens are said to have perished before it. Behind it the hosts of the cross made their last stand, and when Acre fell (St. Jean d'Acre it was called), the Crusaders lay buried beneath its ruined walls, never again to rise and battle for the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre. And this blood-drenched threshold of Acre is the "Gate of Nazareth ! ' ' For it looks out upon the hills where only twenty miles away dwelt the meek and forbearing Nazarene who taught the lesson so hard for men to learn : ' ' Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also." It had been 500 years and more since an army from Christendom had presented itself before the gate of Acre when Napoleon came to challenge this stronghold of Turkish power. Before him stretched the classic highway of empire to the famous ladder of Tyre, leaning against a white, rocky promontory. Behind that headland lies the city of Hiram, whose capture is counted among the most celebrated ex- ploits of Alexander the Great. Surely this new Alexander would make short work of Acre, the savage den of a Bosnian slave who boasted the bloody title of Dejezzar, which means "the butcher," "the beheader," "the cutthroat" or something equally terrible. But this barbarian did not stand alone at the Acre gate. The British lion was crouching there in the path of Napoleon. By a dramatic combination of circumstances which the playwright and the novelist might hesitate to employ and which makes history seem theatrical, Napoleon found stand- ing on either side of Dejezzar two men who had crossed his path in other years and other lands. One of them was a daring young English sailor of fortune who, after serving with Swedish and Turkish fleets, had joined the British navy and was at Toulon when it fell under the fire of Napoleon's batteries. It was he who stayed behind to blow up the mag- azines and cheat the victors of their spoils. In a later daredevil adventure he was captured as a sus- INTO THE HOLY LAND 99 pected spy and confined in the temple at Paris for two years. After appealing in vain to the members of the government to be exchanged as a prisoner of war, he addressed a plea for assistance to Napoleon on his return from Italy, but re- ceived no reply. The prisoner in the temple was Sidney Smith. The other ally of Dejezzar was a Frenchman and a gradu- ate of the Ecole Militaire in Paris. He and Napoleon were at the Ecole together, where they quarrelled and kicked each other's shins black and blue under the desks in the classroom. This was Phelippeaux. Phelippeaux was an aristocrat and an enemy of the Repub- lic. Being in Paris and ready for plots he aided Smith to escape from the temple just one week to a day before Napo- leon's departure for Toulon and the east. They fled to Eng- land, and when Smith was sent to Egypt to watch and thwart Napoleon, Phelippeaux eagerly joined him in the expedition against his old schoolroom foe. While the army was slowly labouring across the desert, Smith, racing on ahead with his little fleet, pounced upon the French flotilla, having on board the siege train and ammuni- tion. Napoleon, thus left without the necessary means of besieging the town, saw his own guns mounted on the walls by Phelippeaux and turned against him. Forty times in two months he hurled his little force in vain against the gate of Acre under the fire from the town, and often under another stream of fire from the British ships. In the midst of the siege an army of Turks from Damascus, boasting themselves innumerable as the sands of the sea or as the stars of heaven, bore down upon the French rear. To meet the Turks and British in front and beat off the Turks that were swarming behind him, Napoleon had now an army of only 9000 men. If caught between the two forces, his little band would certainly be smashed to pieces. To avert that catastrophe, he determined to divide his forces, hasten into the mountains of Galilee and there challenge the horde from Damascus on its march to the relief of Acre. CHAPTER XIII HIS FIRST RETREAT 1799 AGE 29-30 WHEN Napoleon marched into the mountains of Gal- ilee, in the month of April, 1799, to stem the tide of Turks pouring down upon him from Damascus, he matched 4000 men against 30,000. For he dared take no larger number from the siege of Acre, where Turkish troops and British ships were holding the town against him. The first shock of battle reverberated about the traditional Mount of the Beatitudes, the Horns of Hattin, where General Junot, with only 300 men in a square withstood an advancing column of 4000 Turkish horsemen. Next Kleber's infantry met and repelled a large body of cavalry at Cana, where a Greek priest shows the stone jars in which the water was turned into wine for the wedding feast. The Turks were bursting into the valley of the Jordan when Napoleon himself struck out along the bridle path that leads from Acre up into Nazareth, where, seeing the smoke of battle curling about the heights of the town, he spurred his horse to the scene of combat. Descending between Mt. Tabor and the Mountain of the Precipitation, down the cliff of which the unbelieving Nazarenes threatened to cast the prophet who was not without honour save among his own people, he looked out upon the historic Plain of Esdraelon or Jezreel. There, the young champion of the west, fresh from his vic- tory in the cockpit of Europe entered the lists in this cock- pit of Asia. Lifting his glass, his eye swept the field of strife. In the west rose Mt. Carmel by the sea, and to the south the hills of Samaria. Over to the east, where the moun- tains of Gilead come down to the River Jordan, the Mos- 100 HIS FIRST RETREAT 101 lem enemy was encamped in a black mass of camel's hair tents. At the foot of Tabor, General Kleber, with no hope or thought that the General-in-chief was coming to his rescue, was stubbornly holding back a big horde of mounted men as they advanced from their camp and furiously strove to crush his little force against the base of the mountain. The Turkish dead lay in windrows all about him. For hours Kleber had been battling with despair. He wished only to break through the Turkish lines or at least see his brave but exhausted band die like soldiers rather than be butchered like sheep. Soon he must tire his last cartridge. With an instant grasp of the desperate situation, Napoleon sent his small body of cavalry across the plain through fields of wheat six feet high, which screened them from the Turks. The cavalrymen gave the enemy a wide berth until they were in his rear, when they closed in to cut him off from his camp and his line of retreat over the Jordan. As the Turks in their surprise and bewilderment discovered these French horse- men behind them they turned from Kleber. That was the moment for Napoleon to deliver his second stroke. Leading in person a force of infantry within a gun- shot of the Turkish line, their fire suddenly burst upon the foe from the field of grain. At the sight of Napoleon emerg- ing from the wheat, Kleber 's hard-pressed and despairing band made the Galilean hills ring with cheers. Finding the French springing upon them from every di- rection as if they were a multitude, and finding themselves in the centre of a triangle, the 30,000 Turks broke in mad disorder. They fled to the Jordan, scampered off toward the Sea of Galilee or hid in the hills, leaving behind them 400 camels, scores of horses, many guns, abundant ammunition and food enough to last the French a year. Mt. Tabor is the most historic among all Napoleon's ex- traordinary battlefields. That plain of Esdraelon has been the prize ring of the nations of the east through 5000 years that are told, and we know not how much longer through ages untold. 102 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON The smoke of the locomotive now rises close beneath the hills of Nazareth as a train from Damascus enters the plain on its way to Haifa. And the trains of antiquity, the camel trains, ignoring the new highway of iron, course tediously along the old caravan route, by which the children of the east poured down upon the children of Israel. A clump of trees, in the shadow of Mt. Gilboa, marks the still flowing fountain, where, rallying to Gideon's trumpet call, the invincible 300 qualified as war dogs by lapping up the water, dog fashion with their tongues, and overwhelmed the Midianites and Amalekites although they came as grass- hoppers for multitude. Farther on are the huts of Zerin, the once royal city of Jezreel, where from the window of her ivory palace, Queen Jezebel, that byword among women, looked out with hard, covetous eyes upon Naboth's vineyard over where Mt. Gilboa still shows the wine presses cut in its rocky side. Again she looked with terror to see the venge- ful Jehu in his chariot furiously rushing down from the mountains of Gilead to deliver her to the devouring dogs. There in the plain lies the first battlefield of David. Close by, the sun is baking the wretched hovels where the witch of Endor told Saul's tragic fortune, while toward the south rise the hills where Jonathan was laid low by the Philis- tines, and Saul fell on his sword, moving David to exclaim, ' ' How are the mighty fallen ! ' ' From the summit of Mt. Tabor, above the spot where Kle- ber was beset with his back to the mountain wall, Deborah saw the stars in their courses fighting against Sisera and his 900 iron chariots, and sang her song of cruel victory. It was there on that plain, in that coliseum of gladiatorial combats, that stadium where through uncounted generations humanity has been the football, that the last pitched battle of the Cru- sades was fought. There, too, the last battle of all, the finish fight between the hosts of good and evil, is to be fought, for part of the plain is "the place which is called in the Jewish tongue Armageddon," that is the "Valley of the Megiddo." The village of Nain, a welcome oasis for the soul in the midst of all that waste of war, squats near the foot of Mt. HIS FIRST RETREAT 103 Tabor. At the sight of that poor little hamlet, the mind turns gladly from scenes that speak of 200 generations of slaughter, from hate to love, from the taking of life to the giving of life ; for there in the gates of Nain, Jesus restored the widow's son and dried the widow's tears. As one enters the vale of Nazareth from the war trodden plain, the message of peace which the little town sends out into a warring world holds a new and clearer meaning. Nazareth itself lies in a pretty mountain ravine, with schools and orphanages and hospitals, the gifts of the Christian world to the boyhood village of Jesus, looking fondly down upon it from the surrounding heights. At the Virgin's Fountain, the only water supply in the town now as in the olden time, the beauty of the girls and young mothers, who come to fill their water jugs even as Mary must have come, is really striking. To that fountain Napoleon went after the battle of Mt. Tabor, and there he received the homage of the people. In the monastery of the Annunciation he slept, where, tra- ditionally, stood the home of the Holy Family — where "the Word was made flesh." There the visitor is conducted in a cavernous region to the marble slab, worn smooth by pious lips, where the angel paused before Mary, and on to the "kitchen of the Virgin." The fathers of the monastery have treasured through the century the bed and room where the young warrior rested, amid the scenes hallowed by the youth of the Prince of Peace, whose sword was of the spirit and whose kingdom was not of this world. When Napoleon returned to the gate of Acre he brought to his besieging forces the news of victory to cheer them in their forlorn hope. But the sun of a Syrian summer was beating upon them in the unshaded plain with a fire more destructive than that which belched from the walls and the ships. Phelippeaux succumbed to its burning rays, strug- gling to the last to settle the old score with his schoolmate at the Ecole of Paris. The unburied dead lay in a heap against the stubborn wall, threatening the health of the forces on both sides. 104 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON One day in early May when Napoleon saw a fleet of thirty sail bearing down upon Acre with thousands of Turkish soldiers coming to the relief of the town, the siege took on a spirit of desperation. In a last effort to capture the place before the reinforcements arrived, the French flung them- selves madly at the walls, and with scaling ladders carried the tricolour flag to one of the towers. At an exposed and vital position three officers were killed in quick succession. Another must go into the deadly breech. But Napoleon had only two aides left, Lavelette and Eugene Beauharnais. Eugene was filled with reckless daring, but his stepfather had seen him fall once when stunned by a shell. Turning to Lavelette, he said: "I don't want to send this boy and have him killed so young. His mother has entrusted him to me. You know what life is. Go!" The sun was setting on the red day, when the Turkish re- inforcements were seen rowing ashore in their small boats. The siege had come to its last stage and several hundred French broke into the town where they fought their way to the garden of Dejezzar. There they looked upon the walls of "the Butcher's" harem, the prison house of his eighteen white wives; but in a few minutes the brave men in the gar- den were headless corpses. This wild charge was led by General Lannes, who was brought to the earth by a shot through his neck. A company of his soldiers bore him back to safety, but with a wound that caused him to carry his head to one side the rest of his days. For twenty-flve hours the fighting lasted. In the last at- tack, when the spearheads on the standards of France and Turkey were locked, Napoleon stood with Arrighi by his side until a shell swept down his fellow Corsican. With anxious eyes he was watching Kleber's great shock of bushy hair in the thick of the hand-to-hand combat, and listening to his tremendous voice as it rose above the barbarous yells of a thousand newly landed janissaries. Soon Napoleon saw Kleber stop. The French column ceased to move forward. It paused a moment, and then re- coiled in a wild rout before the victorious Turks. HIS FIRST RETREAT 105 The new Alexander had lost the empire of the east. A little town, "that miserable mudhole," as he called it, had barred Napoleon's path to the conquest of the Orient. All his life he murmured, "I missed my fortune at St. Jean d'Acre" — "the grain of sand that undid me." Folding his tent like the Arab he silently stole away in the night. But a messenger from the exultant Sidney Smith overtook him with this taunting letter: "Could you have thought that the poor prisoner in the temple, an unfortu- nate for whom you refused even for a moment to give your- self any concern, would compel you in the midst of the sand of Syria to raise the siege of a miserable, almost defenceless, town?" At the same time the British sailor was boasting in his report to London that "the plain of Nazareth is the boundary of Bonaparte's extraordinary career.''' Entering the ironclad Gate of Nazareth through the double walls of the town of Acre, one encounters, to-day, nothing more warlike than a drove of camels with a few begging lepers and cripples in the vestibule of the town. The way to the ramparts is through a maze of stone and through narrow, twisted, vaulted, but surprisingly clean, old streets, bazar lined. Looking seaward from the ramparts not a ship is to be seen in port. For when the Moslems in their fanatical frenzy tore down the great city of the Crusaders they filled the an- cient harbour with the ruins, and now Haifa has all the com- merce of the region. - Acre is only a petrified town, with a population perhaps of 12,000, all fast asleep, but still talking a good deal in their sleep. Down at a corner of the wall rises the light- house on the foundations of the Philistine temple of Beelze- bub. On the opposite wall the Tour Maudite was built with Judas' thirty pieces of silver! But Dejezzar's tower is the loftiest of all in Acre. It is the minaret of the mosque which that pious old butcher reared to Allah on lines of his own designing, and it must in fairness be admitted that he was as clever an architect as ever cut a throat. There is to be seen from the roof of the monastery of the 106 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON Franciscan fathers, a pretty panorama — including the Mount of Eichard Coeur de Lion and Napoleon's headquarters out in Dejezzar's country villa. In a monastery of the Greek faith is a rare monument of the Napoleonic siege. It is a memorial tablet to that Major Oldfield of the British marines, whose daring charges in the sorties against the French moved Napoleon to admiration and at last to bury him with full mili- tary honours, as the inscription duly records. There are few Christians in Acre and it is said that even these do not venture to show themselves in the streets at the season of Kamadan. Tourists are a rarity, there being no hotel and nothing but a vast, cheerless eastern caravansary, a khan. But the Sultan has a large and crowded boarding house at Acre for the special accommodation of those who disturb the repose of the Sublime Porte. This is a stockade rather than a prison, and behind it may be seen an array of picturescpie conspirators as terrible looking as any operatic stage ever presents. Far up the side of Mt. Carmel, at the other side of the bay of Acre, is the big Carmelite monastery which served Na- poleon as a military hospital. When he retreated, he left under guard at the monastery all who were too sick to accom- pany his army on its long, hard march. According to a local legend, these numbered 2000 and all were massacred by Dejezzar. But by the records of history only a few soldiers really were left there. The Carmelites to-day are a little Christian garrison in the land of Islam. In the course of the centuries, they have seen their home destroyed seven or eight times by the foes of the cross. The silent, cloistered precincts, tenanted now by only twenty-one monks, seem like the deserted halls of a big sum- mer hotel out of season. The monastery was long closed to the monks after Napoleon's retreat. When more than thirty years after the slaughter of the helpless, they were permitted to return, they gathered and deposited in a cave, the bones of the dead. Afterward the remains of the poor boys of France found their last resting place in the pretty garden before the HIS FIRST RETREAT 107 monastery, and the sailors of a passing French warship erected a memorial stone with an iron cross among the palms in "the vineyard of God." Napoleon's 400-mile retreat from Acre down the Syrian coast, across the plains of Palestine and the desert of El Tih, in a tropic summer, was an anticipation in miniature of the retreat from Moscow. It was the last time he was destined to turn his back to an enemy until his flight over another desert, a desert of snow in a Russian winter ! In that first retreat he lost the empire of the east, in the second he was to lose the empire of the west. On his return march to Egypt he ordered all the horses to be given over to the sick and wounded. A stricken grenadier hesitated lest he might soil a handsome saddle, but the Gen- eral-in-chief said, "Mount! There is nothing too good for a brave soldier." An ordnance man inquiring which horse the commander wished to reserve for himself, Napoleon, re- plied with a blow from his whip, "Every one afoot; myself first of all." The fields were fired to cut off pursuers, but a few Syrians and the Arabs of Samaria lurking behind the stones and bushes on the hillsides peppered the fleeing French. Stung by that bushwhacking to an exasperated and mutinous tem- per, some soldiers forgot the obligations of humanity toward their sick and helpless comrades, and angry murmurs arose against them for delaying the retreat. Arrived at Jaffa, many of the garrison that Napoleon had left there in his advance on Acre were found in the hospital, some with "the plague." Those who were not plague- stricken were panic-stricken in the presence of the hideous malady. To arouse them from their despair, Napoleon went among them and there is a disputed story of his touching a plague patient to inspire the courage of the terrified inmates of the hospital. "In a few hours the Turks will be here," he repeated to the unfortunates as he moved along. "Let all those who have the strength rise and come with us. They shall be carried on litters and horses." All but about fifty, perhaps all but 108 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON twenty-five, struggled up and swelled the numbers of the helpless that were already burdening the retreating column. Napoleon was charged for a long time with having adopted the principle of euthanasia toward those who were too feeble to rise from their beds and accompany him, and of having directed the apothecary to administer to them a fatal dose of laudanum. Bourrienne says he did, but Marmont, Andre- ossi, and other witnesses testify that he did not. Sidney Smith himself tells of finding the French sick still alive three days after the army left Jaffa. The weight of judgment now is that Napoleon restrained the instinctive promptings of nature, and, observing the scruples of our civilisation, did nothing to hasten the end of that little band of soldiers, but left them to the tortures of their disease and the tortures of their fears in the pest hospital at Jaffa. For nine hot summer days the army carried its sick and wounded over the desert into Egypt. The mirage, that cruel trick of nature, lured the soldiers to cooling waters that vanished at their approach. Maddened by heat and thirst, some threw down the litters of the sick, and killed themselves before the eyes of Napoleon. Yet, with flags flying and bands playing, the sadly reduced Army of Syria, as if in triumph, entered the Bab el Nasir, "the gate of victory," at Cairo. "I have razed the palace of Dejezzar and the ramparts of Acre," Napoleon proclaimed to the Egyptians; "not a stone remains upon another." Bourrienne looked up in amazement as his chief dictated that bulletin, but only to be chided for his ingenuousness: "My dear fellow, you are a simpleton. You do not understand this business." In a month the pursuing Turks were upon him to challenge even his refuge in Egypt from the disaster in Syria. A British fleet protected the landing of a large Turkish army on the sandy promontory of Aboukir where the French, by a rapid movement, caught them and penned them up. Of the 15,000 Turks who entered the battle there, 9000 are said to have found their graves in the sands or in the waters. Abou- HIS FIRST RETREAT 109 kir had avenged Acre, and the victory served to eclipse the retreat from Syria. While making some arrangements with Sidney Smith un- der a flag of truce after the battle, Napoleon sent him a chest of coffee and a case of brandy. In return for these gifts, Smith sent him a batch of European newspapers, only six weeks old. "Heavens," Napoleon exclaimed, as he read one of the papers, "the fools have lost Italy. All the fruits of our victories are gone. I must leave Egypt." The truth is he had wished to leave ever since he came. From the day Nelson sank the French fleet he had been no more than a prisoner in a desert. The bad news from home only determined him to hasten his long meditated attempt to make a wild dash to France and to his destiny. Fooling Smith and his scouts, he stole aboard a vessel in the night as she lay off a lonely desert shore. With 500 men and a few pieces of artillery on four frigates, and with less than $3500 in his chest, he set sail. The Army of Egypt was left under the command of Kleber and abandoned to its in- evitable doom. Since Napoleon could not be an Alexander in the east he might yet be a Charlemagne in the west — if fortune did not be- tray him as he dodged through a British blockade of the Mediterranean so close that a letter seldom passed. For six weeks he was the sport of the winds and was fairly blown into the harbour of Ajaccio. But Ajaccio was no longer the port of his dreams and his ambitions. At the first favouring breeze he sailed away, never again to smell the scented fields of his youth or look on his native mountains. CHAPTER XIV RULER OF FRANCE 1799-1800 AGE 30 THE people of the pretty little port of Frejus on the Mediterranean Riviera, sixty miles east of Toulon, awoke of an October morning in the year 1799 to the astonishing news that Napoleon was entering their harbour. All France supposed him to be penned up in Egypt. But he had made a safe run of nearly fifty days through the British blockade. "Had he fallen from heaven," Savary tells us, "his appearance would not have created more surprise and enthusiasm." Napoleon himself did not dream of the frenzied welcome that awaited him. On the contrary, he was fearful of a long detention in quarantine. When the townspeople, frantic with joy, swarmed out in boats and surrounded his ship, his com- panions shouted a warning to keep at a safe distance as the vessel had come from the plague-infected Orient. But the people roared, "We prefer the plague to the Austrians." For while Napoleon had been absent, the conquering soldiers of Austria had obliterated his victories in Italy, and the in- habitants of southern France were in terror of an invasion by the white coats. As with the population of Frejus, so it was with the French people as a whole. They preferred any evils Napoleon might bring to the evils already upon them. His journey from Frejus was a triumphant progress. Everywhere along his drive of 600 miles Napoleon was hailed as the rescuer of the Republic. Every town through which he passed gave him an enthusi- 110 RULER OF FRANCE 111 astic reception, but none, we may be sure, touched the same emotions as Valence when she welcomed back the melancholy, almost suicidal sub lieutenant, who only a few years before had haunted her lanes and garrets. At the gate of the town he was greeted by Mile. Bou, and her former lodger gave her an Indian shawl and a silver compass. For this favourite of fortune ever retained at least one simple quality, a recol- lection of all who touched his life in its plainer days and a desire to draw them after him as he sped up the heights of fame. Napoleon had hastened from Egypt with an ambition to be the saviour of the country from military disasters in Italy. He really had no idea that the time had already come for him to take his place in France, no idea that already "the pear was ripe," as he had been in the habit of saying while musing on the future. But he found he had now only to shake the tree to bring down the fruit. France was not fearing foreign armies so much as the plotting factions at home, who forever kept the country be- tween the two horns of the dilemma, the return of the Bour- bons or the return of the Terror. The day Napoleon arrived in Paris nearly every plotter began an attempt to draw him into his own particular plot. He did not have to conspire. He had only to choose among the conspiracies already hatched before he landed on the shore of France. In the end he selected the Sieves brand of revolution. This former cleric was a member of the Directory of five members, which held the executive power, while the council of ancients and the council of the five hundred formed the upper and lower houses of the legislative body. The Sieyes plot called for the assembling of those two houses in an ex- traordinary session at an early hour in the morning, before the city should be astir. The ancients, whose leaders were favourable to a change, were to declare that Paris was in dan- ger of a Terrorist uprising, appoint Napoleon to the com- mand of the military forces for the protection of the capital and adjourn the legislative sessions to the quiet and security of St. Cloud. 112 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON In the midst of the panic thus fomented Sieyes and a fel- low-conspirator in the Directory were to resign and the re- maining directors were to be frightened into retiring, while the legislature at St. Cloud was to be hastened into establish- ing a new government with a new constitution. Sieyes pro- posed to handle the politicians and leave to Napoleon the control of the army officers, who naturally rallied around him in unquestioning loyalty when they saw him preparing to act. Like everything with which Napoleon had to do, the revo- lution moved according to a nicely arranged schedule. All his trusted companions in arms gathered at his house in the Rue de la Victoire at six o'clock on a November morning, when the general in command of the city, a most vital per- sonage, burst in with a demand to be informed what it was all about. This was Lefebre, the husband of the former laundress, the Mme. Sans Gene of the stage and the novel. That ex-sergeant was too hot-headed a republican to have been approached in cold blood and told the secret in advance. "Lefebre," cried Napoleon, "you, one of the pillars of the Republic, will you leave it to perish at the hands of the law- yers? Here is the sword I wore at the Pyramids; I give it to you as a pledge of my confidence." 1 ' Let us throw the lawyers into the river, ' ' roared the fierce republican as he fondled his new toy. The subtle Sieyes now sent word that he had played his part with the ancients, whereupon Napoleon galloped to the Tuileries and took command. Once more Paris stood in the presence of the "man on horseback." In accordance with the plans, the legislative bodies met the next morning out at St. Cloud in the suburban palace of the old kings, where Napoleon anxiously waited in a near-by apartment for the schedule of the revolution to be observed. With the slow hours of delay, he grew increasingly impatient and angry. It was his first experience with a legislative body that pretended to any independence of his own will. Fairly beside himself at last, he rushed into the council of the five hundred. This body was not in the plot and the RULER OF FRANCE 113 sight of the soldiers accompanying the young general in- furiated the red-gowned council. Nor would it be stilled by its president, Lucien Bonaparte, who, as a compliment to his brother, had been elected to the chair. Councillors rushed upon Napoleon and grabbing the in- vader of their sanctuary by the collar of his grey coat and denouncing him as a traitor and dictator, they shook him as a dog shakes a rat. Although history doubts if any weapon was drawn on him, Napoleon cried in the midst of the noisy melee: "They mean to assassinate me." Thereupon the god of war fell like a fainting woman into the arms of his grenadiers. "Outlaw him! Outlaw him!" The council hall resounded with that sinister cry, which had sent many a man to the guillotine, ' ' Hors la loi ! Hors la loi ! " Napoleon gathered his wits as he determined no longer to waste his time in words but to return to his native element. The grenadiers under Murat and Leclerc were or- dered to clear the hall of the five hundred. Forward ! March ! The drums rolled as the soldiers entered. And the councillors, crying "Vive la Republique, " jumped out the windows. The Republic was no more ; it had jumped out the window. With a mere fragment of the broken up five hundred, only thirty members, Lucien opened a new session at nine o 'clock in the evening. Measures were quickly concerted with the complaisant ancients, whereby the old government was formally done to death and a provisional Consulate of the three conspirators, Sieyes, Ducos and Bonaparte, was estab- lished. The scene of that memorable but bloodless revolution re- mains one of the favoured sights of the environs of Paris. The terrace of St. Cloud looks down upon the Seine, shining like silver in the sun. Over back of a hill which the horizon touches, lies Versailles, where the Great Revolution was born in the tennis court. There was its cradle; St. Cloud is its grave. And off against the heights of Montmartre glistens the dome of the Invalides ! A big grey fortress still crowns 114 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON the towering Mt. Valerien. That was the last stronghold of France in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71. The Ger- mans were at St. Cloud, too, and the French guns on Mt. Valerien shot the chateau to pieces. After the war, its ruined walls were torn down, not one stone being left upon another, and now the grass is green and the flowers bloom where the palace of the Bourbons and the Bonapartes stood. As Napoleon seized the helm of the ship of state, he an- nounced to France and the world, "I am the Revolution!" In truth, he was its son and heir, the sole legatee ! Out of all that forest of pikes came his sword alone ; out of that babel of sound and fury one clear, commanding voice ; out of that multitude of thoughts and purposes and plans one powerful will ; out of that era of dreams there issued this reality^ In the eyes of France, the Revolution had not been over- thrown ; it was embodied in Napoleon. With a sense of peace and justice, the exhausted nation reposed in his strong arms. Mathieu Dumas tells us that he "did not injure liberty, as it did not exist. He strangled the monster of anarchy and saved France." Chaos vanished before his frown. The hateful law of hos- tages was repealed and he went in person to throw open the prison doors of the temple. Imprisoned or banished priests, who had taken the republican oath, received the freedom of the country. The national securities rose from twelve to twenty francs in five days. The masses and the classes alike welcomed the advance agent of prosperity. The banks trustingly opened their strong boxes to him, and an individual citizen came forward with a loan of $100,000 to a government that had lacked the money to pay the expenses of a courier to its army in Italy. In a month there was a new constitution, which provided that Napoleon should be First Consul for ten years, with full executive power and a salary of $100,000 a year. The Second and Third Consuls were left almost as powerless as the Vice- president of the United States, and were retained only to dis- guise the one-man despotism. The people continued in pos- session of manhood suffrage, but were removed as far as pos- RULER OF FRANCE 115 sible from the control of the government. The 5 000 000 men of voting age in the country were to choose 500,000 per- sons, who m turn, were to choose 50,000 and finally they were to choose 5000. From these 5000 notables, all the offices were to be filled. There were to be a council, a senate, a tribunate, and a legislature. The Consuls were to appoint the council and a majority of senators, after which these latter were them- selves to complete the composition of the senate, which finally, was to choose from the notables the members of the tribunate and the legislature. No one was to be directlv elected by the people. The council, presided over by the First Consul, was to propose all laws to the tribunate, where they were to be de- bated and then referred to the legislature— " a deaf and dumb assembly"— which was to adopt or reject the proposals m silence, after which the laws were to go before the senate also a mute body, which had only the power to veto legisla- tion. & In two months this elaborate scheme of government was in lull operation, and in less than three weeks after the legisla- tive bodies had assembled, the judiciary and the entire^ov- ernment of France down to the smallest municipality were completely reorganised; a new system of taxation was de- vised and the great Bank of France established. At the same time Napoleon brought to an end eight years of civil war in Vendee and elsewhere in Brittany and Normandy, where a royalist and Catholic population had made a stubborn re- sistance to the Revolution and the Republic. Peace and pros- perity were the twin blessings received by France in a crowded three months. Then an election was held and the people ratified the new constitution. Napoleon and Josephine installed themselves in the palace ot the Luxembourg immediately after the coup d'etat at St Uoud. The directors had been living in that palace and now the Consuls supplanted them. How few were the years since the Luxembourg had been the prison of Josephine's first hus- band, when it was crowded with the victims of the Terror and 116 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON she herself was a prisoner in the Carmelite convent a little way down the street ! But the Tuileries, not the Luxembourg;, was the palace of the kings. It was not from idle vanity that Napoleon longed to move over the Seine and live in that home of royalty. For the same purpose that the chief of a provisional govern- ment in the United States might wish to occupy the White House, the First Consul desired to possess himself of the tra- ditional seat of power and authority in France. Such a change in quarters, however, might awaken the mob that he himself had watched seven years before while it drove Louis XVI from the throne of his fathers. As he pon- dered the question, the news came of the death of Washing- ton. He seized upon the event to distract the attention of the republicans from his despotic designs. Proclaiming a period of mourning and holding a memorial festival, he evoked the shade of the immortal friend of liberty and enemy of tyrants as a screen for his entry into the abiding place of the Bour- bon monarchs. Thither he drove behind six white horses, and wearing a magnificent sabre, gifts of the Emperor of Ger- many. As he passed within the gate he could have read on one of the stone posts this boast of the Republic: The 10th of August, 1792, ROYALTY IN FRANCE IS ABOLISHED AND SHALL NEVER BE RE-ESTABLISHED. He permitted the sign to remain on the gate post, but as he walked over the great palace, he found some liberty caps painted in red on the walls. "Get rid of those things," he commanded; "I do not like to see such rubbish." Turning to his secretary, he said :" To be at the Tuileries, Bourrienne, is not all. We must stay here. Who, in heaven's name, has not already inhabited this place? Ruffians, con- RULER OF FRANCE 117 ventionalists ! But, stop, there is your uncle's shop. Was it not from those windows I saw the Tuileries besieged and the good Louis XVI carried off? Be assured, they will not come here again!" J CHAPTER XV CROSSING THE ALPS 1800 AGE 30 THERE is a little cottage at Bourg St. Pierre, the tiny- Swiss hamlet that lies on a shelf more than half-way up the snowy side of the Great St. Bernard. Its un- painted walls have been stained by wind and rain a deep, rich brown like all the rest of the fifty or sixty habitations in that rude and lonely Alpine village. Yet it has its distinguishing mark, and every one in the place calls it "The House with Three Windows." But the villagers have found that for some reason or other the stranger is more impressed if they point it out as "The House of the Guide of Napoleon." St. Pierre also boasts an inn with a significant name, the Hotel au Dejeuner de Napoleon. There the curious traveller may sit in the veritable chair and at the veritable table of the historic breakfast and listen to the story of it from the lips of the granddaughter of the innkeeper who served it, un- til he is so distracted by the feast of memory she spreads be- fore him he can hardly do single-minded justice to her wor- thy omelet. The old pictures of the grandparents and their immortal guest hanging on the panelled walls and the china and pewter accessories of that dejeuner 113 years ago are a banquet in themselves. As the granddaughter of the old innkeeper presides now over the Hotel au Dejeuner de Napoleon, so a grandson of the guide dwells in the Maison du Guide de Napoleon. To- gether they industriously polish and keep shining the memory of the great little man, all buttoned up to the chin 118 CROSSING THE ALPS 119 in a big grey overcoat, who rode out of St. Pierre on a mule one May morning in the year 1800, a Swiss peasant walking beside him. The rider was the First Consul of France, who in six months had restored peace at home, but had failed to obtain peace abroad. As it is said of a man who takes a disputed land title that "he has bought a lawsuit," so Napoleon in as- suming charge of the French government took upon him- self an irrepressible conflict with the other nations of Europe. The Revolution had hoisted its tricoloured flag on the castles of conquered lands, and it was not for him to haul it down, to surrender what the French had purchased with their blood. Thus the Napoleonic wars, in their early stages at least, were the inevitable sequence of the wars of the Revolution. Austria had yielded to Napoleon three years before, but not until he had whipped five of her armies. "While he was before the walls of the far-away town of Acre, the French ambassadors to the congress of peace at Rastadt were mur- dered by Austrians, and Austria rushing into a new war, took from France all the ground he had won for her in Italy. Aided by a subsidy from Great Britain, the Austrians were preparing now to invade France herself and dictate terms of peace to the French people from their own capital. An Aus- trian army of 120,000 men had marched across Germany and around the upper end of the long Alpine wall which defends the approaches to France; but only to be hurled back from the Rhine to the Danube by a great French army under Gen- eral Moreau. Another Austrian army of nearly 120,000 men in Italy, however, had caught a little French force under General Massena and shut it up within the walls of Genoa. Its sur- render was a question only of days. Then the Austrians would be free to march around the lower end of the Alpine wall, where its base is washed by the waters of the Mediter- ranean, and enter southern France. They were confident of victory and all Europe seemed to share their confidence. Napoleon could not send a great army against the enemy in Italy as he had in Germany, because the Austrian soldiers and 120 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON the British gunboats together could easily defend the narrow path along the mountainous shore. Apparently there was nothing for him to do but wait and accept battle on French soil. He confirmed that general view of the situation by noisily proclaiming the formation of the Army of Reserve at Dijon, ostensibly for the purpose of meeting the invaders in the Valley of the Ehone. But the spies of the enemy and the representatives of the foreign press, who rushed to Dijon, found only the skeleton of a military body there. This exposure of his feeble re- sources brought upon Napoleon the derisive laughter of the nations. His boasted Army of the Reserve was the butt of the caricaturists and the jest of London and Vienna. The other governments, however, did not know that his ex- traordinary success in hastily patching up a peace with the revolted provinces of western France and his general paci- fication of the country had, for the first time since the Revo- ultion began, released for the foreign service all the military strength of the Republic. He needed no army to defend his government at home. Even in the garrisons of Paris he had only 2300 men, a much smaller force than was employed to preserve the peace in London herself. Nor did his enemies know that while his phantom army at Dijon was contributing to the gaiety of nations, a regiment was quietly forming here, a brigade there in various parts of France and stealthily marching by itself toward Switzer- land. Its own officers had no idea of its real destination. Even the minister of war was not in the secret. As those mysterious and mystified commands, coming by many roads, met on the banks of Lake Geneva at Lausanne they were amazed to find themselves an army — the real Army of the Reserve — under the command of Napoleon himself, who marched them squarely against the Alps at Martigny. He was going to steal up the Alpine wall and jump down on the unsuspecting Austrians! Magnificent highways run over the Alps to-day and luxuri- ous express trains run under them — it is hardly more than an hour from Martigny itself to Italy by the great Simplon CROSSING THE ALPS 121 tunnel. But there was not a wagon track for Napoleon. Among the mere foot trails over the steep passes, he chose the steepest of all, the Great St. Bernard, because it was the shortest and would take him closest to the rear of the Aus- trians. As another youth with the same sad brow and flashing blue eye, who bore mid snow and ice a banner with a strange de- vice, was warned by the prudent against the roaring torrent and the awful avalanche of the St. Bernard, the army engi- neers, returning from their inspection, shook their cautious heads at the young First Consul and echoed, "Try not the pass ! ' ' ' ' Difficult, granted, ' ' he replied to the engineers ; ' ' but is it possible?" They admitted the possibility. "Then let us start!" He did not cry " Excelsior ! " But no doubt he had his secret watchword — "Empire!" If Charlemagne had led an army over the St. Bernard 1000 years before, and Hannibal had crossed the Alps 2000 years before with troops reared beneath a tropic sun and encum- bered with a train of elephants, why should Napoleon be daunted? "An army can pass at all times," he said, "wher- ever two men can set their feet." For nearly a week he sent his army out of Martigny, a di- vision a day, to scale the 6600-foot wall that towers above the town and from its top to let themselves down 6000 feet into the valley of Aosta on the other side. For two months he had been preparing for the march. All the necessary sup- plies had been collected by him as secretly as he had assembled the army itself. His troops marching in a few hours from the warm sunshine of the lowlands into the ice and snow of the sunless gorges might succumb to the change and the cold; he had laid in an immense stock of clothing and shoes and he saw to it that every man was properly clad and shod. As the day grew warmer and the snow began to melt, the perils from avalanches would increase; he ordered each division to be at the foot of the mountain and ready to start before two o'clock in the morning, thus making the most dan- gerous part of the passage in the night. To fortify the weaker 122 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON for the crossing and to resuscitate them at the end of their arduous tramp, he set up hospitals on either side of the moun- tains. The line of march, starting in an almost barren region, soon left all vegetation behind; he arranged for the army to carry every morsel of food and forage for men and beasts, sixty or seventy pounds being loaded on the back of each man. The road from Martigny to the valley of Aosta in Italy is more than forty miles long. But from Bourg St. Pierre there was no road at all in Napoleon's day, only a path up to the summit of the St. Bernard, eight miles, and then for another seven or eight miles down to St. Rhemy on the Italian side. Nothing could go over that part of the pass on wheels. But the artillerymen found a gang of expert workmen at St. Pierre ready to take their gun carriages and ammunition wagons to pieces and pack the parts, properly numbered, on the backs of mules. Sledges had been provided for the cannon, but they proved to be useless. Thereupon fir trees were cut down and their trunks split in two and hollowed out. The gun was laid in one-half of the hollowed log, while the other half was fastened over it as a covering. It was found that even this could not be hauled up the pass by the mules. The peasant mountaineers were called in and Napoleon offered to pay them 1200 francs ($240) for each cannon they transported. But it took 100 men two days to drag a gun over the path. After a few gangs had attempted it, the peasants gave up the task. Napoleon finally appealed to his soldiers and they threw themselves at the Alps as if they were an enemy in arms, while bands and drummers and buglers, posted at the hard- est points, played the stirring tunes of the Revolution. Pa- triotism did what gold could not do. As each division of troops mounted to the top of the pass and arrived at the Hospice of St. Bernard it was greeted by the monks, who having laid in abundant supplies at Napo- leon's request and expense, gave the soldiers a delightful sur- prise, every man receiving bread and cheese and wine. Down CROSSING THE ALPS 123 at St. Rhemy, where the path ended on the Italian side and the road began, not only was a hospital set up but all man- ner of craftsmen were assembled. If a strap on a mule was broken, saddlers were there ready to repair it, while other workmen put together the gun carriages and ammunition wagons and remounted the cannon as fast as they arrived. Napoleon stayed at the lowland home of the monks of St. Bernard, the monastery which still stands by the old church in Martigny, until he had seen to the last detail and de- spatched the last division. His battle against the Alps was won, and as he rode out of Bourg St. Pierre, after the now- celebrated dejeuner, he seemed to have no more serious in- terests than the curiosity of an idle traveller. As his mule plodded up the heights by the tumbling, rush- ing Valsorey, he listened to the roaring and crashing noises that broke the silence of the lonely pass and the musical call of the herdsmen from peak to peak. Always charmed by the sound of a bell he hearkened to the loud tinkling of the big Alpine cowbells as they rang out above the singing torrent. This pretty picture has been transferred by Emerson from the pages of history to the pages of poetry and philosophy in his "Each and All:" The heifer that lows in. the upland farm, Far heard, lows not thine ear to charm; The sexton, tolling his bell at noon, Dreams^ not that great Napoleon Stops his horge, and lists with delight Whilst his files sweep round yon Alpine height; Nor knowest thou what argument Thy life to thy neighbour's creed has lent. If the sexton did not deem that the great Napoleon paused entranced by the music of his noontime bell, so even the moun- taineer who walked beside the mule of the little great man in the big grey coat did not dream that he was guiding Napoleon to his destiny. Peasant and ruler chatted on easy terms as they toiled together up the gorges of the St. Bernard, while the stranger questioned and the countryman explained his little world. Tempted to confidences, the guide told of his 124 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON sweetheart in the valley and how poverty had baffled their mating, of his humble life and modest ambitions. "What above all things desirest thou most at this instant to make thee happy?" the traveller asked. "That mule you are riding," the peasant replied without need of hesitating. Not only did he get his wish and return to his neighbours the proud and happy owner of the coveted animal, but not long afterward an agent of the French minister to Switzerland sought him out with a gift beyond his dreams. By the command of the First Consul of France, the agent came to arrange for the purchase or erection of a house and to provide the means for the guide's marriage. The little great man's activities as a matchmaker and pro- moter of weddings have fallen under the censure of his- torians. But surely they must all forgive him this time. That little, unpainted, weather-stained cottage in a Swiss hamlet, the House with Three Windows at Bourg St. Pierre, that simple monument of the gratitude of Napoleon, has out- lasted his magnificent palaces and even the splendid edifice of his great Empire. The Tuileries and St. Cloud are gone, but the Maison du Guide de Napoleon still stands and shelters the grateful posterity of the guide. Mighty works wrought by the power of Napoleon and dedicated to his glory have passed away, but a simple deed of kindness endures. A carriage road has taken the place of the rough trail Napoleon followed over the wild, deep ravine of the Valsorey, where the French army found its steepest climb ; through the forest of St. Pierre, where the trees make their final stand against the wintry desert of stone, and then on to the last in- habited house, the Cantine de Proz, where even man sur- renders to the arid heights. More than 1000 feet below the Hospice of St. Bernard is its outpost, the little stone hospitalet or refuge. Here and there a solitary tree rises from the stones to stand like a sentinel at his post, guarding the lowlands against the advance of desola- tion. In the drear Combe des Morts itself— the Valley of Death — beautiful Alpine flowers, hardiest dwellers in the CROSSING THE ALPS 125 floral world, garland the shoulders of the mountain and fain would crown him. Even in early July, the shovelled road mounts between snow banks six and seven feet high to the little plain where the grey walls of the Hospice of St. Bernard rise out of the white earth in a cold haze toward a sombre sky, as melancholy a scene as can be imagined. An enclosed bridge connects two severely plain stone buildings, standing on either side of the road. One is the monastery and the other the Hotel St. Louis, a necessary refuge for the brothers in case of fire, and which also serves as a lodging for poor wayfarers and a shelter for the horses of travellers. It was in the depth of the dark ages that a young dreamer, St. Bernard de Menthon, quit a world filled with hate and war to set up the cross on the lofty and peaceful heights of the Alps as a beacon along the pilgrimage road to Rome, as a sanctuary for the storm-beaten wayfarer. Although the rail- roads and highroads under and over the Alpine chain have largely reduced the necessity for this rescue work in our time, gentle souls still hearken to the call of St. Bernard's cross and, leaving self and a world of selfish strife below, go up in the mountains to devote their lives to an ideal. In the chapel are two strange companions, a portrait of the peace-loving founder of the order and the sculptured monument of a war-loving youth. This is General Desaix, and the white marble memorial of him was set up by Napo- leon as a testimony to his admiration and regret for a brilliant young general, who crossed the Alps only to meet his death on the field of Marengo. Generations of monks have cher- ished the traditions of Napoleon 's hour of rest at the Hospice, and the goblet from which he drank is treasured to this day. As he came away from the monastery and proceeded past the lonely statue of St. Bernard on the bleak plain beyond the little lake, he saw a wonderful toboggan chute glistening in the Italian sun. It had been worn smooth by the thousands of soldiers who had seated themselves in the snow and slid down the steep mountain side. Following the example of his men, he himself took the 126 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON toboggan and was fairly shot into Italy, where the Austrians were as surprised to see him descend upon them as if he had dropped from Mars with a parachute. CHAPTER XVI MARENGO LOST AND WON 1800 AGE 30 TWO months before he crossed the Alps, Napoleon lay on a big map of Italy, which had been spread on the floor of the Tuileries in Paris. As he studied the map he stuck pins in it, here and there, some of them tipped with red wax and the others with black. Bourrienne, who knelt on the map beside him, says that when Napoleon had finished this operation he asked, "Where do you think I shall beat Melas?" "How the devil should I know?" Bourrienne replied. "Why, look here, you fool," said the other man on the floor, "Melas is at Alessandria, with his headquarters. There he will remain until Genoa surrenders. Crossing the Alps here," and he pointed to a red pin at the Great St. Bernard, "I shall fall upon him, cut his communications and meet him there," pointing to a red pin at San Giuliano. "Poor M. de Melas, ' ' he chuckled ;, ' ' he will pass through Turin, fall back upon Alessandria, I shall cross the Po, overtake him on the road to Piacenza, on the plains of the Scrivia, and I shall beat him just there, just there ! ' ' It was in June, 1800, nearly three months after that re- ported forecast, when Bourrienne found himself watching from the height of San Giuliano the smoke of battle rising from the field of Marengo. Napoleon had crossed the Alps, cut the communications of General Melas, the Austrian com- mander in Italy, and now was meeting him in the valley below San Giuliano. The decisive battle came before either side was ready for it. Taken by surprise, Melas had been able to assemble of his 127 128 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON immense but widely scattered forces only about 30,000 men at Alessandria, when the French presented themselves be- fore the brick wall of that town, which is an important place sixty miles south of Milan. Napoleon, on his part, had neglected for once his adopted maxim that "God is always on the side of the heaviest bat- talions." He had tempted fate by so dispersing his army as to bring perhaps only 20,000 men to the field of action and only forty guns to meet the fire of the 200 Austrian guns. For five hours this small force had struggled to restrain the advance of the Austrians, when at ten o'clock Napoleon gal- loped upon the scene of battle for the first time. With him were his old Guides, now the Consular Guard, and from his shoulders floated the cloak which was destined to cover his coffin when it was borne to the willows at St. Helena. Nearly all the famous battlefields were appointed by nature and not by military strategists. "We hear of warriors select- ing fields of combat, but they only seek out the places chosen for them long ages before they were born, generally beside a stream or a hill. Looking down from the old legendary tower of Theodoric, the great Ostrogoth, which still rises among the orchard trees of Marengo, one sees a lazy little creek meandering over the broad plain that lies before the eastern gate of Alessandria. The plain is like a great football field, bordered on either side by hills that rise like the tiers of a grandstand, with the River Bormida washing the old walls of Alessandria at one end and the heights of San Giuliano rising at the other end of the gridiron, while the tiny rivulet Fontanone is the fifty-yard line. Across that mere brooklet the Battle of Marengo was fought. There, by the steep banks of a reedy ditch, the his- tory of Europe was decided for fifteen years. At two o'clock of a June afternoon it was decided favourably to Austria and adversely to France, for then Melas had crossed the creek and smashed Napoleon's army into fragments. Many of the French were in a rout, but others stubbornly contested the ground inch by inch as they slowly retreated over the MARENGO LOST AND WON 129 plain. Lannes, falling back at the head of a small brigade, yielded only a mile in two hours. But at last the Consular Guard itself gave way under a blazing artillery fire. The Battle of Marengo was lost, and with it, Napoleon's chance for empire. A messenger hastily stole away to carry to the enemies of the First Consul in Paris the welcome news that fortune had deserted him. Revolutionary Paris need no longer fear his iron hand. Suffering from the heat and burdened with his seventy years — Austria persisted in her policy of sending old men to whip this Corsican youth — General Melas left the field of vic- tory for his headquarters in Alessandria. Having silenced all but five of the French cannon, it was time for the aged General to lie down and dictate a report, telling the Emperor at Vienna how he had slain the Goliath of the Revolution with the pebbles of the Brook Fontanone. Meanwhile Napoleon was sitting on the ground, behind the sheltering walls of the little village of Marengo. The Con- sular Guard was drawn up about him. His maps were spread beside him. But he was not looking at them, nor seemingly at his fleeing soldiers as they passed him. He did not lift his finger in an effort to rally them. His boldness seemed to have forsaken him, as he sat there beating up the dust with his riding whip. He still entertained a faint hope, however, that before the slow-going Austrians recovered from their victory and adopted measures for following it up, General Desaix, whom he had ordered elsewhere, might yet come to the rescue. While he waited and hoped, Savary, an aide-de-camp of Desaix, dashed up to report that his General, having heard the sound of battle, was hastening to the scene with his 5000 men. Napoleon at once sprang into his saddle and spurred his white horse among his retreating troops, forming them in line again in front of San Giuliano. His cocked hat blew off, but he rode on bareheaded through the ranks, shouting: "My friends, we have fallen back far enough. Remember, soldiers, it is my habit to bivouac on the field of battle. ' ' 130 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON As the sun was descending to the Alpine horizon the Aus- trians, with colours flying and bands playing, leisurely moved forward from Marengo. They were content merely to drive the enemy from the field, for to all the old generals of Europe war was only an interminable game of checkers, not a fight to a finish. On they went until they were within 100 paces of Desaix's force, but without seeing it through a field of high- standing wheat and the thick leaves of a vineyard that screened the French. Suddenly the hidden army sprang at the surprised Aus- trians, and out of the grain and the vines blazed a heavy mus- ketry fire. The line of white coats wavered, but quickly ral- lied. Soon, however, 600 French cavalry under young Kellermann dashed upon their flank and carried chaos among the Austrians. Their ranking officer and 6000 men were taken prisoners. The French line began to advance, and the victors of a few minutes before found themselves rolled back among the 10,000 dead and wounded lying on the plain. The retreating white coats hurried past Marengo, jumped the creek and then ran for their lives to the bridges over the River Bormida, where it flows between Alessandria and the battlefield. When night fell there was not an Austrian in arms on the field of Marengo. Desaix had saved the day but he had been killed at the head of his column. "What a triumph this would have been if I could have embraced Desaix on the field of battle," the General-in-chief exclaimed. Then he added, with quickly ris- ing spirits, "Little Kellermann made a lucky charge. We are much indebted to him. You see what trifling circum- stances decide these affairs." On a field where his genius shone at its poorest, Napoleon reaped probably his greatest harvest of glory. Although he had correctly foretold the battle nearly three months, it found him unready and absent from the scene until the fight was more than half over. As he saw his army smashed and driven from the plain, he contrived no timely expedient, no brilliant exploit to turn the engulfing tide of disaster, and he was saved at last by Desaix and by Kellermann. MARENGO LOST AND WON 131 Success came to him only as a stroke of luck. Yet it right- fully belonged to him, in accordance with the rules that gov- ern our world of chance. He had surmounted the Alps and placed himsef where luck could find him, where a few of Desaix s muskets and Kellermann's horses could win a great wh ^M ! e b f tlG ° f Mareng ° rea11 ^ was won in March when Napoleon lay on the floor of the Tuileries, sticking red pms and black into the map of Italy. Marengo is to-day the best cherished of all the fields of Napoleon s victories. His battle grounds lie generally in alien lands among conquered peoples, who naturally have not done much to commemorate his triumphs over them His Italian victories, however, were not won against Italians but against Austnans, and in the end United Italy slowly rose to independence from the battlefields of Napoleon, who only blazed the path for Victor Emmanuel. The last of these, the climax, was Marengo. He fondlv planned the erection of a monumental city there a citv of victories, with beautiful avenues bearing the names of his generals and adorned with temples and sculptures. But those castles of glory remained in the air, never emerging from his dreams into reality. Long after his bones were dust and his sword was rust, a patriotic Italian of Alessandria bought Marengo and made it a Napoleonic museum About all there was to the village when the battle immor- talised its name was an old roadside tavern, with its stables and sheds and its ancient tower, which legend ascribes to a palace erected there by Theodoric some 1400 years ago Against the stony sides of those structures the red tide of battle surged and the leaden hail pelted as the contending armies took and retook the sheltering walls Menai ^ The tavern still stands by the road, along which a rural trolley line now makes its way. Its sign, < < Albergo Marengo ' ' is covered with the scars of time if not of battle. The al- bergo is unchanged by the years, and one might say unswept by the generations that have come and gone since NapoTeon sat m its lee, beating up the dust with his riding whip But against its wall and behind an iron fence, with golden tipped 132 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON pikes and lances and battle axes on top of it, there rises the monumental palace built by the Alessandrian citizen. Within this fence is the court of honour and a statue of the young First Consul, whose feet are planted on a block of red granite from the Alps which he crossed to write the name of Marengo on the list of his victories. The palace walls ris- ing behind and on one side of the court of honour are entirely covered with most amazing frescoes, depicting the spires and domes and arches, avenues, palaces, temples, and belvederes of Napoleon's dream city of victories, as they might have looked if his dream had come true. Out of this gorgeous fantasy, the victor floats at full length while victory crowns him with laurels, and Desaix, Kellermann and other generals are also portrayed. Back of the palace are the old tavern stable and sheds, still echoing to the imagination the moans of the poor wounded fellows who were carried there from the battlefield. A stage coach of the Empress Marie Louise has been brought from somewhere and in all its gaudiness is installed in a shabby barn. Within the silent, untenanted palace itself is a gorgeous gallery of the apotheosis, and there are also chambers lined with pistols, muskets, swords, sabres, knives, and all manner of rusty, murderous things raked in from the battlefield. The table on which Napoleon is said to have written his letter to the Emperor of Germany has been brought there, with the veritable quill, the veritable tin ink horn in which he dipped it, the veritable sand with which he dried his letter and the veritable receptacle for water in which he left the quill when he had finished. A high, slender-backed chair, like a piece of pulpit furniture, whereon he is reputed to have sat — and napped — is treasured in a glass case, and above it are a nobby chapeau and a sword and scabbard crossed. They belonged to Desaix, but presumably were not worn in the battle, for Savary records that ghouls had stolen everything on him and stripped him naked before his body was cold. Out in a pretty park — there are 260 acres in the reserva- tion — is a marble bust of the fallen General in the midst of a MARENGO LOST AND WON 133 leafy solitude, his shoulders, chin, cheeks, and brow black with the scribbled Italian names of visitors. A lovely belvedere rises in the shade of great trees, an altar against its inner wall. Through an opening in the centre of the floor, a heap of bones surprises the gaze. There in that pit are gathered the relics of the slain in a common pile, where the boys of France and the boys of Aus- tria are mingling their dust as they mingled their blood in the creek on the plain. Out of the grave of that mute brotherhood of death, came peace, the first that a war-worn world had known since monar- chical Europe combined against the French Revolution eight years before. Austria was ready to lay down her arms at Napoleon's feet, but her ally, Great Britain, whose battlefield was the sea, had not felt the heavy hand of the conqueror. If she gave him peace on the water he would be able to rein- force his army in Egypt and keep his foothold in the east. The British, therefore, sent the Austrians an extra subsidy for the continuance of the campaign against France in Ger- many, which, however, was brought to a disastrous end by General Moreau in a great French victory at Hohenlinden in the December following Marengo. Napoleon now showed hardly less skill in the game of diplomacy than in the game of war. He made his moves like an adept chessman. He brought Austria to harder terms than he had imposed at Campo Formio three years before, closed an ugly quarrel with the United States, made a trade with Spain for Louisiana and promoted a feud between Russia and the Baltic powers against Great Britain, which broke out into a naval war, culminating in the Battle of Copenhagen. The British, with a population of 17,000,000, found them- selves abandoned and alone in the long struggle with France, which now numbered 40,000,000 people. Since the war be- gan in 1792, the expenditures of Great Britain had risen from $100,000,000 a year to $300,000,000; the income tax had been raised to ten per cent, and the national debt stood at $2,750,000,000. Beneath those accumulated burdens, England welcomed the 134 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON relief that peace would bring;, although looking upon it as hardly more than a brief truce, an experimental peace, as her statesmen described it. She did not yield, however, until the French had lost Egypt and until she herself had little to lose from a breathing spell. CHAPTER XVII THE LAW GIVER IF Napoleon never had fought a battle, he would yet stand forth as one of the world's greatest statesmen. Where, indeed, shall we look for his peer in statecraft ? Laying aside his sword after the Battle of Marengo, he won in four years of peace, victories which deserve to be no less renowned than those of war, and which were far more en- during. Entering upon the Consulate in the true spirit of a patriot and servant of the people, the greatness and dory of his country were his ruling passion. "Ma belle France," as he fondly called her, was his mistress. . He would rather toil for the nation than sleep or eat He could work eighteen hours without resting. "I work all the time," he said to the official sluggards, "at dinner and at the theatre. ' Generally men are grown old and stale by the time they attain to power. It was this man's fortune while yet in the full flush of youthful enthusiasm to find himself the ruler of France. He held his councillors to their tasks from nine to five, with only fifteen minutes' intermission for eating, and again from ten at night until five in the morning. "Come come," he chided his exhausted helpers far in the°ni»ht "let us bestir ourselves. It is only two o'clock, and we must earn the money the French people pay us." If Bourrienne stole away to the theatre he had to come back to take up the day's duties again. Napoleon did not take time properly to undress for bed, but tore off his clothes and flung them about the room, hat, watch and all. He did not stop even to be shaved, but talked, read papers and kept on the move while under the razor of Con- stant, his valet. He held audiences while in the bathtub. His servants had to go into conference and agree upon 135 136 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON measures for getting him correctly dressed for state occasions. He refused to pause for sittings to the great Canova, whom he had summoned from Italy, but obliged the sculptor to study him while he lunched. And he would not spare the time to eat. A glass of hot water, in which he squeezed a lemon, sufficed for his break- fast. The table bored him, and his chef, never knowing when he would yield to the need of nourishment, kept his luncheon ready and waiting for him hour after hour, replacing the food in the oven as fast as it was cooked with a new supply. When he came at last he chose only one of nine or ten dishes and ignored the rest. He hardly knew what he ate. Often when he had stayed only ten minutes, even at dinner, he pushed his chair back and left the family and his guests at the table. Once when something troubled him, instead of springing up from the table as usual, he hurled it away from him, upsetting the dishes on the floor. When he wrote he did not take time to form the letters, but left half of them out of the longer words. "He writes like a cat scratching holes in a sheet of paper, ' ' his brother Joseph said. His thoughts outraced his quill, which he wiped on his white breeches, necessitating a fresh pair every morning. He insisted that "a man occupied with public business can- not practise orthography. His ideas must flow faster than his hand can trace." His dictation poured forth in a torrent, which brooked no interference and could not be turned back for the repetition of a sentence or a word. There was yet no shorthand system, and to keep up with him his scribes had to invent one of their own. While he dictated he strode up and down the room like a caged lion. If he sat down his tireless hand hacked at the arm of his chair with a penknife, or he dangled his legs from his secretary's table and rocked it so hard the poor man had still greater difficulty in making his notes. The infinite range of his interests and the tremendous dis- play of his energies stagger the imagination, and "surpassed human capacity," in the words of Taine, his severest critic in literature, while Emerson has said that "his achievement of THE LAW GIVER 137 business was immense and enlarges the known powers of man." His ministers, overwhelmed by his instructions and pumped dry by his questioning, went from the Tuileries to their of- fices only to find on their desks a dozen more written inquiries from him. Lavallette said that "he governed more in three years than kings in 100 years." He boasted that he took more pleasure in reading official reports "than any young girl does in a novel." He got up at two in the morning to study army reports while stretched on his sofa before the fire — and detected twenty mistakes in them ! His own explanation of the mechanics of his mind is as good as it is familiar: "Various subjects and affairs are stowed away in my brain as in a chest of drawers. When I take up any special business I shut one drawer and open an- other. None of them ever get mixed, and never does this incommode me or fatigue me. When I feel sleepy, I shut all the drawers and fall asleep." Yet this Titan did not really have great physical vigour. He was seldom well, often in pain and he generally awoke in the morning unrefreshed and depressed. He was subject to dizziness, nervous spasms and fainting spells, which led to the suspicion that he was epileptic like Cassar, Mahomet and some other great geniuses in history. Under Napoleon the government ceased to be a government by faction, and France no longer was a prey to the bitter strife between the ins and the outs. He coined for the new era that alluring watchword, ' ' a career open to every talent, ' ' and rightly calculated that "nobody is interested in over- throwing a government in which all the deserving are em- ployed." When the task of organising the nation suddenly fell to him he knew almost no one in the country except soldiers. He had to spy out statesmen as he had spied out the lay of the land in his military campaigns in strange countries. He prospected for human gifts as another might prospect for gold mines. 138 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON His eye and his intuition seldom deceived him, and men soon lost their courage to try to foist a knave upon him. All stood in terror of his glance, which shot through them like an X-ray, and a foreign diplomat is said to have adopted col- oured glasses to screen his soul from that searching gaze. Once he had chosen he held to men while a shred of them remained, and bore with mediocrity and even betrayal be- yond the point where patience in a ruler ceases to be a virtue. He framed for himself the motto, "There is no fool that is not good for something; there is no intelligence equal to everything." Men rated as incompetent surprised their friends with the latent abilities which he drew out of them. ' ' I have a lucky hand, ' ' he chuckled. ' ' Those on whom I lay it become fit for anything." His great passion was to reunite the French people of all classes and, regardless of their past differences, to call into the government the ablest men in the nation. He found 145,000 Frenchmen in exile as aristocrats or priests, while 300,000 were living on sufferance at home, deprived of all civic rights. He restored the rights of the latter and recalled the former from their banishment. Summoning to the Tuileries a village priest, the most stub- born opponent of the Republic in rebellious and Bourbon Vendee, he won him over at a word and made him a mediator between the state and the church. "While never much of a churchman himself, he determined to make peace with the Papacy and he bade his ambassador at Rome to "treat the Pope as if he had 200,000 soldiers. ' ' All this was galling to the spirit of the revolutionists, for the Republic and the Pope had been engaged for years in a bitter warfare, and the Holy See had been active in the coali- tions against France. "I found it more difficult," Napoleon said, "to restore religion than to win battles." Already the church bells were heard after a silence of years, and as Napoleon was walking with councillor Thibau- deau in the garden of Malmaison, he stopped and said, "Listen to me: Last Sunday I was walking here alone when I heard the church bells of Reuil. I was moved by the sound, THE LAW GIVER 139 so strong is the power of early association. I said to myself, if such a man as I am can be affected in this way, how deep must be the impression on simple, believing souls. ... A nation must have a religion. ... I do not believe in any re- ligion, but when it comes to speaking of God" — and he pointed to the heavens — "Who made all that?" "All moral systems are fine," he said again; "but the Gos- pel alone has shown a full and complete assemblage of the principles of morality, stripped of all absurdity. ... Do you wish to find the really sublime? Repeat the Lord's prayer." It was, of course, as a statesman and not as an individual that he sought the reunion of the church with her "eldest daughter," France, coldly arguing: "Society cannot exist without inequality of fortunes and inequality of fortunes can- not exist without religion. AVhen a man is dying of hunger by the side of one who gormandizes, it is impossible for him to agree to the difference unless there be some authority to say to him, ' God wills it so ; there must be poor and rich in this world; but afterward and during eternity the division will be made otherwise.' " He reduced religion to the same base use and gave it the same earthy, economic motive when he said that it "prevents the rich from destroying the poor." At the invitation of the First Consul, the papal secretary of state, Cardinal Consalvi, came to Paris, and the celebrated Concordat was drawn up, a treaty destined to continue in force through all the vicissitudes of a century, and not to be abrogated until 1905. By the terms of the Concordat the Catholic religion was recognised as the religion, not of the state, but of a great majority of the people and of the Con- suls. On the other hand, the church consented to reduce its sees in France by more than one-half and permit the French government to nominate all bishops for the approval of the Pope, while the bishops in turn were to nominate all priests for the approval of the government. The church also gave a quitclaim deed to the purchasers of the estates that had been taken away from it in the Revolution, and the govern- ment in return pledged itself to give the bishops and priests a fitting maintenance. 140 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON Another and generally welcome effect of the Concordat was the restoration of Sunday. Sunday had been abolished by the republican calendar, which provided in its place a day of rest each tenth day. Some wit had proved the folly of that attempt to change the settled habits of mankind when he said the new calendar would ' ' have to fight two enemies who never yield, the beard and the shirt;" for ten days surely was too long to wait for the weekly shave and change of linen. Letizia was the happiest of the Bonapartes at the thought of the return to mother church. "Now I need not box your ears," she said to Napoleon, "as I used to in order to make you go to mass." He had not forgotten her half-brother in his negotiations with the church, the uncle who taught him the alphabet; Joseph Fesch, having re-entered ecclesiastical life, was to be Archbishop of Lyons and a cardinal. The two achievements of his Consulate that gave Napoleon the most pride was his restoration of the "fallen altars," as he said, and the adoption of the Code Napoleon, through which, as he boasted, "I have hallowed the Revolution by infusing it into our laws. My code is the sheet anchor which will save France, and entitle me to the benedictions of pos- terity." He early set a committee of his council of state at work drafting and codifying the laws, and he remorselessly held them to the task until they had fashioned more than two thou- sand articles into a Code. This body of laws was framed to meet every conceivable occasion in the intercourse of a civil- ised community, every question that could arise between men in business, in the home, in the street. Towering above his battle monuments and his arches of triumph, the Code stands to this day the greatest and most enduring single achievement associated with the name of Napoleon. It was the granite foundation on which he reared a new France amid the smoking ruins of the old institutions that the Revolution had destroyed, a France that has with- stood the winds and floods of a stormy century, because it was founded on the rock of law and order. The tottering nation no sooner had evoked the mighty arm THE LAW GIVER 141 of Napoleon as its crutch, and France no sooner leaned upon it than she was filled with dread forebodings of what would happen when it should be withdrawn from her support. Would the Terror or the Bourbons return? The aristocrats and the church looked upon him as their only shield from the former, while the revolutionists and the peasant landowners regarded him as their protector from the latter. He himself was well warranted in declaring that " except for a few lunatics who care for nothing but anarchy and a few honest men who dream of a spartan republic, the whole nation is crying out for a strong and stable government." Not merely the placeholders felt their dependence on him, but all who were sharing in the new security and prosperity of a flourishing national business found themselves limited in their calculations to his ten-year term ; then the abyss ! The First Consul was hardly in office before a movement began to lengthen his term to twenty years, but the proposal was immediately amended and his election for life was pro- vided instead, with authority to nominate his successor. He himself struck out this last provision, for he was still argu- ing that "heredity is irreconcilable with the principle of the sovereignty of the people and impossible in France." There was only one vote against the Consulate for life in the Tribunate and that was cast by Carnot. Napoleon was wise in insisting on having the law submitted to a referendum of the voters, who indorsed it with a unanimity amazing to English speaking people: Yes, 3,568,885 votes; no, 8374. The First Consul for Life, with an annual allowance from the treasury of $1,200,000, felt himself a King in all but the crown. His thirty-third birthday was celebrated with the pomp and gaiety which Paris so well knows how to display, and on the tower of Notre Dame there blazed through the night a great fiery star, the star of Napoleon's destiny. Dropping the signature of Bonaparte, he began to sign his Christian name, Napoleon, after the manner of a royal per- sonage. He fairly clapped his hands, this giant sprung from the loins of the people, as he thought of himself on an equality with the crowned pigmies of Europe : "I am on a level now 142 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON with foreign sovereigns. They, like me, are rulers for their lifetime only. They and their ministers will have much higher respect for me now. ' ' The Cisalpine Republic in Italy also called him to its presidency. Among the dissenters from the life Consulate was Lafa- yette, who wrote on the election register that he could not vote for an unlimited magistracy unless political liberty was guar- anteed. The patriotic Marquis appealed in a letter directly to the First Consul: "It is impossible that you, General, the foremost in the ranks of those great men who are but rarely found throughout the ages, should desire that such a revolu- tion as ours, so many victims, so much bloodshed, such mis- fortunes, such prodigies, should terminate in the establish- ment of an arbitrary regime." On reading that communication, Napoleon contemptuously exclaimed: "Always thinking of Washington," and dis- missed the writer from his thoughts as "a political ninny," "an idealogue," who is "constantly harping on America without understanding that the French are not Americans." It was Lafayette's last effort to preserve the Revolution, and he entered into a retirement from which he did not emerge while Napoleon remained in power. Might he have made himself a Washington instead of a Ca?sar? It is hard to say. Against factions at home and foes abroad even the power of Napoleon might not have availed to make France, with its traditions of royalty and ignorance of free institutions, a true republic. But how glorious would have been his failure ! CHAPTER XVIII SELLING LOUISIANA 1803 AGE 34 THE Consulate of Napoleon had a more important and lasting effect on the United States, a country 3000 miles away from the French shore, than on even the next door neighbours of France. The people of the New World are likely to think of them- selves as having been mere lookers-on at the great drama of Napoleon's life, with a vast ocean between them and the theatre of his activities. But even the Atlantic was not a moat broad enough to separate them entirely from his for- tunes and misfortunes. The earliest treaty made by the First Consul was a treaty of peace and friendship with the United States, which was concluded by Joseph Bonaparte on September 30, 1800. The event was celebrated with brilliant fetes at Joseph's country estate, Mortefontaine, near Chantilly, in the Parisian suburbs, where at an elaborate banquet of 180 covers, the First Consul toasted "the manes of the French and Americans who died on the field of battle for the independence of the New World. ' ' The Americans present would have been sorely distracted from the pleasures of that feast at Mortefontaine had they known that within twenty-four hours the conqueror of Italy and Egypt was secretly to conclude a treaty with Spain which would make him the next door neighbour of Uncle Sam. By swapping a little Italian kingdom for the vast territory of Louisiana, the First Consul became the possessor of more square miles of American soil than the United States held and also became the master of the greatest river of North America. 143 144 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON When, on March 4, 1801, Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated third President of the United States, he in common with all his countrymen was still ignorant of the existence of that hidden treaty of II Defenso, which had been made on the first day of the preceding October. At the first rumour of it the President and his cabinet were greatly disturbed, while a spirit of warlike resistance flamed up in the breasts of the Kentuckians and of the other frontier dwellers in the Missis- sippi valley. "Nothing perhaps since the Kevolution," Jefferson wrote, "has produced more uneasy sensations," and he instructed Robert R. Livingston, the American minister at Paris, boldly to say to the French government : "There is on the globe one single spot the possessor of which is our natural enemy. It is New Orleans. . . . The day France takes pos- session of New Orleans fixes the sentence which is to restrain her within her low-water mark. It seals the union of the two nations which, in conjunction, can maintain exclusive possession of the ocean. From that moment we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation." Nor did the Commander-in-chief of an army of 3000 soldiers and of a navy of seven warships pause even there in his challenge to the victor of Marengo, but added that "the first cannon which shall be fired in Europe" will be "the sig- nal for tearing up any settlement made by France in America." A member of Napoleon's cabinet truly remarked that if any European power had dared to address such lan- guage to the First Consul, the words would have been an- swered only with guns. Happily, even the Little Corporal's 24-pounders could not shoot across the Atlantic. Fortunately no other man in America better understood European politics than the then President. While Napoleon went ahead with his project for planting himself at the mouth of the Mississippi river, Jefferson prepared for the inevitable outbreak of a new war between France and England. Nearly six months before the rupture which he foresaw, he proposed to Congress that a special mission be sent to Paris, and James Monroe was chosen as the commissioner. SELLING LOUISIANA 145 Even while Monroe was on the sea, George III called out the British militia and Napoleon stormed at the British am- bassador. At last when the American envoy, in a post chaise, was hurrying on from Havre to the capital, Napoleon an- nounced to two of his ministers that not a moment was to be lost m selling Louisiana to the United States before the im- pending war should burst upon him, when the territory surely would be lost to France. In vain his minister of marine Decree, protested that New Orleans was a second Alexandria that it could be made more important than any other port on the globe and certainly would be of inestimable value when a canal across Panama should be constructed. Far into the night the three men debated at St. Cloud the destiny of Louisiana. After only a brief rest, they met again at daybreak, when Napoleon, in his dressing gown and with his lap full of newly arrived London despatches, pronounced the fate of the great empire. It must be sold at once or it would be snatched from France without any compensation. After two weeks of chaffering over the biggest land trans- action in history the entire parcel was sold to the Ameri- cans for $11,250,000 cash and a remission of spoliation claims against France to the amount of $3,750,000, or a total of $15,000,000 One shearing of sheep in the states of the Lou- isiana purchase now would suffice to pay the original price of those more than eight hundred thousand square miles. On the very day Napoleon ratified the Louisiana treaty, there began that war between France and England which closed only at Waterloo twelve years afterward. As he parted with a territory vaster than his sword ever was to con- quer, he consoled himself with the reflection that he had aided a competitor of the English on the sea, a competitor who sooner or later, he confidently predicted would humble their pride When the negotiations were concluded, and he con- templated the huge area that he had fairly thrust upon the American envoys, who had been charged to buy only the few acres comprised within the limits of New Orleans, he chuckled, They asked me for a town and I have given them an em- pire. 146 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON The last scene in the drama of the Louisiana sale was en- acted in the Place d'Armes at New Orleans the week before Christmas in the year 1803. For 60,000,000 francs in hand, Napoleon opened the Tchoupitoulas gate of the town. A little force of American soldiers, under General Wilkinson, marched in and drew up before the old Cabildo, which still rises by the cathedral of St. Louis in the Place d'Armes, now Jackson Square. The treaty of cession was read aloud to the people in French and English, whereupon Laussat, the commissioner, standing on the balcony of the Cabildo, read his credentials from Napo- leon Bonaparte, First Consul of France, and Governor Clai- borne of the Mississippi territory read his credentials from Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States. Laussat then surrendered to Claiborne the keys of New Orleans and exchanged chairs with him. The red, white, and blue banner of France, which had floated over New Orleans for only twenty days, was slowly lowered on the flagstaff as the red, white, and blue of the American Union was hoisted. Midway of the pole, both flags paused for a fraternal moment to mingle their folds, while the trumpets sounded and the drums rolled. The stars and stripes then ascended to the top to receive the salute of the artillerymen and musketrymen and the tricolour to the bottom reverently to be received in the arms of fifty Louisianians, vet- erans of the army of France, who had gathered from distant settlements to pay homage to the last banner of the country of Champlain, Marquette, La Salle and Montcalm to wave in sovereignty above a spot of earth on the continent of North America. CHAPTER XIX A DAY AT MALMAISON FRANCE joyed in the Consulate as the glorious sum- mer that followed her long- winter of discontent. It was the wondrous healing time for the wounds of the Revolution. While Napoleon welcomed home the lon*- proscnbed aristocrats and priests, he dispelled the fears of the republican masses by confirming them forever in the pos- session of the property which the Revolution had taken from the aristocracy and the church, and sold to them. The world was young again. Fortune had shuffled the cards and fame was dealing new hands all round Youth was m the saddle. The private soldier and the stable boys of yesterday, when they had hardly a shirt and a half between them, suddenly found their peasant names glorified and eclipsing the lustre of the dukes and marquises and counts 01 the ancient nobility. No other hand than Napoleon's ever lifted so great a legion ot people out of obscurity into position, out of poverty into affluence. For this man, who faced the world with a heart of ice, never ceased to take a boyish pride and pleasure in sharing his fortunes with all who had known him in his poorer days. He hunted up the outcast friars of the over- thrown school at Brienne and conferred offices and pensions on them, bestowing a snug annuity on even his writing teacher who surely had small claim to the gratitude of so wretched a penman. His teachers at the Ecole in Paris also were gen- erously remembered, while a shower of favours fell upon his old neighbours in Corsica and upon all in Valence and Au- xonne who had bestowed a friendly nod upon the starveling lieutenant when he was stationed in those towns. He appointed to the post of conservator of waters and for- 147 148 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON ests the mountaineer who led the band of men that rescued Mother Letizia from the Ajaccio mob. He pensioned Camilla Ilari, his old foster mother, the fisherman's wife of Ajaccio, and would gladly have carried her son, his foster brother and playmate, along with him, had the young man not run away and joined the British navy. He brought his foster sister to Paris and introduced her in his court to "show what beautiful girls Corsica raises;" he married her off to her advantage and stood godfather to her baby boy. A caller from Valence was questioned about every one in the place and particularly about the woman who kept the "Three Pigeons" in the Rue Perollerie, where Second Lieu- tenant Bonaparte used to eat his one meal a day. Learning she was still living, Napoleon sent her $200 for fear, he said, that he might not have paid her for all his cups of coffee. One of the first debts of gratitude he discharged was in favour of the man who had given him the desk in the war of- fice where he had the opportunity to draw up his plan of campaign in Italy. When the old official responded to the summons, the First Consul said with a smile that reflected his pleasure : ' ' You are a senator ! ' ' "I was at Toulon," was the magic password at the palace door for army men, and even Carteaux, the painter-General who had laughed at Captain Bonaparte, was placed on the pension rolls. An old nobleman who had lent the impecuni- ous father of the First Consul $125 and, of course, had never been repaid, was in exile and poverty. "Bourrienne," Na- poleon said, with real emotion, as he held in his hand the ap- pealing letter from the creditor, "this is sacred. Send the old man ten times the amount of the debt and have his name erased from the list of the banished." Raguideau, Josephine's candid lawyer, who had advised her against marrying a man with nothing but a sword and a cloak, received a lucrative post. Even the humble shopkeepers, who had given him credit when he needed it, were honoured with patronage in prefer- ence to more fashionable and prosperous tradesmen. The obscure cobbler who made his shoes when he was at the Ecole, A DAY AT MALMAISON 149 became the proud bootmaker for the First Consul of France. Des Mazis, his one intimate among the pupils at the Ecole, the youth who lent the penniless Corsican the money to take him to his regiment at Valence, was in exile as an aristocrat, but was recalled and received an important office. The steadily increasing pageantry of the Consulate was outshining the ceremonials of royalty, and a presentation to Napoleon and Josephine was more coveted than an introduc- tion to the Hapsburgs, the Hohenzollerns or the Guelphs. The new court was free from the scandals and stiffness of the old courts. Not only was there opened under the Consulate a career for every talent, but for every grace as well. Beauty no less than ability had a fair field and no favour. Although when Napoleon went to take up his residence in the Tuileries, most of the dignitaries in the procession had to ride in street cabs with pieces of paper pasted over the license numbers, and there was hardly a suit of livery left in the city, Paris quickly resumed her place as the capital of fashion and gaiety. Josephine is said to have had 600 gowns in her wardrobe and the women of two worlds moved up their waist lines in conformity with her girdle. "The great thing for Paris, and I well know it," Napoleon said, "is to furnish dances, cooks and fashions to Europe" — that bloody-handed Paris which but yesterday was the red terror of tyrants the earth over! The courtiers and servitors of the Bourbons were wel- comed to their old places. Gorgeous ushers reappeared with their rods. Judges and lawyers put on their robes again. People began to powder their hair and some men even ven- tured to sport queues and ruffles. ' ' Monsieur ' ' and ' ' Madam ' ' drove out the usurping "Citizen" and " Citizeness. " The Tuileries and Malmaison were the centres round which the new life of the reborn nation revolved. The former rises by the Seine no more, having been long ago levelled in a frenzy of revolution. But France to-day cherishes as a patri- otic shrine the home of Napoleon and Josephine at Malmai- son in the pristine glory of the Consulate, when they still typi- fied the majesty of the Republic. 150 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON That modest, suburban three-story stone villa at Reuil in the valley of the Seine between St. Cloud and St. Germain en Laye and only eight or nine miles from the centre of Paris looks more like the country house of a merchant than the seat of a great ruler. Josephine selected it while her hus- band was in Egypt and the purchase price was only $32,000. But she bought adjoining lands and laid out a park that was fit for a fairy princess. Only a little of this remains, however, the estate having lately been cut up into villa gar- dens. One of the new streets that crosses what was formerly the park bears the name of the Rue Tuck, in recognition of an American from New Hampshire who was influential in the development of the neighbourhood. Malmaison is treasured now among the priceless national monuments of France. Pilgrims from all over the world pour in streams through the shady gateway of the chateau and into its halls and chambers, sighing over Josephine's harp with its broken strings, and looking with curious eyes at Josephine's bed whereon she died, her ornate washstand, her gorgeous dinner service and costly ornaments, mostly the gifts of sovereigns and governments, her work table and em- broidery frame. The cedar she planted still casts its shade out on the lawn, where the tents used to be pitched as in an army camp, and where in his shirtsleeves Napoleon played "prisoner's base" with hilarious young men and screaming young women. The shepherd's hut and the Swiss dairy have vanished from the park; the marble gods and nymphs that Josephine set up are mossy with age; her cascade and lake, on which she lav- ished a fortune, are gone dry, but the bridge still spans the now arid bed of the brook. Her theatre no longer stands among the trees, where the consular court were wont to gather and be entertained by the famous players of Paris. There, too, some of the great actors in the drama of the Napoleonic era used to play at amateur theatricals, with Josephine as the presiding genius, and when Napoleon prankishly hissed, she announced that any person A DAY AT MALMAISON 151 dissatisfied with the performance could have his money re- funded at the door. The prettiest memorials of Josephine in her fanciful Eden are the flowers and shrubs she imported from her native Mar- tinique, a few of which go on blooming as when she watched over these friends of her childhood and watered them with her own hands. She drew on that West Indian island for many kinds of seeds and plants, but begged in vain for her mother to come to her. She sent her the handsome chaplet which the Pope gave her, and Hortense drew for her grand- mother a portrait of Napoleon walking in the park of Mal- maison. Mme. Tascher, however, chose to live on in the kitchen of the ruined house at Trois Islets alone with a negro servant. Josephine called the garden at Malmaison her family, and her favourite salon was in a big greenhouse, where she held court in the midst of fragrance and beauty. Botany, per- haps, was her one certain accomplishment. She could neither sing nor play any instrument, for the harp with the broken strings, which the pilgrims to Malmaison see now, only serves to recall the prosaic fact that its mistress' repertory was lim- ited to a single air. She dabbled a bit with tapestry, and she and her friends made the coverings for some of the furni- ture in the house. But she was most at home with her flowers. One of her pleasures was to array her lithesome self in simple India mus- lin and lead her husband along the winding, bloom-em- broidered paths, for he always vowed that the prettiest sight for mortal eyes was a tall, slender woman in white, strolling in a leafy lane. She liked to bewilder his botanical igno- rance with her knowledge of the names and habits of all the things in her little floral world, and we are told that she wept m her great Paris palace when he kept her away from Mal- maison in the flowering time of her hyacinths and tulips— a single tulip bulb had cost her $800. The First Consul 's own special favourites in the park were the gazelles which had been brought from Egypt. He used 152 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON to amuse himself by feeding them, and he laughed to find them inordinately fond of eating out of his snuff box. Some moufflons, or wild sheep, he imported from Corsica, disap- pointed him, however, by rejecting his hospitality and run- ning away. Josephine 's rare song birds, at which her spouse, in a spirit of rude teasing, aimed his pistol shots from a chateau win- dow, no longer sing in the trees of Malmaison, whose barks bear the bullet scars of the German invader in the Franco- Prussian War. For alien armies have twice invaded Napo- leon's dooryard — in 1815 and in 1870. The bell of the old Keuil church still sends its peals upon the air as in the days when it was music to the ear of Na- poleon. "Ah," the man of state sighed, "that reminds me of the bells of Brienne. I was happy there!" The bell, however, was not his only reminder of Brienne. He had appointed Fr. Dupuis one of the old friars and teachers there, to be the librarian at Malmaison, although there really was no library in the house, and Fr. Dupuis never was seen to touch a book; but his one-time pupil enjoyed seeing him about the place. The porter of the Brienne school, too, was brought to Malmaison and installed in a like post at the chateau. The woodland workroom of the First Consul is yet in the park, a little vine-clad retreat from the frivolity of the young people who filled the chateau with their mirth. But his pref- erence was a tent in the garden, and one of his campaign tents is there now. In such a place he carried on at Malmaison much of the business of his widespread realm. "I cannot understand men," he said, "who can sit by the stove and work without any view of the sky." Mme. de Remusat said that he was only fitted for a tent or a throne, where everything would be permitted him, for, she tells us, he did not know how to enter or leave a room, make a bow, sit down properly or converse ; he could only ask abrupt questions or make impertinent comments. Mme. de Stael, on the other hand, was so pleased by an interview she held with him that she reported the remarkable dialogue, A DAY AT MALMAISON 153 which Josephine condemned, however, as an exhibition of her husband's vulgarity: "General, whom do you regard as the greatest woman in the world?" "She, madam, who has borne the most children." "But whom do you esteem highest?" "She who is the best housekeeper." "It is said, General, you are not fond of women?" "Pardon me, madam, I am very fond of my wife." Although Stendhal tells us that Napoleon's look became excessively gentle when he spoke to a woman, his wizardry was pretty sharply confined to the limits of his own sex and left women comparatively unen thralled. He treated them too much like soldiers, often walking down a line of loveli- ness as if he were on a military inspection. Sometimes he playfully pinched their ears till they shrieked, reproving them if their cheeks were not rouged to his taste, or chiding them for wearing old gowns. "You are too pale," he said to Mme. de Remusat, as if rebuking a grenadier for a spot on his coat; "two things are very becoming to women, rouge and tears." To another woman he exclaimed, "Heavens! How red your elbows are!" To another, "What an ugly headdress!" Mme. Junot was too defiant. "Remember," he admonished her, "a woman ceases to charm whenever she makes herself feared." Yet this same Mme. Junot herself assures us in her venge- ful "Memoirs" that it is impossible to describe the charm of his countenance, the magic of his smile when he was animated by a feeling of benevolence — "his soul was upon his lips and in his eyes." She describes his brows as formed to wear the crowns of the whole world ; his hands as worthy the envy of the most coquettish woman; a white, soft skin covering his muscles of steel. It is certain he was not lacking in one respect : his air was already regal and his appearance had grown majestic. Much of the time until he was twenty-four or twenty-five, he did not have enough to eat; but in the Consulate he was no 154 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON longer lean and hungry-looking. On the contrary, his hollow cheeks had rounded into a becoming fulness ; his complexion, having lost its yellowness, was clear and fresh ; his body, plump but not yet portly, now filled out his clothes. How tall was Napoleon? In the first place, he was by no means as short as many historians have mistakenly assumed. Some of the most careful writers have fallen into error on this point, through an inaccurate translation. The transla- tors of Constant and of Mallet du Pan say he was five feet three inches, while the translator of Baron de Meneval says he was five feet two inches. Those latter figures are most gen- erally adopted. It is true that by the French measurement he was five feet two inches and four lines ; but the French foot is longer than the English, and Napoleon's actual height was five feet six and one-third inches. His grey overcoat hanging now in the Hotel des Invalides is itself four feet three inches in length. His stature therefore was not far from medium, according to the modest standards of Latin nations. His habit of stoop- ing, however, with his hands behind him, and his short neck made him appear shorter than he was. He did not have the vanity of small men to make themselves seem larger and em- ployed no trick to enhance his height. His shoulders were broad and his trunk was long for his legs, which, however, were well shaped. He was vain of his small feet — his treasured shoes and slippers look like a woman's — of his delicate hand with its tapering fingers, and of his teeth, albeit they were hardly worthy of his pride. His bust was a handsome one, in spite of being mounted on an inadequate pedestal; well designed for the gallery of im- mortals. The profile was modelled to adorn an imperial coin- age, while the great head, twenty-two inches in circumference, which had alarmed his family in his infancy, the high broad forehead, the luminous grey, eagle eyes, the straight, sensi- tive nose, the smooth, ivory skin were the delight of artists, many of whom, however, chose to give him dark hair rather than his own fine, though thin, chestnut locks. We see some lack of strength in the under lip, as it was drawn in his early A DAY AT MALMAISON 155 portraits, but when he rose to mastery, the painters and sculptors corrected their predecessors in this detail, or per- haps improved on nature herself. The expression of his face was so active that it was like a moving-picture film of his mind. He could still smile when he became Consul, as softly, as sweetly as a girl, but he could no longer laugh. If angered, a sort of cyclone suddenly tore across his coun- tenance and convulsed every feature; a tempest swept the brow; the eyes blazed; the nostrils swelled; the mouth con- tracted; the hand seized the offender or smashed the gilded furniture of a palace chamber. But the storm passed as quickly as it came, and left him as calm as a summer har- bour after a downpour of rain. Notwithstanding these facial hurricanes, he insisted that his passions never rose above his neck, and his physicians corroborate him with the report that his blood was not given to rushing to his head. He had the weak desire of one who had suffered from pov- erty and privation to see himself surrounded with a display of luxury and splendour. But Josephine 's almost childish ex- travagance often made him wince. The mistress of Malmai- son had far more taste than thrift, and she pursued her love of pretty things there and in Paris with a light-hearted dis- regard of the cost. The tradesmen were quick to discover her weakness and prey upon it. Napoleon had forbidden them admission to her, but laden with their tempting wares they penetrated and crowded her apartments. When at last their clamours for payments came to his ears, he ordered Bourrienne to investi- gate the matter. Josephine confessed to the secretary that she owed $240,000, but begged him to conceal half of the stag- gering total from her husband for the present, in order to spare her his violence. The pile of bills astounded Bourrienne; thirty-eight new hats, heron plumes to the value of $360, and perfumes to the value of $160 in one month. The secretary called in the credi- tors and insisted on cutting their extortionate charges in half. One man who had made out a bill for $16,000 received only 156 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON $7000, but was still able to congratulate himself on having made a liberal profit. That was not Bourrienne 's only unpleasant experience of the same kind. When Napoleon bestowed on a sister as a wedding gift a necklace belonging to Josephine, she longed to replace the ornament with some pearls she had seen which once belonged to Marie Antoinette. The price was $50,000 cash, and not daring to propose such an extravagance to Na- poleon, she was aided to make the purchase by General Ber- thier, who proceeded to extort the needed amount from a big army contractor. After getting the coveted pearls, Josephine could not sum- mon the courage to wear them and let them be seen by her husband, who Bourrienne tells us was somewhat of a busy- body. Finally, unable longer to resist and conceal the beau- tiful necklace, she implored the secretary to stay near her and defend her in the inevitable scene. "How fine you are to-day," Napoleon said; and then, just as she had expected and feared, he added, "What is it you have there? Where did you get those pearls?" " O ! Mon Dieu ! ' ' Josephine replied in her most caressing tone. "You have seen them a dozen times before. It is the necklace the Cisalpine Republic gave me. Ask Bourrienne; he will tell you." "Yes, General," the second conspirator said in corrobora- tion of the first, "I recollect very well seeing this necklace before." Still Josephine was worth all she cost Napoleon. Great stage director as he was, his court never would have been much more than a camp except for the assistance of his wife. He said in Italy: "I win battles while Josephine wins hearts." He bound together the French factions in law and justice and glory; but socially the old France and the new were united by the tact and charm of Josephine. It was in her drawing room, long before they would cross his threshold, that the returning aristocrats first consented to mingle with the men and women of the Revolution. She filled with flow- A DAY AT MALMAISON 157 ers the bloody chasm that had long divided them, and drew them together with her smile. She cared nothing for their tragic quarrel and was herself too amiable for quarrelling. "She has no more resentment than a pigeon," Napoleon said. As the women of the nobility began to gather about her, she did not forget her friends in the dark days and wept when her husband drew the line on Mme. Tallien, her com- panion in prison. Napoleon assured her he liked her loyalty and was sorry to ban old friends ; but a new court had to be very careful of its moral tone. Already the shadow of the coming dynasty had fallen upon Josephine and Fouche had read aloud to the First Consul in the presence of others a newspaper report that her divorce was contemplated because she had not presented her husband with an heir. Josephine, too, had frequently been made to listen to the same disquieting suggestion. Her new position in the world was costing her dear, and she was not a very ambitious woman. If she still did not love her husband, she had grown fond enough to be loyal to him and to suffer the pangs of jealousy from his disloyalty. As the dyer's hand is subdued to what it works in, a man cannot exercise a despotism without developing a despotic nature. Napoleon had become a law unto himself in all things great and small. "I am not a man like other men," he frankly told Mme. de Remusat, "and moral laws and the laws of propriety do not apply to me." As his iron power over nations increased, he could no longer feel bound by the silken tie of matrimony, and every day the poor, little wife saw her eagle soaring farther and farther away from her. The net of intrigue, drawing about her day by day, grew finer and finer in its mesh. To gain more influence in the hostile counsels of the Bonaparte family, she promoted the marriage of General Murat with Caroline Bonaparte, rely- ing on Murat 's friendship to aid her. In increasing des- peration and though loving her dearly, she sacrificed even her own daughter to save herself. Anxiously promoting a further alliance with the Bonapartes, she made a match that was no match at all between Hortense and Louis Bonaparte. 158 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OP NAPOLEON They hated each other, and the bride was led weeping to the altar. Their first baby being a boy, Josephine welcomed him as a candidate for the succession and he was christened Na- poleon Charles. The lack of an heir probably was not Josephine's only mo- tive for counselling her husband against dynastic ambitions; very likely a woman's native prudence was also among her promptings. Her heart sank now as in the days of her court- ship when she marked the wild flights of his fancy and am- bition. Once Napoleon asked her to tell him his defects and she replied, "I know only two: weakness and indiscretion. You permit yourself to be influenced by persons who are only seeking your downfall, and you are so fond of arguing that you let your secret thoughts escape." He fondly took her in his arms as he admitted the correctness of her diagnosis — and put aside her womanly intuition. She warned him again and again, as she told Thibaudeau, that "two things ruin men — weakness and ambition." But she complained he would not discuss politics with her. Did a man ever discuss his plunges with his wife? Seating herself on his knee and running her hand through his hair, she said to him: "I entreat you, Bonaparte, do not make yourself King ! ' ' But the husband gently and smilingly dismissed her like a child, "Come now! You interrupt me — leave me alone!" Bourrienne reports the interview and also Josephine's later appeal to him, when he told her that he feared Napoleon could not be dissuaded from placing a crown on her head. "My God! Bourrienne," she replied, "such an ambition is farthest from my wish. Try to prevent his mak- ing himself King." The secretary confessed that he had al- ready exhausted his influence to thwart Napoleon's purposes and had reminded him that being childless he would have no one to whom to bequeath the throne. ' ' My kind friend, ' ' Josephine eagerly inquired, ' ' when you spoke of children, did he say anything to you? Did he talk of a divorce?" Bourrienne lowers the curtain on this scene with Josephine crying, "Good God! How unhappy I am!" F CHAPTER XX HOW THE REPUBLIC DIED RANCE, under the Consulate, quickly became the envy of the nations. It was an era of unexampled peace and order. All men were equal before the law and free to do what they liked, only provided they let politics alone. Peasant and noble were safe in their homes, their properties and their businesses. "The stage coach went without a guard." The country waxed prosperous beyond all precedent. Taxes were light and the national bonds rose in two golden years from twelve francs to sixty-five. Yet the Republic perished. The operation was successful, but the patient died! The Consulate was a brilliant and benevolent despotism. It took away only the people's dream of liberty and their ideal of a free republic, two boons they never had enjoyed. It gave them in exchange the abounding genius and energy of Napoleon, who served them better than they could serve themselves. A wise and pure despotism is the wisest and purest of gov- ernments. But its fatal defect is that it dries up the springs of its wisdom and purity, public opinion. As the First Con- sul waxed more masterful, the French people sank into a dumb subserviency until he could no longer hear their voice. As he grew stronger, they grew weaker, until they trembled at the thought of standing alone and at last surrendered them- selves wholly to his iron will. Many look back upon the Consulate, with its centralisation of power, its revival of official ceremonies and its inaugura- tion of the Legion of Honour, as one long, crafty, cold-blooded conspiracy against the Republic on the part of the First Con- 159 160 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON sul, who, day by day, warily and steadily crept toward the throne. This opinion, however, gives too much credit to his fore- sight, a quality in which he was strangely deficient. For this man was not the architect of his own fortunes. His plans were overruled in nearly every important instance and he was always the creature of circumstances. He had chosen to be a writer rather than a soldier, to go into the real estate business rather than into the Revolution, to be a Corsican rather than a Frenchman, to be a drillmaster for the Sultan of Turkey rather than serve in the army of the Republic, to seek martial glory in Asia rather than in Europe, and finally to return to the Army of Italy rather than be First Consul. Once he was installed as dictator of France, in November, 1799, the throne was the natural if not inevitable goal of the dictatorship. It was as unnecessary for him to conspire for the crown as for the consulship, as unnecessary for him to plot against the Republic as against the Directory. He frankly said to the council of state: "France is not yet a republic; whether she will be one is still highly problematical ; the next five or six years will decide." That was true, and nine Frenchmen out of ten knew it. Enemies as well as friends played their part in hurrying the Republic toward the Empire and Napoleon toward the throne, all classes and events conspiring to the same end. Bourbon plots supplied, indeed, the strongest argument for making the change. The old royal family in their exile persisted in the folly which had lost them their kingdom. It was truly said of the Bourbons that in their misfortunes, "they learned nothing and forgot nothing." Failing in their armed treason against their country as allies of jealous foreign nations, they de- scended to the next step in their degradation and tried to bribe their way back to the throne. When Napoleon came they found a man they could not buy. After he became First Consul, the pretender, Louis XVIII, younger brother of Louis XVI, wrote the young ruler, beg- ging for the lost throne and bluntly asking him to name his HOW THE REPUBLIC DIED 161 price : " If you doubt my gratitude, fix your reward and mark out the fortunes of your friends." To that base appeal from the son of St. Louis, the son of the people returned this kingly reply: "You must not seek to return to France. To do so you would have to trample upon 100,000 dead bodies. Sac- rifice your interest to the repose and happiness of France, and history will render you justice." In their despair the Bourbons then sank to the level of assassins. For years they had maintained their emissaries in Paris for the purpose of fomenting revolution and anarchy. But, under Napoleon's masterful rule, the country was quickly pacified and the nation reunited. France prospered and revolutions languished. The Bourbons found themselves without an active party, and unable even to incite a riot. If they could not hope to overthrow the government, they could plot the assassination of Napoleon. As he was on his way to the opera in the win- ter of 1800-1, his driver, a veteran who had been with him in Egypt, and whom he had nicknamed Caesar, found a cart, apparently a water cart, standing across the street. When the escort had drawn it to one side, Ca?sar, exasperated by the delay, whipped up his horses and drove on at a furious pace. In two seconds an infernal machine on the cart exploded. Cassar had driven so fast as to remove his distinguished passenger beyond harm's reach, but several persons in the street had been killed and many wounded. More than forty houses were shattered, and even the glass in the windows of the Tuileries was smashed. Napoleon gave rein to a passion for punishing the perpe- trators of the outrage. He refused to believe that the Bour- bons would resort to such a murderous measure, although his minister of police, Fouche, insisted it was a royalist and not a republican plot. "They are the Terrorists," the First Con- sul insisted, "wretches stained with blood. The Bourbons are simply a skin disease, but the Terrorists are an internal malady." In his determination to terrify the Terrorists, 130 men were rushed into penal banishment without any evidence against 162 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON them. Afterward it was discovered that they had nothing to do with the infernal machine, and that it was the work of the royalists, two of whom were detected, convicted, and ex- ecuted. Yet, so persistent was Napoleon's suspicion that the Terrorists were a menace to his government he did not recall the poor exiles from their prison colony in the tropics. Fouche, whose duty it was to watch the enemies of the First Consul, but who always kept the sharpest watch on the First Consul himself, boasted in after years that he hired Bourrienne to spy on his chief. The Bourbon conspirators also passed around the word that "the secretary is for sale." However that may be, the tender spot which Napoleon always kept for old friends and associates was sore wounded by the oldest and closest of them all. He had been glad to share his prosperity with Bourrienne as freely as they had shared their poverty at Brienne and in the streets of Paris. He gave him apartments in the Tuileries and also gave his family an independent establishment. Disdaining to limit his friend and confidant to a fixed salary, he invited him to help himself from their common cash drawer in the palace, and no account was kept between them. He flattered himself he could share with him even his fame. "Ah, Bourrienne!" he proudly exclaimed. "You also will be immortal." "How, General?" the friend asked. "Are you not my secretary 7 ?" Poor Bourrienne could not content himself with this re- flected immortality, and loving what his chief despised, money, he yielded to the one sin Napoleon always refused to compound in his own immediate household. When at last a case in court disclosed the secretary as a partner of govern- ment contractors and his avarice thus became a public scan- dal, the First Consul dismissed him, telling him as he slammed the door in his face, "Never let me see you again." "Why!" Napoleon grieved to Meneval, the assistant who now took the place of the unfaithful secretary, "I have known that man since he was nine years old !" Still wishing to spare HOW THE REPUBLIC DIED 163 him the full measure of disgrace, he officially announced that Bourrienne had been promoted to other duties, and, indeed, it was not long until he did find employment for him. But he would not see him, and they never met again except on one occasion, when Bourrienne was summoned to receive his commission as minister at Hamburg, where for many years he continued his peculations and ended by conspiring with the Bourbons against his forbearing friend and benefactor. The Bourbons never relented or rested in their savage pur- pose to strike down the man that stood in their way. They seized upon the reopening of the war between England and France to spring their grand plot. It began to unfold itself late in the summer of 1803, when an English naval officer landed a little party of French royalists at the foot of a steep cliff on the coast of Normandy. The leader was a remarkable character, a Breton named Georges Cadoudal, who had bravely fought in the royalist rebellions of La Vendee in the time of the Revolution. Georges was joined by General Pichegru, a teacher of Napoleon in the military school of Brienne and later a general in the Revolution. Pichegru 's part in the plot was to induce General Moreau, the foremost military commander under the First Consul, to enter into the conspir- acy, and win over the support of the army. Once Moreau 's co-operation was assured, two of the Bourbon princes, the Count d'Artois and the Duke de Berry, were to come from England, personally join in waylaying Napoleon on the road to Malmaison, and, having abducted or assassinated him, seize the government in the name of Louis XVIII. Pichegru found Moreau ready enough to conspire, but not for the Bourbons. "Do with Bonaparte what you will," he said, "but do not ask me to put a Bourbon in his place." Nevertheless Moreau soon found himself locked up, for spies were following the conspiracy step by step. Napoleon wished above all to catch the Bourbon princes, and he posted Savary at the cliff on the Normandy coast to lie in wait there for the princely prey. He was filled with a ferocious passion for revenge on the royalists. "Am I a dog 164 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON to be beaten to death in the streets?" he demanded. "I will pitilessly shoot the very first of these princes who shall fall into my hands." Moreau having disappointed them, however, the princes did not climb up on the cliff where Savary sat watching like a terrier beside a rat-hole. Nor could the hiding places of Georges and Pichegru be found until Paris suddenly shut down on them like a trap. The gates of the city were closed, the walls were patrolled and no one was permitted to leave the capital. Pichegru was hunted down and thrown into prison, where he strangled himself to death in his cell. Next Georges was found and taken in the street, but not until he had shot dead one of his pursuers and seriously wounded another. He and nineteen of his accomplices, including a marquis and the heir to a dukedom, were tried and condemned to die. Moreau was sentenced to two years' imprisonment, but Na- poleon pardoned him, on condition that he go to the United States and stay there. Meanwhile a Bourbon prince had been caught. In the midst of the excitement attending the man hunt in Paris, a report was received that the young Duke d'Enghien, a de- scendant of the great Conde, was living in the duchy of Baden, a few miles from the French frontier, where he was conspiring with General Dumouriez, another General of the Revolution, who, like Pichegru, had been bought up by the Bourbons. It was further reported that the Prince had actu- ally made secret visits to Paris. A squad of thirty horsemen was sent into Baden, although it was not French soil ; the Duke was kidnapped and hurried to Paris. While he was on the way, however, it became known to the government that he had not been with Dumou- riez at all, and it was seen that there was no evidence what- ever that he had any part in the plottings of the other branch of the Bourbon family. It was true that he had served in foreign armies against France and was then in the pay of England, but he was not a conspirator. Napoleon's rage, however, was now beyond control. The fight had become a Corsican vendetta between the Bonapartes HOW THE EEPUBLIC DIED 165 and the Bourbons, and no kinsman of the foe should be spared. Some of those around the First Consul might stand aghast at the thought of shedding royal blood, but he declared, "Neither is my blood ditchwater ! " To the tearful appeals of the terrified Josephine, he commanded, "Begone! You are a child ! ' ' Late in a March afternoon of 1804, the captive Duke was conducted into the big, grey fortress of Vincennes, four miles from the heart of Paris. Although he was yet to be placed on trial, his grave was already dug in the moat on the other side of the castle. At six o'clock in the morning the Duke was led out of the door of the castle, the door that looks upon what is now one of the prettiest and most popular of the forest playgrounds of Paris, and down into the moat. There he was placed with his back to the wall of the tower and fac- ing the firing squad. His request that a priest be summoned to attend him was ignored, but when he asked that he might be permitted to send a lock of his hair to his sweetheart, the Duchess de Rohan, the commander of the squad gruffly in- quired of his men, "Has any one of you a pair of scissors?" The scissors were found and the lock was clipped. The Duke's last appeal to his executioners was for them not to miss their aim, and in another instant he fell before the fatal volley, pierced through the heart. The corpse was pushed into the gaping hole beside it, but there to pause only a few years until the return of the Bourbons, when it was disinterred and laid to rest in the chapel of the grim old castle. A small slender column of marble was erected in the grassy moat at the time the body was removed, and there it still stands under the gaze of the morbid and the curious, marking the spot where the last of the House of Conde fell — and where, too, in the twelfth year of its age the Republic fell! For it was well said of the Bourbon conspirators that they came to give France a King and gave her an Emperor. The blood of the Bourbons, and indeed of all the royalty in Europe, ran cold with horror at the news of how the Duke d'Enghien had died. The court of the Czar Alexander I at 166 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON Petrograd went into mourning, and the King of Prussia re- coiled from Napoleon into an alliance with Russia. Paris met the event with mixed feelings. Some protest- ing person coined his whispered denunciation of the killing in a memorable phrase, "It is worse than a crime — it is a blunder!" The evening of the tragic day was a silent and gloomy occasion at Malmaison. The strain was not broken until the company had risen from dinner, when Napoleon himself be- gan to speak of the inevitable cruelties which history charged against rulers from the time of the Roman Emperors, abruptly concluding with the exclamatory declaration : ' ' They wish to destroy the Revolution in attacking my person, for I, I, I am the Revolution!" At once the suggestion was flashed abroad that the only security for the peace of the country and the security of the new order against the old, lay in providing an hereditary succession. Fouche and his police hastily diverted their en- ergies from hunting down plotters against the First Consul to forwarding a plot of their own against the Republic. Five days after the death of the Duke d'Enghien, several electoral colleges obediently responded to their instructions and laid at the feet of Napoleon their appeals that his authority might be perpetuated in his family. The great conspiracy that was still agitating the country served well to make the nation feel its dependence on one mor- tal life, which might be cut off in an instant and leave the country plunged in chaos. ' ' This work we do, this money we risk," the people are represented as saying, "this house we build, these trees we plant — what will become of them if Na- poleon dies?" Establish a dynasty and the royalist assassins would see the uselessness of striking down the head of the government, with a long line of heirs standing behind him, and would cease to disturb the land. Moreover, set up a throne and monarchial Europe would no longer band against France as a menace to kings. The Republic was dead — long live Napoleon! CHAPTER XXI TWICE CROWNED 1804-1805 AGE 34-35 ALL the world's a stage, and for twenty brilliant sea- sons Napoleon was the stage manager. When his audience, which comprised mankind, had grown weary of the melodrama and tragedy of revolutions and wars and murderous plots, he relieved the tension by putting on, in the season of 1804-05, that spectacular production which is' known to history as the Coronation of Napoleon and Josephine. Only the unparalleled, dramatic gifts of the star performer could have saved such a wild extravaganza from degenerating into a farce, and a venerable archbishop who took part in it confessed that if any one in the house had laughed, the show would have been roared off the boards. A novelty-loving world looked on spellbound as France sud- denly was transformed, like a lightning-change artist, from a spartan Republic into a gilded Empire, and her fanatical patriots and Terrorists into humble but gaudy courtiers, while the horrid guillotine, as if by magic, was changed into a sumptuous throne, the bloody pike into a golden sceptre and the red cap of the Revolution into a glittering crown. Even more amazing still was the versatility displayed by the actors in the principal roles. The little charity boy of the King at Brienne twenty years before, the hungering, melan- choly, wandering alien in the street of Paris only ten years before, strutted upon the stage in imperial robes as if born m the purple. And his wife, an alien like himself, who was but yesterday an imprisoned and penniless widow, looked her queenly part to perfection as she came on, followed by a train of princes and princesses, who, a decade ago, had been 167 168 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON stranded on the shore of France, poverty-stricken refugees from the then seinibarbarous Island of Corsica. The curtain raiser of the imperial drama was only a mario- nette show, with Fouche, that glorified plain clothes man, pulling the strings while the puppets of the legislative body went through the motions of offering the crown. The sena- tors ran from their chambers, leaped into their carriages and raced out to the palace of St. Cloud in the tumultuous eager- ness of each to be first at the foot of the new Caesar. There they found him in simple military uniform with Josephine beside him, and, addressing the General of yesterday as "Sire," they duly proclaimed "Napoleon Bonaparte, Em- peror of the French," whereat the cry of "Long live the Em- peror" rang through the palace halls and was echoed by a swarm of suitors in the garden. A gay cavalcade next ap- peared in various squares of Paris, where with the blare of trumpets they acclaimed Napoleon, Emperor, to idly curious and sometimes laughing crowds which at the suggestion of a monarchy a few years before would have drenched those very streets with blood. Last of all, and when the Empire really had been estab- lished three months, the wishes of the country were consulted on the proposal to make "Napoleon Bonaparte Emperor of the French and the imperial dignity hereditary in his natural or adopted descent and in the descent from his brothers Joseph and Louis." The heirs of Lucien and Jerome were excluded from the line of succession because those two Bonapartes had lately married to suit themselves and not their brother. Meanwhile Napoleon had forsaken the camp of his army and forgotten his projected invasion of England in his attention to his multitude of duties as stage director, costumer, car- penter, and property man of the great burlesque which he was busily preparing. 'Tis a pity, but it must be said in frank- ness that his scenario was wholly devoid of invention and that his stage business was altogether old and hackneyed. Prudent nature imposed sharp limitations on this giant to save the world from his thrall. For in showering her gifts upon him she withheld two qualities which, omitted, bound TWICE CROWNED 169 the voyage of his wonderful life in shallows and miseries. He lacked originality and he had no real sense of humour. Had he been original, he would have planned his corona- tion in keeping with the Revolution and the Republic, whose creature he was, and made it imposing by its simplicity. Had he been endowed with a wholesome sense of humour, he would not have disclosed his parvenu spirit by striving vainly to hide his demorcratic origin in a wrapping of tinsel and by aping with Simian tricks the meaningless ceremonials of the dead past. Anxious to disguise all his associates as well as himself, he suddenly made over his brothers, Joseph and Louis, their wives, Julie Clary and Hortense Beauharnais, and his own sisters into princes and princesses. He tricked out uncle Fesch, now Cardinal, as grand almoner, and arrayed eighteen generals, all good republican products, in the trappings of marshals of the Empire, while his two colleagues in the Con- sulate, Cambaceres and LeBrun, became arch chancellor and arch treasurer, and Talleyrand grand chancellor. He commanded Berthier to exchange the proud rank of general, won on the field of battle, for the absurdity of grand master of the hounds, and he concealed General Duroc be- neath the designation of grand marshal of the palace, while Caulaincourt, able statesman, became the imperial hostler, or master of the horse. As he saw those sons of the Revolution parading about in their imperial livery, he laughed in his sleeve : ' ' All I have to do is to put a little gold braid on my virtuous republicans and instantly they become whatever I please to make them." Men who but yesterday would have bent their necks to the guillotine rather than bend their knees to a monarch were as supple in their hinges as if their lives had been passed in loafing about a throne. Napoleon oscillated between admira- tion and contempt for his fawning courtiers, but when he chaffed Fouche for having been one of the men who sent King Louis XVI to his death he received from the regicide a keener thrust: "Yes, Sire; that was the first service I had the happiness of rendering to Your Majesty." 170 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON Napoleon's cynicism was touched, too, by the readiness of the haughty members of the ancient aristocracy to prostrate themselves before the new throne ere its gilding was dry. "I showed them the path to glory and they would not tread it," he said. "I opened my anteroom and they rushed through the door in crowds." Not a few of the old nobles and grande dames were eager applicants for palace places. They were set to work drilling the awkward squad of the new court, teaching the raw recruits from the peasantry and the lower middle class the proper way to enter and back out of a room, curtsey, speak, manage their trains or hold their hats. Encouraged by his success with the stars in the cast, he next showered the crosses of the Legion of Honour on the chorus and the supernumeraries, when, on the great day of the nation, the 14th of July, nobles and hinds knelt before him in an equality of vanity. An intoxication of ambition for personal glory and selfish reward spread over France, which had poured forth the mightiest armies of modern times, raised up peasants to be conquerors of dukes and princes, and fought all Europe single-handed for ten years with- out offering any other prize than the honour of serving the Republic in hunger and rags. Now, however, that "Our Country" had become "My Empire," "Our Government" "My Throne," "Our Army" "My Army," and "We, the People," had become "My Subjects," men no longer sweat for duty, but only for promotion. The manhood of the nation was lost in the mad scramble to receive the new guinea stamp of rank. Discarding his Corsican ancestry, the new monarch chose an entirely different set of forbears. Even the Bourbons were not deemed suitable progenitors, and when it was sug- gested that he should take the old title of King of France, he remarked, "I do not succeed Louis XIV, but Charlemagne." Accordingly he solemnly made an imperial progress to the tomb of his new-found and illustrious forefather at Aix la Chapelle. Having chosen the great Emperor of the Franks as his ancestor, he determined to imitate the principal feature of the TWICE CKOWNED 171 Carlovingian coronation and be anointed by the Vicar of Christ. He would even better the example. Charlemagne went to Rome to be crowned in St. Peter's by Leo III. The new Charlemagne made Rome come to Paris and Pius VII crown him in Notre Dame. The grey walls of Notre Dame had risen for 600 years and more from the "Island of the City," where, in the middle of the Seine, Cassar found a cluster of savage huts that con- stituted the Paris of twenty centuries ago. A jumble of old buildings shut in the great cathedral and Napoleon ordered those structures to be torn down right and left to clear the way for the imperial procession. The work of demolition was pressed by day and night. New platforms and galleries were hastily erected within the church. Streets were paved and all Paris was filled with the chorus of hammers. Workmen took advantage of the great demand for labour to extort unheard-of wages, amounting to as much as 65, 75, and even 80 cents a day. Dressmakers, tailors, and milliners, goldsmiths, and jewellers did a rushing business. The making of crests, a lost art since the Revolution, flourished once more. Napoleon adopted the eagle of Charle- magne for the standards of his legions and the bee as his per- sonal emblem, scattering swarms of bees over his ensign and escutcheon, his palace carpets and draperies. The only me- mento of his native Corsica that appears to have interested him was its emblematic colour, green, which he adopted for the livery of the Empire, a choice that is perpetuated to this day in the national flag of Italy. Isabey, the artist, was ordered, on the eve of the coronation, to prepare seven drawings in colours of the seven scenes to be enacted at Notre Dame. It was an impossible feat within the limits of time. But the resourceful artist purchased all the dolls in Paris and, dressing them up as Emperor, Empress, Pope, princes, chamberlains, equerries, ladies of honour, and the rest, he arranged them on a little stage that was a minia- ture of the church interior. Napoleon was delighted with this clever plan and, calling in the various actors and actresses in his cast, he personally taught them their proper positions. 172 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON A grave crisis arose as the Pope neared Paris in his journey from Rome over the newly constructed Mt. Cenis highway. Where and how should His Majesty receive His Holiness? In his new exaltation Napoleon was extremely anxious not to place himself in a position where he would have to take second place even to the Pope. It was decided, in keeping with the merely theatrical character of the entire coronation, that he should go hunting and meet the Pope informally and by chance. While pretending to be taking part in a hunt in the im- perial forest of Fontainebleau he affected to be surprised by the arrival of the papal party, numbering more than one hun- dred persons. He dismounted, the Pope stepped out of his carriage, and they embraced, after which one of the imperial carriages drove up. The Emperor entered it before the Pope, but he took the seat on the fail her side, which procedure had its compensation for the Pontiff, since it left him the seat on the right. Pius, an amiable and benevolent character, was determined to make the best of every situation and not to bicker with the Emperor. Although he had supposed that his long jour- ney was for the purpose of placing the crown on Napoleon's head, he cheerfully consented to let him crown himself, as the Emperor was determined to receive the crown from no other hands than his own. When he recoiled from the communion as a sacrilege, since he could not partake of it in a spirit of sincerity, the Pontiff consented to its omission, respecting his scruples, probably glad to find he had any in church matters. The Pope was immovable, however, on questions that he re- garded as moral, and carried his point every time. There was one very important condition which he insisted upon from the outset. Napoleon had resolved upon having Josephine crowned, although none of the Bourbon queens had received such an honour since Marie de Medici 200 years before. Yet he had no wife in the eyes of the church, his wedding having taken place in the Revolution, when there were no religious marriages in France. The Pope firmly announced that unless he and Josephine went through a religious cere- TWICE CROWNED 173 mony the church could have no part in her coronation. The imperial will was slow to bend, but in the end and only on the eve of the coronation Napoleon and Josephine knelt before Cardinal Fesch. After eight years their union had received the sanction of the church and the Empress no doubt rose from the Cardinal's blessing with a new feeling of security, for was not the Em- peror bound to her now by a tie that no man could put asun- der? Napoleon's desire to have her crowned, however, would seem to be assurance enough that he had yet no intention of sundering it, and as his thoughts harked back to their first wedding he laughed at the notary, now the imperial notary, who had advised Josephine against marrying a man with nothing but a cloak and a sword; the cloak had been dyed purple and the sword was Charlemagne 's ! As they were breakfasting on the morning of the great day, December 2, 1804, Napoleon placed the crown on Josephine's head that he might enjoy the pretty sight over their coffee and rolls. The Pope was already starting for Notre Dame, with his cross bearer riding ahead on a mule in accordance with the ancient papal custom. It was ten o'clock when Murat led the carbineers, cuiras- siers, chasseurs, and the mamelukes — reminders of the Egyp- tian campaign — out of the courtyard of the Tuileries, followed by the heralds at arms and the carriages of the masters of the ceremonies, the grand officers of the Empire, the great digni- taries and the princesses. Then in solitary state, came a gilded carriage with a crown atop, its eight horses in resplendent harnesses driven by Cassar, the coachman, who had galloped to safety past the infernal machine. Pages in green and gold were perched behind, while all about pranced the horses of the aides-de-camp. Within sat Napoleon, two white aigrettes nodding above his black velvet cap, surrounded with a band of diamonds, clasped together by the celebrated $2,000,000 Regent solitaire. His purple cloak showed its white satin lining as it hung from his left shoulder, and beneath it was a coat of purple velvet faced with white and glittering with gems and gold. His waistcoat 174 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON was buttoned with diamonds, while gold embroidered white velvet breeches reached to the diamond garters of his gold embroidered silk stockings, whose clocks bore the imperial coronet. His $80 pair of velvet boots with diamond buckles were white as snow and gleaming with gold. No operatic tenor could have outshone the Little Corporal that proud day, when he exulted to his brother, "Joseph, if father could only see us ! " Yet mother did not deign to be a looker-on at the show! Beside the Emperor sat Josephine, in whose smiling face no trace of age had been left by her skilful maids. Her white satin gown was trimmed with silver and gold and sprinkled over with golden bees. Diamonds sparkled on her head, on her neck, in her ears and in her girdle. Facing the imperial couple were the Princes Joseph and Louis. The 80,000 soldiers assembled in the city for the corona- tion, left little room in the streets for the people who were not largely represented, and seldom was a cheer raised. As Napoleon passed the Church of St. Roch in the Rue St. Honore he could see the first flight in the steps he was climb- ing to the throne ; for by those steps of St. Roch, the Man on Horseback became master of Paris nine years before. In the archbishop's palace by the cathedral, the imperial couple changed to their coronation costumes, Napoleon put- ting on a circlet of gold laurel leaves and getting into a white satin petticoat! Next he donned an eighty-pound purple robe and cape, ermine lined and covered with golden bees, while Josephine put on a highly embroidered velvet mantle, twenty ells in length, and with $2000 worth of ermine for its lining. This robe, which was draped to leave her bust un- covered and her figure free, was fastened to her left shoulder and held in place by a clasp at her golden girdle studded with rose coloured gems. Her crown had eight branches, set with diamonds, banded by eight large emeralds, while amethysts shone from the bandeau on her brow, and four rows of mag- nificent pearls, entwined with diamond covered leaves formed her diadem. In all she wore on her pretty head $250,000 worth of pearls and diamonds. TWICE CROWNED 175 Meanwhile the great throng of nearly twenty thousand shivered in the cold cathedral as they waited and watched for the next scene to be enacted within its walls, where in less than a decade the "torch of truth" had blazed on the vener- able altar and a ballet dancer had been enthroned in the choir to be worshipped as the ' ' goddess of reason. ' ' Probably no other bosom in the immense assemblage felt the same emotions as that which had nursed the Emperor. For he had not forgotten his foster mother but had brought Camilla Ilari from Corsica and installed her in a post of honour where she could see her "little Nabulionello" put on the crown of empire. It was almost noon, when at last the heralds and pages ap- peared at the portal of the church, followed by the marshals of the Empire. Those war dogs of the fallen Republic came in with mincing steps, one laden with a cushion on which lay Josephine's ring, another a basket for her cloak, another her crown on a cushion. Then entered Josephine, her imperial self, between her first chamberlain and her first equerry, with the Bonaparte prin- cesses holding up her robe and looking like captives at a chariot's wheel. Walking behind with courtly tread was Mine, de Lavelette, daughter of that Fanny Beauharnais who had befriended Josephine when she was the neglected wife of Fanny's nephew, and a stranger in France. Beside her marched an uncomely, unfortunate hunchback, but this was Mme. de la Rochefaucauld and perhaps the only person in the entire imperial suite who ever had stepped foot in the old court of France. Next there came more war dogs carrying Napoleon's trin- kets, and then the Emperor, grasping in one of his gold-em- broidered gloves "the hand of justice," while in the other he held the sceptre with an eagle perched on top of it. Joseph and Louis, Cambaceres and LeBrun followed him as they held up his burdensome robe, and the cry of "Vive l'Empereur!" rang through the groined aisles of the vast and lofty edifice. As Napoleon made his bow to the Pope he touched the gos- pels with both hands. Then he and Josephine descended and 176 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON knelt at the foot of the altar, where the Pontiff anointed their heads and hands. The Emperor put on his ring, sword and crown, and next bent over to crown the Empress who was kneeling at his feet. The religious ceremony was finished with a kiss from the Pope on Napoleon's cheek and his bene- diction, "May the Emperor live forever!" A herald-at-arms now proclaimed "the most glorious and august Emperor Napoleon," who, however, was still boyish enough to prod uncle Fesch with his sceptre as he was leaving the scene. The grandiose spectacle was at an end. Soon Notre Dame was wrapped again in the solemn stillness of the centuries, Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, And marching single in an endless file. Only a solitary lamp lit the dusk of the waning day in the great nave, haunted by the ghostly past, where above all the echoes of the ages there still resounds Pius' invocation, "Vivat Imperator in eternum. " At Napoleon's appearance in Milan in May, 1805, to be crowned King of Italy, the Milanese outdid the Parisians at his French coronation. No recollection of heavy sacrifices in a great revolution for the overthrow of a monarchy cast its shadow upon the Italians as they rejoiced at the setting up of a new throne. Besides, was not their new sovereign an Italian like themselves? To grace the brow of the new King of Italy the famous crown of the Lombards was brought forth. That precious heirloom of the ages is jealously guarded behind no less than six locks in a casket with doors of silver and steel beneath a marble canopy in the cathedral of the royal town of Monza, a few miles out of Milan. There curious pilgrims may mount a platform and look down upon the rude coronet of the Long- beards, all gold and gems except for a slender inner band of iron, which tradition says was made from a nail of the Saviour's crucifixion. It was not in that simple old church of Monza, however, that Napoleon was consecrated, but with all pomp in the beau- TWICE CROWNED 177 tiful cathedral of Milan, from whose noble altar he took the iron crown to place it upon his head with his own hands So pleased was he with his performance in that last scene of his great spectacular drama that he exclaimed on returning to the palace, "Well, did you see the ceremony? Did you hear what I said when I placed the crown on my head?" And he lifted his voice in imitation of the tones that had rung through the cathedral, "God has given it to me. Woe to him who shall touch it ! " CHAPTER XXII THE UNCONQUERED SEA 1801-1805 AGE 32-36 THE green lea that crowns with the velvet turf of Eng- land the chalk cliffs of Folkestone is hardly lost to the view of the passengers by the steamer that is bearing them to the shore of France, when they see a tall and beautiful Doric column rising from the sand dunes of Boulogne. That shining white obelisk is the boundary stone of the Empire of Napoleon, and on its top stands the bronze effigy of the man who spent fifteen years of his life in a futile effort to cross the English Channel. As the boat draws nearer the end of its voyage from the English isle to the continent of Europe, the ruined tower of Caligula is seen on the brow of the yellow heights, where the legionaries of Rome planted it in the fortieth year of the Christian era. Hard by, the conscripts of Napoleon reared for him a timbered palace in the third year of the nineteenth century, where he could dwell in the midst of his nearly two hundred thousand warriors who were ready at his nod to bear him on their arms into the palace of St. James. And down alongside the quay, where the Folkestone steamer now ties up, 1000 boats waited to ferry them over the twenty-nine miles of water that rolled between them and their goal. Some of the craft are afloat to this day, the barelegged fisherwomen of the old town insist, and are numbered among their herring fleet. But they have never crossed the channel and grated on an English beach ! The Peace of Amiens, which really was no peace at all, but a mere truce in an age-old, irrepressible conflict between France and England, had lasted less than fourteen months, when the clash of arms was renewed. It was only the resump- 178 THE UNCONQUERED SEA 179 tion of a vendetta which had embroiled the two countries since the Norman conquest and in pursuit of which they had hunted each other to the ends of the earth, from the Ganges to the St. Lawrence and from Yorktown to Acre. When, like two winded pugilists, they agreed in the Treaty of Amiens to lay aside the gloves after ten years in the ring, the old score was left unsettled, with one the mistress of the ocean, with one the master of the land and each at the mercy of the other. The French shore was England's door stoop on the European continent, while the British Isles and the British rock of Gibraltar were the gateposts on the lanes that led from France to the highway of the sea. England, with immense dominions beyond the ocean, had all but stripped the French of their once great colonial em- pire, while France dominated Europe as never before. The British protested against Napoleon's annexation of Piedmont and his active influence in Switzerland, where he was making over the Swiss Confederation into the modern republic that we know to-day. The jealousy of the London statesmen was aroused to the greenest hue when they saw him, by invitation of the German states, acting as mediator be- tween them, and remaking the map of Germany. In the midst of the quarrel, England had faithfully carried out her treaty agreement to restore the Cape of Good Hope to the Dutch and relinquish Egypt to the Turks. She also sent home at her own expense the remnant of Napoleon's Egyptian army, which she had captured when she took the country. She continued, however, to hold on to Malta, and Napoleon insisted that England must not remain in control of that key to the eastern Mediterranean. In the end, the controversy thus narrowed down to the pos- session of a barren rock twenty miles long and nine miles wide. In the temper that had been aroused on both sides any bone would suffice to bring on a fight. The war began in Josephine's salon at the Tuileries one Sunday afternoon. "When Napoleon entered the circle which had formed in the drawing-room, he walked up to Robert R. Livingston, the American minister, and made a few pleasant 180 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON remarks, after which he strode over to Lord Whitworth, the British ambassador. ' ' So, ' ' he demanded of the Briton in his deepest tone, ''you are determined to go to war?" A diplomat being a gentleman who is sent abroad to lie for his country, the ambassador insisted, of course, that his nation was only desirous of peace. But the First Consul, in angry accents, insisted that England was not keeping her promises and was plotting to bring on hostilities. "Why these preparations for war?" he sternly inquired. "Against whom are you taking these measures? . . . But if you arm, I shall also arm. If you will fight, I shall also fight. You may pos- sibly destroy France, but you never can intimidate her!" As the First Consul left the room, he repeated, "Woe to them who do not respect their treaties!" When the door closed behind him, it closed upon the Peace of Amiens and the peace of the world. Thus began, in the spring of 1803, the titanic war which was to draw into its vor- tex all the nations, until the battle line should stretch from Moscow to Detroit, and end only at Waterloo in 1815. Shortly after the opening of hostilities, Napoleon pitched his camp at Boulogne in sight of the chalk cliffs of Albion and for two years he bent his giant energies to the formation of the mightiest invading fleet ever launched against England. Boasting that he would "jump the ditch," he declared that Caesar's expedition was "child's play," and that "mine is the enterprise of the Titans. ' ' The Roman had only 800 boats but the Corsican commanded that there should be built for him no less than 2000 boats. In one respect and the most important, the latest invader could not claim any superiority to that first recorded invader of England. After 1800 years had passed since Caesar's in- vasion, Napoleon still must depend on sails and oars to carry him across the channel, as the invention of aerial, steam and submarine navigation was then only faintly dawning. While Robert Fulton, with his plans for steamboats and torpedoes, vainly offered his inventions to the two powers that were struggling for the mastery of the waters, Napoleon's ship- yards were busily launching his cockle shells and he restlessly THE UNCONQUERED SEA 181 moved up and down the coast, which he lined from Havre to Antwerp with sentries, cannon and telegraphic semaphores. The "Army of England," as he called his invading force, was daily put through drills in embarking and disembarking until every man knew his boat and his place in it and 25,000 could clamber aboard in ten minutes. On the other side the channel, the "Great Terror" held England in its grip. Had not this Corsican imp raced twice through British fleets over the 1400 miles of blue water be- tween France and Egypt? Had he not leaped the Alps? Could a few miles of sea set bounds to his activity? AVhile the credulous peasantry shivered as they listened to stories of his having already landed and, like a wild man, secreted himself in the haunted depths of the neighbouring woods, where he only awaited his good time to pounce upon them, the King "in daily expectation that Bonaparte will at- tempt his threatened invasion," as George III wrote, made provision for the flight of the royal family beyond the Severn. The army of defence was quickly swollen to 300,000 and 400,000 by zealous patriots determined to make good Bri- tannia's dearest boast that "Britons never shall be slaves," and when the supply of muskets was exhausted by the volun- teers, they grasped pikes, and even pitchforks. Huge piles of combustibles were made ready to be turned into bonfires as a signal of the approach of the nation's ogre. Forts sprang up about London, and some of the seventy -five martello watch towers which were erected on the coast still may be seen. All the while a cordon of British ships of war, ' ' those raven- ing wolves of the sea," as Napoleon called them, was drawn about the terrified land. But there was not a French naval vessel afloat in the Channel. The French warships were all sealed up in the harbours of the Atlantic and the Mediter- ranean, with English blockading fleets at every harbour mouth. How, then, could an army cross the Channel and land on the English shore ? History cannot keep a straight face while recording Napoleon's solution of the problem. "Eight hours of calm or fog," he said, "will decide the fate of the uni- 182 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON verse." If the waters would be still that long, he argued that his invading hosts could row across while the British ships lay becalmed and helpless spectators of his descent upon the doomed island. On the other hand, if fortune should choose to cover the waters with a fog, he contended that his 2000 boats could dodge through the enemy's fleet. Some historians rejecting all that mad folly, which Na- poleon talked for two years as he paced to and fro beside his telescope levelled at Dover castle, have persuaded themselves that his whole scheme of invasion was a mere ruse to enable him to marshal his forces for the campaign which came to a climax at Austerlitz. But there is evidence enough that be- neath his nonsense about rowing or dodging into England he concealed an elaborate plan for assembling a great naval fleet that should swoop down upon the British men-of-war and sweep a passage for his army. "Leave it to me," he said as he kept his secret locked in his breast. "I will surprise the world by the grandeur and rapid- ity of my strokes." To distract the British blockaders of his harbours and give his imprisoned naval fleets an opportunity to escape, he darkened the air with the cloud of a gigantic deception. Throwing up fortifications on the southern shore of Italy and marching thousands of soldiers down the penin- sula, he lured Nelson away from Toulon, out of which the French fleet stole and sailed unopposed through the Straits of Gibraltar. Assembling an army of 20,000 in the west of France, with a noisy pretence that it was destined for Ireland, he hoped thus to distract the British blockading ships off Brest, enable his own vessels to slip out of that harbour and, joining the Toulon fleet, suddenly fall upon the Channel squadron of the British. "The English know not what awaits them," he remarked enigmatically to his suite when he heard of the escape of his Toulon battleships. "If we have the power of crossing for but twelve hours England will be no more." But as he waited in vain for his ships to come, he asked for even less time and pleaded with fate, "Let us be masters of the Channel for six hours and we shall be masters of the world." THE UNCONQUERED SEA 183 Still his prudent commander at Brest held back. "Start, start at once!" he commanded and implored him. "In your hands are the destinies of the world." But his fleets did not appear on the bare western horizon. On the contrary, his Toulon ships had already run into Cadiz and the British watchdogs never took their eyes off the rest of his vessels. With gloom and anger clouding his brow, Napoleon paced the sandy bounds of the unconquered sea and bitterly mut- tered to himself in his impotent rage, "The English will be- come very small when France shall have two or three admirals willing to die." But Mars had failed to snatch the trident from Neptune. The master of the land had been thwarted by the mistress of the sea. CHAPTER XXIII THE FALL OF VIENNA 1805 AGE 36 WHEN Napoleon raised his camp at Boulogne at the end of the summer of 1805, he turned his back upon England in a retreat from her invincible strong- hold, the sea, but only to strike her down, if he could, amid the hills of Germany. He marched away to conquer the coast of Europe and, sealing every harbour against British trade, leave England marooned in her fog. Thenceforth he battled to that end alone, whether in Aus- tria or in Germany or in Spain or in Russia. All the Na- poleonic wars had no other object than this. They were not for the conquest of lands, but of harbours. England had closed the sea to France and France would close the continent to her. "To live without commerce, without fleets, without colonies and subject to the unjust will of an enemy," Na- poleon said in his proclamation at the opening of the war, "is not to live like Frenchmen." He made war to win for France dominions beyond the sea, while England made war to protect the foundations she was only then laying of that world-wide British Empire which finally was won at Waterloo. The destiny of Asia, Africa, and Australia, and, perhaps, the Americas was determined on the battlefields of Europe. The allies of France and England changed sides from cam- paign to campaign, but the two principals in the long and bloody duel remained the same. They are the rival powers, always contending for the mastery of the world, England with her ships and her wealth, France with the sword of Napoleon, which was no more than a weapon borrowed for this earth- 184 THE PALL OF VIENNA 185 shaking struggle between conflicting national impulses that swept over Europe like wrestling tides. It was an irrepressible conflict. Many historians, transpos- ing cause and effect, represent it as a war for the advancement of one man's personal ambition. But it began while Napoleon was yet idling in Corsica. It would have gone on to the end had he never stepped foot on the shores of France. Had the French found a leader less resourceful, doubtless the final de- cision would have been more quickly rendered. But, on the other hand, the result might not have been so decisive and lasting. It is a libel on mankind to say that all the nations which Napoleon led to the slaughter, year after year for ten years, followed him merely to flatter his self-conceit and poured out their blood only to feed his appetite for power. He was but the agent of a mighty force that swept kings and peoples on its irresistible current. The glory of the Alexanders, the Cassars, and the Napoleons is no more than the foam on the breakers of the great movements of men. But by watching them we may best mark the rise and fall of the surging waves of human history. The chief monarchies of Europe leagued themselves for the overthrow of the French Republic in 1792 and again in 1799. A third coalition was formed, in 1805, to take from the Em- pire the conquests it had inherited from the Republic. Of all those coalitions England was the soul and the purse. The French could not fight her on the seas, but she could fight them on the land, not always with English soldiers, perhaps, but with her pounds, shillings and pence, and with the dogged persistence of her national character. The ruling passion of Austria and her Emperor, Francis I, was to recover in Italy and Germany the rich provinces they had lost in two disastrous wars with France. Russia was im- pelled by a national ambition to make herself the foremost power in Europe and by the vanity of her youthful Czar, Alexander I, to make himself the arbiter of the nations. Meanwhile Prussia timidly held back and disappointed the Allies. 186 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON The alliance was completed and the campaign outlined early in August. The Allies adopted, however, the old familiar plan of Napoleon's enemies, conceived in their overweening desire to make war without taking the chances of war. Their unchanging idea was to play the game safe and make success certain. They never ventured to hurl them- selves upon Napoleon in full force and stake everything on one campaign for his complete overthrow. He used therefore regularly to lay down for the information of his generals this proposition : ' ' The enemy, in the Austrian man- ner, will make three attacks. Ignore two of them, and throw yourselves with all your forces on the third." Now the Allies, under Austrian influence, were still further dividing their strength to make several attacks upon him, first on the banks of the Danube in Germany; second, in Hanover; third, in northern Italy, and fourth, in southern Italy. Moreover they sought to strike him while his back was turned and he was pacing the shore at Boulogne, still absorbed in his project for invading England. An Austrian armj', therefore, stealthily moved up the Danube at the end of August, and a Russian army promised to hasten forward in time to join it by October 20; but the Austrians failed to take account of the interesting fact that the Russian calendar is twelve days behind theirs. An even more serious miscalculation was made by the wise men of Vienna. They reckoned that Napoleon would not wake up from his dream of capturing England until it was so late that he could not possibly hurry an army to meet the allied forces by the Danube before November 10. AVatching him closely, while their army silently crept toward his frontier, they flattered themselves that he remained oblivious to his peril. They were delighted to see him dawdling away his days at Boulogne or at St. Cloud in seem- ing idleness; but he was whispering, however, that it was a time to appear pusillanimous. The Paris papers contained no mention of the impending war or of the movement of hostile forces toward France. Nor were they permitted to hint that the Emperor had lifted his THE FALL OF VIENNA 187 camp at Boulogne, had headed 200,000 Frenchmen toward the Rhine, had ordered Bernadotte to march the French army of occupation out of Hanover for the purpose of joining the Grand Army and had directed two minor armies in Italy to parry the attacks aimed at him there. When in due time his armies were at the Rhine, he sud- denly cut off the outer world from France so that not a hint of military movements should escape to the enemy. No for- eign mails were permitted to leave the country. Even the despatches of the ambassadors at Paris were held up, and not a horse was allowed to go across the frontier unless he carried an army courier. France became in a day a land of im- penetrable silence, under cover of which her army crossed the Rhine late in September. The army which sped over the Rhine had undergone many changes in the more than two years since Napoleon first mar- shalled it on the sandy heights of Boulogne. It had been trained by master hands in a great school of war, from which it went forth the best drilled, the most magnificent military body the world had ever seen. Its brilliant accoutrements were unstained by service in the field, and its soldiers in their queues, many of them wearing ear-rings, were as fresh and spirited as colts dashing out of a pasture. Yet they were not strangers to battle. For although no foe had ventured in five years to meet triumphant France in combat, a full half of those 200,000 were battle veterans, and a fourth of them had fought through all the victorious wars of the Republic for ten years. The very name of the organisation was changed. It ceased to be the Army of England when it turned its face from the sea toward Germany and became the Grand Army, bearing aloft on its standards for the first time the imperial eagles, which it was thenceforth to follow from Boulogne to "Water- loo, but which, after all, is only an easy march of 125 miles ! Moreover, while it tarried by the shore of the English Chan- nel, the army had experienced a deeper change, a change of allegiance. It had lost its soul, and a new spirit had stolen through the ranks of those one time republican warriors. 188 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON They had come together in the name of the French people, but they marched to war now in the name of one man. An idol had displaced an ideal in their devotion and they felt no more the old stirrings of patriotism in their blood. Never again were they to fight for their country and for themselves, but ever after for their Emperor and his Empire. They marched and battled no longer to carry liberty to others, but to win glory for themselves, for had not every man of them been promised a marshal's baton in his knapsack? Where a generous if fanatical passion for freedom had glowed in their breasts, personal ambition now ruled. True, they still bore in a silver case the heart of La Tour d'Auvergne, that Bayard of the Revolution, that spartan sol- dier of the Republic, who despised rank, scorned promotion and accepted no other reward for his valour than the simple title of the first grenadier of France. On their rolls they still carried his name as a synonym of modest, unselfish love of country. At every roll-call of the 46th demi-brigade there still rang out the name of La Tour d'Auvergne and the solemn response of the oldest grenadier: "Dead on the field of honour. ' ' As the Grand Army marched by his grave in Bavaria — another French Republic has since given his bones sepulture in the Invalides at Paris — it was with ranks closed, drums beating and swords lifted. Yet, for all that now meaning- less ritual, the spirit of La Tour d'Auvergne was as dead among the soldiers who pressed after the eagles of Napoleon as the France for which he had given his life. Napoleon's bulletins themselves reflected the change that had come over France and the army. The conquering watch- words of his Italian campaign, "Liberty, Fraternity, Equal- ity," were discarded. It was enough for him to say to his army now, "Soldiers, your Emperor is in the midst of you," and to bid the nation, "let 100,000 more Frenchmen come and range themselves under my flags." "My soldiers are my children," the one-time sons of the Revolution were flattered to be told by the Emperor. Yet they looked upon him more as a comrade than as a father. THE FALL OF VIENNA 189 He was still their "Little Corporal" in the same simple uni- form and three-cornered black hat that he wore when only a general of the Republic. None of the old moustaches, a high officer tells us, would have dared to speak to the lowest sublieutenant with the free- dom they showed to Napoleon himself as he went his nightly round of the bivouac, stopping to talk with the men by their camp fires, asking them what they were cooking in their steam- ing pots and smiling with amusement at jesting familiarities which he would not have tolerated among his marshals. Those dignitaries were not permitted to take the slightest liberties, and were required to show themselves duly humble in the imperial presence. They had their reward, for Napoleon's obligations to them were amply repaid with money and rank. But to the poor multitude who were fighting his battles for five sous a day he presented himself as a kindly friend and powerful champion. He would listen to the complaint of any private in the ranks against his superiors, and he abolished flogging in his earliest campaigns, although until then Europe never had seen an army move except under the lash. He did not pretend to feed his soldiers, however, for he re- fused to encumber himself with magazines of supplies or burden the French taxpayers with the cost of maintaining the army. The men were turned loose on the people of the war-stricken lands, to forage for themselves. They ravaged the shops, the cottages, the gardens, and dug up with their bayonets the little potato patches of the peasantry. Although they were moving through friendly countries and not in the land of the enemy, no attention was paid to the infuriated outcries of the devastated inhabitants. Napoleon calmly assured his generals that the people really did not care if they were robbed, and it was a saying among the soldiers that ' ' a man is like a sheaf of wheat ; the more you beat him the more he yields." Accordingly, the peasants were mauled until they gave up their last copper. As the French marched through Germany in the rain and sleet and mud of a cold October, they stripped the villages as they went, leaving them bare for the rear columns. Some- 190 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON times the hindmost floundered through the muddy roads for days without coming upon a pig, chicken or even a loaf of bread. But it was part of Napoleon's military calculations that as long as their legs lasted, hungry soldiers marched fastest, spurred on, as they were, by their eagerness to find something to eat. The army, having crossed the Rhine at five different points, descended upon the unsuspecting enemy like the five out- spread members of a monstrous hand prepared to grasp its prey. Napoleon had brought his forces into the theatre of war full seven weeks before his enemies had supposed it pos- sible for him to confront them. Meanwhile General Mack, the Austrian commander, was sit- ting down by the Danube within the fortifications of the old town of Ulm, on the borders of Bavaria and Wiirtemberg, quietly and confidently awaiting the arrival of his Russian Allies. Once the allied armies had come together, they planned to go forth to meet the belated French in the Black Forest. For, of course, Napoleon would come through the forest. French armies always had come that way. Looking straight ahead, certain that Napoleon was intend- ing to attack him squarely in front, Mack had no eyes for Ney, Lannes, Soult, Davout, and Marmont, on his right, as their columns were bending toward him from the north. "When their presence did dawn upon his understanding at last, he thought they must be engaged in some other campaign, perhaps against Bohemia ! Soon he turned to find that the foe, instead of being before him, had got in behind him. For 120,000 French, having crossed the Danube without encoun- tering resistance, were barring both the Russian line of ad- vance and the Austrian line of retreat to Vienna. Prisoners were gathered in by the thousands, often without having an opportunity to offer the least defence. Ulm quickly became a cage, with from 25,000 to 27,000 white coats and 800 guns caught in it. The leaden skies which had lowered upon the beleaguered town, burst into a mocking smile at its fall and a brilliant sun beamed upon the con- queror as he stood on the hillside at the northern gate in the THE FALL OF VIENNA 191 midst of his dazzling staff to receive the surrender of the stronghold. While the captive army silently marched out to fling its arms at the feet of Napoleon, the victorious French filled the valley of the Danube with their gloating cry, "Vive l'Empereur !" The campaign of Ulm was at an end. An Austrian army of perhaps eighty thousand men had been smashed in three weeks, and altogether above fifty thousand prisoners had been taken. The world stood astounded by the rapidity and com- pleteness of Napoleon's success, which he seemed to have won by wizardry. As the new Emperor drained the cup of victory, however, he found a bitter draught mingled with its sweetness. For the day after the fall of Ulm, the Battle of Trafalgar was fought off the coast of Spain. Nelson, dying victorious in the cockpit of his flagship, had won for England a supremacy on the sea which left her absolutely unchallenged in European waters for 109 years when, in 1914, another Emperor threw down the gauge. Swallowing the bitter draught of Trafalgar, Napoleon, with redoubled determination, turned anew to conquer England on the land. As he marched on Vienna at full speed, the Aus- trian imperial family and aristocracy took flight. The Em- peror Francis' fourteen-year-old daughter, the Archduchess Marie Louise, found herself once more, as eight years before, driven by Napoleon from her palace home. The girlish wan- derer among the castles of Hungary and Galicia wrote a friend from one of her refuges: "God must be very wroth with us. Our family is all scattered ; my dear parents are at Olmutz; we are at Kaschan; there is a third colony at Of en. " But she strove to keep up her courage with the philosophic assurance that "the time must come when the usurper will lose heart. Perhaps God has let him go so far to make his ruin more complete, when He shall have abandoned him." When the conqueror appeared in front of the walls of Vienna, in November, the very walls which 120 years before had stood like a dike to stop a flood of Turks from pouring over Christendom, the gates of the city were opened to him 192 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON without waiting for him to knock. Without firing a shot, he had become the master of a city with a population of 100,000 inside the walls and large suburbs lying outside its forti- fications. For the first time, he entered the conquered capital of a sovereign and made himself at home in the palace of a fugitive monarch, Marie Louise's favourite home, the lovely Schonbrunn. The defenders of Vienna had vanished before him only to hasten northward and unite with the Russians among the hills of Moravia, where the Czar Alexander and Emperor Francis were confidently planning to crush the Corsican up- start who had dared to assume the imperial rank. CHAPTER XXIV THE SUN OF AUSTERLITZ 1805 AGE 36 SOME great battlefields are like some great men; the closer you come to them the smaller they appear. Austerlitz and the sun of Austerlitz, for example, are known to every schoolboy in the western hemisphere. They spell success the world round, just as Waterloo is synonymous with defeat. Yet the nearer Austerlitz is approached, the more obscure it becomes. It is not even a dot on the official railway map of Austria. At Brunn, in whose Austrian castle Silvio Pellico, the Italian patriot-prisoner, wrote his sad and moving tale, ' ' My Prisons, ' ' and where Napoleon's army made its headquarters in the open- ing winter of 1805, the guide books and the hotel people, with all their volubility about the surrounding attractions and neighbouring excursions, are reticent concerning Austerlitz, fifteen miles away. Even the 3500 inhabitants of the village of Austerlitz itself have to think twice before they can call to mind the name by which their little town is celebrated on the pages of history. For they are mostly Moravians who speak the Czechish tongue, and they call their place Slavkova. Thus the shining name of Austerlitz, which is dimmer at Vienna than it is at San Francisco, vanishes quite at the gates of the town. Not only is Austerlitz not Austerlitz, but there never was a battle of Austerlitz. Not a volley was fired within the limits of the town. Two Emperors rode out of the village one De- cember morning to wrestle with a third Emperor in front of Austerlitz. But they did not fight in the town or for the 193 194 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON town. It better suited Napoleon, however, to emphasise his victory by naming the battle for the village in which the two defeated Emperors had made their headquarters and to write his bulletin in the very room from which he drove them forth in the snow of a winter 's night. Napoleon not only named the battle to please his fancy, but he also chose the battle ground and even the battle day. Ar- rived at Brunn, the Moravian capital which lies at the foot of a castled hill ninety miles north of Vienna, the heir of the Revolution loudly clamoured for peace in his appeals to "my brother," the heir of Charles V, and "my brother," the heir of Peter the Great, who were at the camp of the allied army at Olmutz, some fifty miles north and near the Russian fron- tier. His eager entreaties, as he shrewdly intended, were mis- taken for a craven confession of weakness and fear. And they only served to embolden the imperial Allies to give him battle, then and there, the very thing he was seeking. When he saw the welcome signs that his two "brothers," Alexander and Francis, were sufficiently flattered in their conceit that they had caught him in a desperate plight and saw them preparing to smite him, he galloped out on the road to Olmutz for the purpose of getting the lay of the land be- tween him and the enemy. Pausing at a point a dozen miles to the east of Brunn, he studied the scene in silence. In his strategic imagination Napoleon was fighting then the battle of Austerlitz, for the field of that great combat was spread before him. On the eastern horizon he saw the Little Carpathian Mountains rising to form the Hungarian frontier forty miles away; but his practised eye lingered on the roll- ing plains and gentle hills, little dales and brooks, ponds and marshes lying in front of the village of Austerlitz. The Allies would come down the road from Olmutz, he argued, while his own outposts fell back before their advance and steadily drew them on to the battle ground, where his forces would be more than half concealed as they crouched behind a range of hills west of Austerlitz. Naturally and properly the Allies would aim to get around him on the right THE SUN OF AUSTERLITZ 195 or south, in their effort to cut his lines to Vienna and to Brunn and place themselves between him and those cities. Napoleon, however, relied on their attempting, after the fashion of his foes, to do the right thing in the wrong way. He knew they would flinch from staking everything on a single move and would not have the courage to throw themselves upon his right wing in a solid body. In their anxiety to make success certain, they would make it impossible by sending only a part of their army against his right, while they sent another part against his left. Moreover, he took note of the fact that their principal move- ment would have to be made across a brook and between a high hill and some ponds, natural conditions that would aid him to retard and embarrass them. And while they were striking at his two wings, he would hold the main body of his forces in his hand, ready to hurl it like a thunderbolt at their centre and thus break their army in two. It would be the old story repeated so often on the fields of Napoleon's vic- tories. His foes would divide to attack him while he united to attack them. After he had finished fighting the battle in his fancy, as he sat in his saddle on the high road, he turned to his waiting and watching staff. "Make a careful note of all these heights," he commanded. "It is here you will fight before two months are over." His only mistake was that the enemy did not wait two months but only two weeks to meet him on the ground he had chosen. The chief military commanders of the allied armies pru- dently counselled the adoption of a waiting policy and de- fensive measures until, by making a wide detour, the other Austrian army in the south had come to join them. But Emperor Francis was impatient to recover his lost capital and dominions, and the twenty-eight-year-old Czar was burning with eagerness to see a battle, as also were the young nobles who surrounded him. Many were certain that Napoleon had with him no more than 40,000 men. The monarchs, therefore, taking matters in their own un- 196 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON trained hands, determined to move at once. Soon the Allies came upon French outposts along the Brunn road, but these fled before them and left the way open to Austerlitz, where the two Emperors found a pleasant chateau for their head- quarters. Napoleon had been riding over the field all day and watch- ing the position of the Allies. From the hills behind which he had posted most of his 75,000 men he looked across a plain to the encampment of the enemy two miles in front of Aus- terlitz on the banks of a little river that flows to the west of the town. Out of the plain between the two armies rose the big, steep hill of Pratzen, which any general in Europe, except Na- poleon, would have seized upon as an admirable position to defend. But he had come to Moravia to destroy an army, not to hold a hill. He left the hill, therefore, without a man on it in order that the Allies might not be diverted from their nicely laid plans. He could have delivered "only an ordinary battle," from the heights of Pratzen, he informed those marshals who were surprised to see him neglect the tempting opportunity the hill offered him for the posting of troops and artillery, and an "ordinary battle" would necessarily have meant an- other battle afterward. To Napoleon a war was not a series of sparring matches. On the contrary, he went into every battle with the purpose of fighting to a finish, and he meant now to end the war with one staggering blow over the heart of his foe. "Whatever they may say, believe me," so ran a maxim to which he re- mained faithful, "a man fights with cannon as with his fists." Even while he gazed at the plain the day before the battle, he saw the left wing of the allied army pushing all the time toward the southerly foot of the hill, and he remarked in a tone of quiet rejoicing: "Before to-morrow night that army will be mine." It was beginning the operation which would expose its heart to his blow. So clearly did he foresee the character of the battle, he took his entire army into his confidence and in his proclamation, THE SUN OF AUSTERLITZ 197 which was read at the head of every battalion, he made this extraordinary announcement : ' ' We occupy a formidable position, and while the Russians and Austrians are marching to turn my right wing, their flank will lie open to us. ' ' That comradic frankness was followed in the proclamation by a remarkable pledge. Most commanders, when seeking to inspire their men, promise to share their perils. Napoleon adopted the opposite course and appealed to his soldiers to be his shield, his protectors from danger. This unique bulletin is documentary evidence of the affection and loyalty in which the Grand Army held its commander-in-chief: "Soldiers, I, myself, will direct all your battalions. If with your accus- tomed bravery you carry disorder and confusion into the enemy's ranks I shall hold myself distant from the fire. But should victory for a moment seem doubtful, you shall see your Emperor expose himself to the foremost strokes." A very dark night fell upon the field. Through the hazy mist, Napoleon saw the enemy's lights gleaming dimly; but he had the French fires put out in order that his position might not be disclosed. His bivouac had been set up on a hill not far from the high road, between Brunn and Austerlitz and five miles from the headquarters of the Allies. That imperial habitation was only a miserable hut made of straw and the limbs of trees, with a hole in the roof to let the smoke ascend from the fire — it was a cold first of December. After a brief sleep in the evening, the Emperor rose to take one more view of his own lines and those of his foe. As he walked past his silent army, one of his escorts lighted his way with a torch. The sentries seeing his face in the flickering glare raised a cry of "Vive l'Empereur. " The shout ran through the camp and roused the sleeping soldiers from their dreams of la Belle France. As they struggled to their feet and shook themselves awake, they pulled the straw from their beds on the frozen ground and lighting it, tens of thousands of torches soon were flaring in the inky blackness of the night, while the thunderous cheers of the Grand Army rolled among the hills. The sudden burst of shouting roused the Russians and Aus- 198 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON trians and some of their chiefs were alarmed anew lest the demonstration were a ruse to cover the retreat of the French. But the Grand Army really was celebrating Napoleon 's corona- tion. Some one had passed the word that it was the night be- fore the anniversary of that event. The Empire was one year old and its defenders, while they pranced about the Emperor, joined in a joyous celebration of its first birthday. In their jubilation, they forgot their hunger, for nothing but bread had been issued in forty-eight hours, one huge loaf for every eight men. Napoleon, seeing potatoes roasting in a fire, stooped over and picked one of them out. As he ate it he asked a grenadier between bites, "How do you like these pigeons ? " ' ' Humph, ' ' the man replied, ' ' they are better than nothing, but too much like Lenten food." "Well, old man," the Emperor promised, ' ' help me to dislodge those rascals over there and we will have a Mardi Gras at Vienna." A grenadier came up and said, "Sire, thou hast no need to expose thyself. I promise thee in the name of the grenadiers that thou shalt have to fight but with thine eyes and that we will bring thee to-morrow the flags and the guns of the Rus- sians to celebrate the anniversary of thy crowning." As Napoleon returned to his hut on the hill, he exclaimed, "This is the finest night of my life!" At four o'clock the Emperor was awake again and calling for a drink of punch. Constant says that he himself would have given the whole Austrian Empire for another hour of sleep, but he rose and brewed the punch. Then he dressed his master, putting on him the familiar grey overcoat. The day of Austerlitz had broken cold and gloomy, with the two armies lost in a thick fog. The Grand Army received its rations of soup and brandy, and the tumult of tens of thou- sands of troops of three empires, with their horses and wagons and artillery, soon filled the air as, without seeing where they were going, they blindly moved forward over the frosted white earth. "When, however, the marshals had gathered behind Napoleon, a flush spread over the Carpathian horizon. Soon the sun — "the sun of Austerlitz" — shone upon them from the blue THE SUN OF AUSTEKLITZ 199 skv As the Emperor stood on the brow of the hill in advance ^hisfuite and a'one, he eagerly watched the Russmns em erg ing from a bank of fog and disappearing m another as the} descended into a deep hollow beyond the farther slopes of Pratzen They were so near him that without lifting his field glass he conld distinguish the cavalry from the infantry His forecast of the battle was being verified. To some pass inff regiments he exultantly shouted in his rich, full tones wfich s nt a thrill through the ranks: "Soldiers we jus finish this campaign with a thunderclap that BhaU ^ound the nride of our enemies!" The response was a lusty roar ot ?'^ V e 1'Empereur!" as the men lifted their hats on their ^jrstliien two men riding in front of a party of horsemen Jloped afong the road toward the village of Pratzen, near Se foot of the big hill. One was in a black uniform with a white plume and seated on a chestnut horse, the after • m I white uniform on a black horse. They were the all ed Emperors who from their hill of observation close t ►the town of Austerlitz had descended upon the field to see for themselves the cause of a great confusion among their troops The presence of their majesties and the commands they gave stirred a tardy movement to occupy the still bare heights of ^Napoleon saw the Russians climbing the hill, he turned in his saddle and, breaking a long silence, quietly inquired -Marshal Soult, how much time will you require to reach the heights of Pratzen?" "Less than twenty minutes, Sire Soul replied. "My troops are ready at the bottom of the valley and covered with fog and the bivouac smoke so that the enemy cannot see them." After a moment's calculation, Napoleon said, In that case, let us wait a quarter of an hour more." The longer he per- mitted the Allies to go on with the movements that were weak- ening their centre, the more he would profit by their mis take They were embarked in a faulty operation and it was not tor him to show them their error too soon. Already he heard the echoes of heavy musketry firing from 200 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON the direction of his threatened right wing, where Marshal Davout was struggling by a brook to check the advance of 30,000 Russians and Austrians. Other thousands of the enemy had been detached to assail the French left along the Brunn road. Meanwhile the line of the allied centre grew thinner and thinner and gaps had begun to appear in it here and there. It was not far from nine o'clock when Napoleon decided that the time had come when he must let the Allies see their mistake. He had drawn off the glove from his white, feminine right hand, and now waving it toward Pratzen, he gave the order to storm the heights. Soult's fog-wrapped battalions burst out of the valley at the western foot of the hill. Racing up the steep slope in overwhelming numbers, they spread panic among its Russian defenders, who had only just toiled up the opposite side. The Czar's green lines were quickly steadied by rein- forcements, but Soult had twenty more battalions at his heels, and it was not long until the Russians were tumbled down the hill in a demoralised mob, abandoning their cannon where they were stalled in the mud of the thawing earth. The French were masters of the heights of Pratzen, the Gibraltar of the field. Napoleon himself now moved nearer the disgarnished centre of the enemy, and as he passed Soult he leaned over and, stretching out his arm to embrace him, exclaimed, "My dear Marshal, you are the best tactician in Europe!" The firing line of the Allies was flung out seven miles in length when, not far from noon, Napoleon began to make a deadly lunge at the enemy's weakened heart, the denuded cen- tre. The shock of the onset fell upon a picturesque little vil- lage along the line of the railroad that now crosses the battle- field on its way from Brunn toward Hungary. There Prince Murat and Marshal Bernadotte faced the Grank Duke Con- stantine of Russia and there the flower of the martial youth of three empires fought. The imperial guard of France, the noble guard of Russia and the chevalier guards of Austria rolled back and forth over the field in the murderous fury of a hand-to-hand combat, a French guardsman, shrieking as he savagely ran his sabre THE SUN OF AUSTERLITZ 201 through a young Russian guardsman, "We will give the ladies of St. Petersburg something to cry for. ' ' After horrible sacrifices, the remnant of the noble and the chevalier guards fled before the Gallic fury, and Murat raced up to the very gate of Austerlitz. As the Grank Duke Con- stantine took flight from the lost field, a mameluke pursued him so hotly that the Grand Duke had to turn to beat him off. Only when a shot from Constantine had felled the horse of his pursuer could he make good his escape. In the front ranks of the retreating soldiers, two men, one wearing a white feather, the other a white uniform, spurred their horses over a ditch. They were the defeated Emperors. The Czar, who a few hours before was rosy with youth and confidence, now was pale, hollow cheeked and sunken eyed; but Francis, who had been beaten so often by Napoleon, better concealed his agony. The fatal blow had been delivered and had left an ugly gap three miles wide between the right and the left wings of the Allies. The army of the two Emperors was hopelessly cut in two and the right wing routed. Napoleon, seated on "Marengo," beside a little white chapel that still looks out upon the battle ground from a fir crowned height, was viewing the havoc he had wrought when, dripping with blood, General Rapp dashed up with a Russian prince as his prisoner, and his escort bearing aloft many captured flags. The mameluke, baffled of his grand ducal prey, came at the same time to explain his failure to catch Constantine and bring his head to the Emperor. A wounded chasseur bearing a Russian standard also presented himself and proudly stood at attention for a moment before falling dead at Napoleon's feet. "When the Emperor ordered Gerard to paint the scene for the walls of Versailles, he commanded the artist to include the chasseur and the mameluke as well as Rapp in his famous picture of that moment of triumph. Meanwhile Soult had whirled to the aid of Davout, who was holding back the Allies in their struggle to get around the French right and Vandamme had come in behind them. The roar of the artillery now shook the hills and great wreaths of 202 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON smoke curled about them. The streets of the little villages which had been taken and retaken in the desperate fighting were choked with the dead and wounded, whose bodies had become a barricade against the advance of the allies. Turning to flee from Davout and Soult in front of them, the Russians and Austrians found Vandamme in their rear with the guns of Pratzen blazing at them on one side and ponds and marshes hemming them in on the other. They were caught in a cage and could only hurl themselves against its iron bars. Batteries were abandoned in a wild flight. Some Russians did succeed in cutting their way through to Austerlitz, and many thousands fled in the opposite direction across the frozen ponds. These tried to drag their artillery after them, but the ice gave way under the weight, and, to save themselves, they had to leave everything behind. "Fire upon those masses," Napoleon commanded as he saw the Russians making good their escape over the glare of the pond ; "they must be drowned. Fire upon the ice ! " But the balls from the artillery on the side of Pratzen rolled harmlessly upon the frozen surface until some light howitzers were ele- vated and opened an almost perpendicular fire. The ice cracked under this assault and perhaps 2000 of the Russians disappeared beneath it. As they went down, the sinking Russians ceased to be ene- mies in arms and became friends in need. With the quick re- action from savagery to humanity, characteristic of warfare, the French turned rescuers, Marbot winning special praise from Napoleon by swimming out to a floe on which a Russian officer was floating. Night fell like a drop curtain on the theatre of the battle. When Napoleon made his way among the dead on his usual visit to the wounded in the wretched hospitals, a gentle snow was covering with its mantle the uncounted slain on the field of Austerlitz. The French had lost probably 10,000 killed and wounded and the Allies 25,000. La Jeune, an aide-de- camp, while crossing the field five days after the battle, came upon fourteen Russians, who, wounded and left on the ground THE SUN OF AUSTERLITZ 203 where they fell, had dragged themselves together to keep warm, and two were still alive. The Grand Army bivouacked in the camp from which they had driven the Allies, and Napoleon congratulated his troops in a proclamation. "Soldiers, I am satisfied with you," was praise enough for them, coming as it did from their Emperor, who promised to lead them back to France where ' ' it will suf- fice you to say 'I was at Austerlitz' for the people to answer ' There stands a brave man ! ' " But many marches and battles lay between them and their homes, and thousands among that jubilant host were yet to find graves in alien earth. By an imperial decree, the Emperor adopted all the children of the men killed at Austerlitz, and conferred upon them the proud privilege of coupling with their own the name of Na- poleon, which, ten years before, he himself had detested as too foreign-sounding in the ears of the French ! He also gave a pledge to educate the orphaned at his expense ; after that "the boys shall be placed in situations and the girls married by us." The vanquished Emperors, with the fragments of their army, were wandering off in the direction of Hungary, but the Aus- trian monarch had left behind an envoy to sue for peace. This was the same Prince Lichtenstein whom General Melas had appointed his commissioner to Napoleon after the Battle of Marengo. Through the night the Prince searched for the victor of Austerlitz, whom he found only at dawn in a mis- erable roadside tavern. There he arranged a meeting of the two Emperors beside an old windmill, whither the Moravian farmers, in their big boots and big caps, still take grain to be ground. By that windmill Napoleon looked upon an hereditary Em- peror for the first time. ' ' I receive you, ' ' he said to Francis, as he pointed to his bivouac, "in the only palace which you have permitted me to occupy the past two months." And Francis happily replied : ' ' You have made such good use of it that I don't think you have any cause to complain." In the negotiations which eventuated in the Treaty of Press- 204 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON burg, the Emperor Francis agreed to the conqueror's de- mands. Austria ceded to him Venice, Venetia, and the Tren- tino, thus giving up her last foothold in Italy. She also parted with Dalmatia, the opposite coast of the Adriatic, a cession which gave Napoleon many coveted harbours to shut against British commerce. The Peace of Pressburg not only cost Francis rich dominions, but it also cost him the respect of his Allies. They had pledged themselves to stand or fall together and not to treat separately with the foe. Francis, however, finding himself without an army, and cut off from his capital, had broken his promise to Russia and England. Although his first battle had disappointed his confident ex- pectation of reaping a harvest of martial glory, the young Czar refused to follow the Austrian Emperor into the conqueror's camp by the windmill. Without even a servant to attend him, Alexander ran away to live to fight another day. Austria having no reason to enshrine Austerlitz, and the place being remote from the main roads of foreign travellers, the battle ground is little visited. The castle, which belongs to a Moravian family of counts, is more a beautiful villa than a castle, its walls rising in a pretty park in the very centre of the tidy village. The memory of Napoleon eclipses that of all other guests of the castle, including the two Emperors whom he drove forth from its hospitality into a December night. And "Napoleon's room," "Napoleon's bed," "Na- poleon's chair," and "Napoleon's table" are the proudest ex- hibits offered to the curious pilgrim. While the battle tide flowed to the very walls of Austerlitz on the east, the western boundary of the scene of combat is fully eight miles away on the road to Brunn. Not far from the true centre, rises the green slopes of Pratzen, crowned by the only monument that marks the field of strife, a huge grey- stone memorial erected on the centenary of the fight. From those Pratzen heights the battle ground of the three Emperors rolls away in every direction, crossed here and there by the brooks that one day ran with the blood of many na- tions, and dotted over with the little stone villages that bore THE SUN OF AUSTERLITZ 205 the brunt of the onslaught. The pond where the fleeing Rus- sians were drowned, however, is no more to be seen, its bed having been drained and converted into tillage. For until the gathering clouds of another war burst upon the Austro-Russian frontier in 1914, thrift was written across the entire face of that countryside which smiled in peace above the graves of the thousands who had fallen in battle where the waving grain blossomed in their dust. CHAPTEE XXV THE MATCHMAKER THE conquest of Austria completed and the spoils of vic- tory secured, Napoleon proceeded to Munich, where Josephine awaited him. Having vanquished at Aus- terlitz the ancient Holy Roman Empire, he felt entitled now to demand royal alliances for the new empire, and at Munich he began his imperial matchmaking with the sovereign of Bavaria. Arranging the details of the match with the speed of a military manoeuvre, he marched the couple to the altar at double quick. Eugene Beauharnais, now a prince and the viceroy of Italy, was to be the happy groom on that occasion, and his happiness was announced to him by Napoleon in the terms of a battle command. Eugene obediently flew over the Alps from his vice regal post at Milan, while his stepfather impatiently waited to see the marriage celebrated before returning to Paris. It chanced that the bride, the Princess Augusta was already betrothed to the heir of the reigning house of Baden ; but that circumstance did not balk Napoleon. He promised to pro- vide another bride for the Baden heir, and he gave him Stephanie Beauharnais, a distant cousin-in-law of Josephine. While he was arranging marriages from the highest tbrone on earth, with the hands of nearly all the princes and princesses in Europe at his command, Napoleon increasingly regretted the matches made by his family in humbler days. With a little foresight and patient waiting, the Bonapartes might all have made royal marriages that would have bound him to every reigning house in Europe. The latest to wed was his youngest brother, Jerome, and on his unauthorised alliance, the imperial displeasure fell in full force. Jerome had been placed in the navy, and after tedious 206 THE MATCHMAKER 207 cruising in the tropic waters of the West Indies and rising to a lieutenancy, the young man landed at Norfolk, Va., in the summer of 1803. At Baltimore, he met the eighteen-year-old daughter of William Paterson, an Irish immigrant who had won his way from poverty to the rank of the richest merchants in America. While it was said of Elizabeth, or Betsy, now that we have been properly introduced to her, that "she charms by her eyes and slays by her tongue," her deadlier weapon spared Jerome at that first meeting and left him wholly charmed. In one swift month more the wooer an- nounced his engagement, and in a few days took out a marriage license. The French consul general warned the Patersons that by the law of France the marriage of a man under twenty -five was not legal unless with the consent of a parent or a guardian. Nevertheless, Jerome and Betsy were married by John Carroll, Roman Catholic Bishop of Baltimore on Christmas eve. Although President Jefferson received the bride and groom at the White House, he expressed the fear, in a despatch to his minister at Paris, that Napoleon might take it into his head to call the President of the United States to account for per- mitting the wedding to take place. Jefferson thoughtfully prepared Livingston, in the event of a Napoleonic outburst, to give assurance that not only was the President powerless under American law, but also that Jerome's father-in-law was "the wealthiest man in Maryland, perhaps in the United States, except Mr. Carroll' '—Charles Carroll of Carrollton. As fast as sails could take him, Betsy 's brother Robert sped to Paris with a letter from James Madison, secretary of state, commending him to the good offices of Robert R. Livingston, the American minister in France. For the bride had two in- fluential uncles at Washington, Robert Smith, secretary of the navy, and Samuel Smith, who had just been elected to the senate and was now sitting in the special session called to ratify the purchase of Louisiana from Napoleon. Robert Paterson could find no one in Paris who dared inter- cede for him. Minister Livingston was too good a diplomat to rush into a family row, and Napoleon said that such a mar- 208 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON riage as Jerome's was "no more real than if it had been be- tween two lovers who marry in a garden on the altar of love in the presence of the moon and stars." In strict accordance with his favourite strategy, he cut off Jerome's supplies, leav- ing him dependent on his wife's family, while he com- manded that the bridegroom should leave "in America the young person in question," and "come hither to associate him- self to my fortunes." The obedient senate of France decreed that no civil officer should record "the pretended marriage" of Jerome, while the new Emperor forbade any French vessel to bring his Amer- ican sister-in-law across the water, and forbade any French port to permit her to enter the Empire. "She shall not set foot on the soil of France," he declared. Jerome and Betsy thus were presented with a problem in blockade running. How was he to steal through his brother's tightly drawn lines and take Betsy into France? Many were their adventures even before they had succeeded in clearing the American coast. Finally her father fitted out for the couple one of his own ships, the Erin, and they sailed under the American flag. With the French ports all closed to it, the Erin put in at Lisbon, where the French consul came aboard and inquired of the bride, "What can I do for Miss Paterson?" The "miss" spiritedly replied : ' ' Tell your master that Mme. Bonaparte is ambitious, and demands her rights as a member of the im- perial family!" Jerome was confident that he needed only to arrange to have Napoleon expose himself to Betsy's beauty and wit to insure her conquest of the Emperor. Filled no doubt with high hopes of bringing the two together, he left his wife in Lisbon harbour to go to his brother. The groom, however, found admission to the imperial pres- ence barred until he surrendered without conditions. His approaching obligations as a father constituted no valid argu- ment with the Emperor. Apparently they were borne lightly enough by Jerome himself, who, after eleven days, submitted himself absolutely to his brother. THE MATCHMAKER 209 "So, sir," the Emperor said to the youth of the white feather, "you shamefully abandoned your post! It will re- quire many splendid actions to wipe out that stain. As to your love affair with your little girl, I do not regard it. ' ' As Napoleon bowed the penitent out, he remarked to his suite: "He needs a little more weight in his head, but I hope to make something of him." In three months more Jerome 's dishonour was complete when he stood before the world a faithless father as well as a faith- less husband, his deserted wife giving birth to a son in a London suburb and dutifully christening him Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte. The baby hands did not prove strong enough to draw Jerome away from his vanity, and Betsy, giving up hope, sailed home. And she accepted such solace for her wounded pride as a pension of $12,000 a year from Napoleon afforded. Jerome, after idling about the sea for awhile, was rewarded first with the rank of rear admiral and then with the title of prince, not to mention the payment of his always rapidly accumulating debts. " It is inconceivable, ' ' Napoleon growled, "how much this young man costs me." But he wrote to Joseph: "I have recognised him as a prince and I have given him the grand cordon of the Legion of Honour. I have arranged his marriage with Princess Catherine, daughter of the King of Wurtemberg. " Although a heavy liability in a financial way, the youth was an asset to the imperial matrimonial bureau, and Napoleon made haste to ask Pope Pius VII to annul the Baltimore mar- riage in a religious sense as it already was annulled by civil procedure. He assured the Pope that his brother had been married by a Spanish priest to "a Protestant young woman." The Holy See knew the true facts and braved the imperial displeasure by declining to invalidate a marriage with a Chris- tian of any faith that had been performed by a bishop of the church. But the royal house of Wiirtemberg, being Protes- tant, was not troubled by the refusal of Rome to sanction the match, and in a little more than two years after his parting 210 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON from Betsy, Jerome became the husband of the Princess Catherine. Some time after the costly youth had been elevated to the throne of Westphalia and Napoleon had unloaded him upon the poor taxpayers of his new realm, Jerome grew generous toward Betsy with the money of his subjects. He offered her $40,000 a year in place of the $12,000 she was receiving from Napoleon if she would bring their boy and live in Westpha- lia. But Betsy was not a woman to be twice fooled by the same person and she replied to Jerome, that ' ' the kingdom of West- phalia is not large enough for two queens" and furthermore that she preferred her present position of "being sheltered under the wing of an eagle to being suspended from the bill of a goose." When the eagle heard of that witty retort, he enjoyed it so much that he instructed the French minister at Washington to ask Betsy what he could do for her. She an- swered, ' ' Make me a duchess ; ' ' but it continued to be her lot to dwell on a level of equality "with people who after I had married a prince became my inferiors." When the kingdom of Westphalia was no more and Jerome's glory had departed, he and Betsy met for the first and only time after their parting in the harbour of Lisbon. He was now a bankrupt, and she had divorced him to protect her property. They passed without a word of greeting as each was strolling in the picture gallery of the Pitti Palace at Florence, Jerome merely jerking his thumb toward Betsy and remarking to Catherine, ' ' That is my American wife. ' ' Both Jerome and Catherine often saw young Jerome Na- poleon, but his father ignored him in his will. Emperor Napoleon III offered to make him a duke, but with the vanity of his race, this American Bonaparte refused to relinquish his pretensions to a higher dignity, that of a prince of the Empire and a legitimate heir to the throne. Although his mother never foreswore her native Presby- terianism, she reared Jerome a Catholic, because that was to her "the religion of princes and kings." She entered him at Harvard, where he graduated, and greatly to his mother's THE MATCHMAKER 211 grief, he so far forgot his princely rank as to make an Ameri- can marriage. Two sons were born to this second Jerome. The younger, Charles Joseph Bonaparte, became attorney general in Presi- dent Roosevelt's cabinet, while the elder was the late Col. Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte, a graduate of West Point, who married Caroline Le Roy, daughter of Samuel Appleton of Boston, and granddaughter of Daniel Webster. Their son, Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte of Washington, is the great- grandson of King Jerome and great-grandnephew of Napoleon. If his great-grandmother's marriage had been recognised, this young man in Washington would be the head of the house of Bonaparte and first in line for the vanished throne of Na- poleon, instead of King Jerome's other great-grandson, Victor of Brussels. Betsy ever remained faithful to the Empire that banned her. Long after it had fallen, she continued to wander about Eu- rope where she could humour her conceit by mingling with titled people. To her hard-headed father's protest against her forsaking her place as the head of his household, she replied : "It was impossible to bend my tastes and ambitions to the obscure destiny of a Baltimore housekeeper, and it was absurd to attempt it after I had married the brother of an Emperor." When at length she did return to America it was to take up the management of her estate in her native city. After the Second Empire had risen from the ruins of the First at Waterloo and fallen at Sedan, and she was four score and ten, Mme. Bonaparte still did her own bargaining and col- lecting as she went through the streets of Baltimore, an old carpet bag in her hand. Although reputed to be more than a millionaire, she passed the last eighteen years of her life in a boarding house, where in her many trunks she cherished her fondest treasures — the purple satin coat Jerome wore at their wedding, a gown given to her by the Princess Pauline, an- other from Mme. Mere and all the other faded finery of the days of her imperial dreams. Is not the gravestone of Betsy Paterson, in Greenmount Cemetery, near the Union railway station of Baltimore, a 212 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON marker in the path of Napoleon to his downfall? Perhaps it was in dissolving her marriage that the Emperor took the first fateful step toward his own divorce. At least it lost him a sister, whose loyalty to his throne would have been an example to his own sisters, whose thrift and ambition would have been useful to the prodigal and silly Jerome, and whose beauty of person and purity of life would have done credit to the court of the Empire. CHAPTEE XXVI THE KINGMAKER WHEN, on the first anniversary of his coronation, Na- poleon gained the great battle with his two rival Emperors at Austerlitz, he stood forth the chief magistrate of Christendom. He lost no time in assuming the imperial prerogative to crown his vassal princes. There were then only eight kings in Europe, the Kings of England, Prussia, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Sweden, Sar- dinia, and Naples. Napoleon opened wide the flood gates of royal honours and there was a downpour of ten kingly crowns in half a dozen years, or more than time had conferred upon princely brows in as many centuries. He had already made himself King of Italy, and now on his way from the field of Austerlitz in December, 1805, he sent a messenger, who over- took the Elector of Bavaria while he was hunting, with a mes- sage addressed to "His Majesty, the King of Bavaria.'' Wherefore the Bavarian sovereigns are kings to this day. The Kings of Wurtemberg and Saxony also are indebted to Na- poleon for their present titles. The new Emperor's success as a kingmaker flattered him into the conceit that in the plenitude of his imperial power he could do more than make over hereditary dukes and electors, and could manufacture kings out of the raw material of the common earth. After he had fairly warned the domineering wife of the Bourbon King of Naples that if she did not cease playing fast and loose with France, her children would curse her as they wandered over Europe begging their bread, he drove the royal family from their capital to take refuge on the Island of Sicily. Thereupon, in 1806, Joseph Bonaparte was thrust upon the vacant throne. "I can no longer have relatives in obscurity," the Emperor 213 214 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON said. ' ' Those who will not rise with me, shall no longer be of my family. I am making a family of kings attached to my federative system. ' ' The Revolution had expelled the House of Orange from Hol- land and set up the Batavian Republic in the Netherlands. When Napoleon prepared to remove this republican reminder from the French border, he placed the crown of Holland on the head of Louis Bonaparte. At one time he thought of snatching the crown of Portugal from the brow of the Braganza king and conferring it on Lucien Bonaparte. Lucien, how- ever, rejected the stipulation that he should divorce his wife, and in loyalty to her, he turned his back on crowns and thrones. Jerome was the only obedient member of the family, but when he was enthroned as King of Westphalia in 1807, his regal magnificence and royal vices troubled his brother much, and he was as hopelessly incompetent as any hereditary prince well could be. His poor subjects had to plough deep to sup- port his pomp and luxury, and he drained the resources of his made-to-order kingdom to fill his little capital, Cassel, with extravagant splendour. His royal theatre alone cost his people $80,000 a year, and he adorned his country palace, Napoleon- shoe, until it took high rank among the show places of Europe. By a strange retribution Napoleonshoe became the prison of Napoleon III, after his capture by the Germans at Sedan, in 1870, and it was there that the last of the Bonapartes took leave of royal palaces forever. By a trick of nature Napoleon found his only real brothers among his sisters. Although, even as the effeminate emperors of degenerate Rome assumed the name of Caesar, the crowned brothers all styled themselves Napoleons — Joseph Napoleon, Louis Napoleon, Jerome Napoleon — Caroline and Elisa were better counterfeits of the Emperor than any of the male Bona- partes. Those two sisters were ambitious and masterful spirits, while in point of personal appearance they held their own in a remarkably handsome family. The elder, Caroline, wife of Murat, had fair hair and a dazzling complexion, with roses in her cheeks. ' ' She bore the head of Cromwell, on the shoulders of a pretty woman, ' ' Talleyrand said of her. THE KINGMAKER 215 As the one sister who had a husband that was useful to the Empire, she made hard terms with her brother on every occa- sion. To appease the demands of the Murats, the Emperor was forced to a painful bit of surgery when he carved out a principality for them in Germany and created them the Prince and Princess of Berg and the Duke and Duchess of Cleves. Besides, Murat was made heir to the throne of Naples, Joseph's children being girls. Elisa, the other Napoleon in petticoats, was the black haired sister and less beautiful, although not at all uncomely. Elisa had a Corsican husband, Felix Bacciocchi, who was a hin- drance rather than an aid to her passion for place and power. But being a clever pupil of Machiavelli, she overcame the handicap of a stupid and useless mate and merited the fame of a Semiramis. This princess drew for Felix and herself the tiny principality of Piombino — now the Italian mainland port for the island of Elba — with only 20,000 subjects, but soon she won the duchy of Lucca, and ultimately became the Grand Duchess of Tuscany, with the noble city of Florence for her capital. The second sister in rank of birth, but the third in im- portance, was Pauline, who was a Jerome in frivolity of char- acter, but a Venus in the charms of her person. She received an Italian principality, with six square miles of territory and 3000 inhabitants, mostly beggars. But that sufficed to make her the Duchess of Guastalla. Happily there was one Bonaparte whom fame could not flatter, and whose head was not turned by fortune. The only reproach that history can bring to the memory of the ' ' Mother of Kings" is that she failed to transmit her virtues to her children. If Napoleon's imagination had been ballasted with the rock of her common sense, he might not have soared so high — but then he would not have fallen so far ; if his genius had been touched with her prudence, he might have ruled him- self and thereby become the ruler of the world. Given her solidity and strength of character, her other sons, their vanity in check, might have become men. Had her daughters in- herited with her beauty her womanly purity, and like her kept 216 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON themselves unspotted from the world, they might have been ladies. As it chanced, alas, her children were not this Cor- nelia's jewels, but her sorrows. A typical Italian mother, than whom there is no better pat- tern, Letizia saw seven of her eight children ascend thrones only to mourn the loss of her family. "All men considered me," she confided to a friend, "the happiest mother in the world while my life was one uninterrupted sorrow and martyr- dom." The higher her children climbed the more she felt a mother's anxiety for the perils that encompassed them. With eight diadems in her family, motherhood remained her only crown. For in supreme good taste, the kingmaker left her in posses- sion of the simple title of mother. He only decreed that she should be addressed as "Her Imperial Highness, Mme. the Mother of the Emperor," and the world spoke of her as "Mme. Mere." The mother could not forget the hard, pinching days that befell her brood in Ajaccio and Marseilles, although every one of them except Lucien now had some sort of throne. "All this pomp may come to an end," she persisted in reasoning, "and then what will become of my children?" Let the sun of Austerlitz beam and the star of destiny shine ever so bril- liantly in the fair sky, her prudent maternal nature took ac- count of the possible coming of a rainy day. Napoleon looked to his brothers to give him an heir to the throne of France. In the lottery of birth, however, Joseph's two children were girls, as also were the two children of Lucien by his only recognised wife, Christine Boyer. Lucien had a son by the disinherited second wife and Jerome another by the disowned Betsy Paterson; but those children were barred from the imperial line. When the Empire came, only Louis and Hortense had sons in the recognised line. Josephine thus was consoled by the prospect of a grandchild of hers being adopted as the heir to the imperial crown, while her own son Eugene had already been adopted by the Emperor and nominated to succeed him on the throne of Italy. Napoleon Charles, the elder of Louis' THE KINGMAKER 217 boys, was looked upon as the destined successor of Napoleon. The child was a great joy to "Uncle Bibiche," as he dared to nickname the Emperor, who delighted to roll on the palace floor and romp with the boy or hold him on the back of a gazelle in the imperial park. In his pride and affection, Na- poleon Charles used to shout at the review of the Guard in the courtyard, "Long live Uncle Bibiche, the soldier!" While the Emperor was going his conquering way across the northernmost plains of Prussia in the springtime of 1807, a messenger brought him the news of the little Prince's death at The Hague in his fifth year. By the death of the boy, the childless monarch was brought face to face with a momentous question, which disturbed the very foundation of his Empire and threatened the stability of the institutions, he had reared. It was the old troubling and unanswered question which had stung him to exclaim, "After me the deluge! My brothers or some successors will fight over my tomb like the followers of Alexander. ' ' CHAPTER XXVII CRUSHING PRUSSIA 1806 AGE 37 AT the opening of the ninteenth century, Germany still remained a prey to the tribal system of the Middle Ages. There were nearly if not quite as many na- tions in the few hundred miles between the Rhine and the Niemen as there are independent sovereignties on the entire face of the earth to-day. A traveller may circumnavigate the globe now without crossing more frontiers or passing through more customhouses than barred trade and communication be- tween the German people only a little more than 100 years ago. Political progress was dead among them and patriotism unborn. Prussia was the natural leader of Germany, being by far the largest strictly German state. But she was yet only Prussian and cared little for Germany as a whole. The reigning family of Hohenzollerns played politics as a sordid game of grabbing and cheating, looking only to increasing the number of their subjects and swelling their revenues. They were still dripping with the bloody spoils of the partition of Poland when they turned from Russia and Austria, their partners in that horrible crime, to traffic with Napoleon. They were well satisfied to share his spoils until in his war with England he snatched Hanover from the British crown and took possession of Bremen and Cuxhaven. That step brought him to the frontiers of Prussia and gave him com- mand of her two gateways to the Atlantic. Divided counsels now arose among the Prussians. The weak and irresolute King Frederick William III found himself pulled and hauled between French and anti-French factions, 218 CRUSHING PRUSSIA 219 the latter having an ardent and influential champion in Queen Louise, whose sweetness and beauty have been immortalised by artists. When the young and enthusiastic Czar hastened to Berlin to urge the King to join in the coalition against France in 1805, he found an enthusiastic ally in the Queen. The Czar, the King and Queen in a melodramatic scene by lantern light, vowed over the tomb of Frederick the Great never to rest until Napoleon was driven back beyond the Rhine. In less than a month the Battle of Austerlitz was fought, the Czar put to flight and the Emperor of Austria brought to his knees. It was now Napoleon's turn to dictate terms. In- stead of whirling his triumphant army toward Prussia, how- ever, he chose to humour her, and at the same time embroil her with England by making her a gift of Hanover, which he had only just taken from her ally, the English King. He was quickly rewarded for his Greek gift when he saw Prussia, instead of making war on him, at war with England, whose navy swooped down upon her merchant flag and swept it from the seas. The anti-French faction in Prussia grew more bitter than ever at the sight of Frederick William entangled in that Han- over deal. But Prussian jealousy was aroused to the highest pitch when, in the summer of 1806, a league of nearly twenty of the southern German states, Bavaria, Wurtemberg, and Baden chief among them, sought shelter under Napoleon's powerful protection and acclaimed him the overlord of a third of Germany. As the war party rallied around Queen Louise, the timid, halting King of Prussia was swept along on the current, and prudence fled the court of Berlin. What if the Grand Army, like a crouching lion ready to spring, was resting on its laurels by the Prussian border ! What if it was commanded by the matchless conqueror of the armies of Aus- tria and Russia! Napoleon had yet to meet the invincible army of Frederick the Great, officered by the heirs of Freder- ick's lieutenants, carpet knights who flattered themselves that they had inherited the martial virtues along with the castles of their sires. 220 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON Members of the noble guard whetted their blades on the stone steps of the French Embassy in Berlin and Napoleon grasped his sword when he heard of their defiance: "The insolent braggarts shall soon learn that our weapons need no sharpening." Although he neglected no detail in his prepa- rations for war he could not believe the plain signs of coming hostilities. As late as the middle of September he said: "The idea that Prussia will attack me single-handed is so absurd that it does not deserve notice." The two powers were most unequally matched. Prussia had only 10,000,000 people against five times that number under Napoleon 's sway. As always with Napoleon's foes, the Prussians fancied they could fool him. The King, although he had reopened the port of Bremen to British commerce and his troops already were on the march, congratulated himself in a letter to the Czar in the first week of September, 1806, that "Bonaparte has left me at my ease." While Napoleon was leaving Freder- ick William at his ease, he was loading down the beams of light with semaphore telegrams to his army. Possessing the only optical telegraphic system, he could send an order from Paris to the Rhine in half an hour, a distance that the post required four days to cover. At last in early October, Prussia delivered her ultimatum, which, when received, left Napoleon only one day to quit German soil. Already, however, his vanguard was across the Bavarian frontier and moving toward the enemy. The war had begun, with 120,000 Prussians and Saxons moving southwestward toward the communications of the Grand Army, while the Grand Army itself, 190,000 strong, moved northward from Bavaria to place itself between the Allies and their base. One fatal difference lay in the seeming paradox that the shorter legged Frenchmen covered more ground in a day than the longer-legged Germans. Where each army was marching to cut the other's communications the one that cut first would surely win. The tradition had come down to the Prussians that from twelve to fifteen miles was a long enough march for an army to make in a day. The French under Lannes, however, marched sixty-five miles in fifty CRUSHING PRUSSIA 221 hours. Bernadotte marched his men seventy-five miles in sixty-nine hours and Lefebre 's command made forty-two miles in one day. The Allies had no idea where Napoleon was until suddenly they were made painfully aware of his presence behind them on their lines. Then their army turned as involuntarily, as instinctively as a dog when caught by the tail. An army's lines of supply have been called its muscles; when they are cut, the military body is paralysed. Paralysis seized upon the brain of the allied army when its leaders real- ised that Napoleon, instead of being in front of them was behind them. Confusion reigned in their councils and confi- dence forsook the conceit of the aristocratic officers. The com- missary was demoralised and the poor soldiers, without rations, were marched and countermarched in a tangle of contradictory plans. Having paralysed the head of the allied army and spread consternation through its ranks, Napoleon's next object was to fall upon the bewildered foe and annihilate him. While the Prussians and Saxons were hurriedly falling back in an effort to repair their communications, he struck one division of them, as much to his own surprise as to theirs, on a lofty plateau above Jena. The scholastic repose of that ancient and celebrated univer- sity town is guarded by two towering sentinel heights, one the Bismarkturn and the other the Landgrafenberg, whose top- most height is called the Napoleonstein. For it is there on that brow of the Landgrafenberg that Napoleon pitched his bivouac in a waning October day, and there in the dawn of the following day he opened the famous Battle of Jena. The landscape of the plateau is delightfully German, with its old windmills and its little poster villages, where the farm- ers, instead of dwelling apart on their acres, gather to make their homes about the kirche and the gasthof. It was around those tranquil little hamlets that the strife raged in greatest fury as Gaul and Teuton took and retook them while a hail of lead pelted their walls. Against the tiny town of Vierzehnheiligen in particular the 222 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON battle tide surged for a full half day. Beside its modest, old church to-day there rises a cross in memory of the men who were slain in its winding lanes and dooryards, and its tavern walls are covered with rusty souvenirs of the field of combat. Although divided by stone walls into many thrifty little Ger- man farms, the size of the battlefield is better suited for golf links than for a mighty combat between two great armies. The larger part of that small field was white with the tents of the Prussians and Saxons when Napoleon climbed up the front of the Landgrafenberg, which rises as steep as a roof from the valley in which Jena drowses beside the River Saale. He saw the Allies across the field, hardly a mile away, where they were flattering themselves that they were secure against the approach of the enemy. They held the only high road from Jena, which winds about until it takes the big hill in the rear, while the almost perpendicular front of the hill rose like an impregnable breastwork for their protection. The thought that a great army might scale it had not entered their fears. Napoleon, however, had not sent an army up the walls of the Alps to be daunted now by the Landgrafenberg and he or- dered his columns to scramble after him up the wooded steeps. As night drew on, the lights of the allied camp blazed forth. Meanwhile over at the brow of the bluff, where a tree and seat now mark the site of Napoleon's bivouac, a single small flame flickered unnoticed in the outer darkness. It was the only light permitted in the French camp, and the Emperor sat by it studying his plans for the morrow. All night his soldiers were toiling up the stony beds of the dry brooks, but they extinguished their lanterns as they en- tered upon the plateau and joined their sleeping comrades in the silent encampment. It was the Emperor's habit, how- ever, to sleep little the night before a battle. Most command- ers at such times issue their orders for the next day and go to bed. Napoleon, on the contrary, took his rest first and planned his battles after refreshing himself with sleep and when he was in possession of the latest reports to reach his headquar- ters. "I lie down at eight o'clock," he wrote Josephine from CRUSHING PRUSSIA 223 the Prussian campaign, "and I rise at midnight. I sometimes think that you are not yet abed." When he rose at midnight before the Battle of Jena and made the round of his lines, he found some heavy guns had been stalled in the steep track up the height. He went among the baffled officers and weary soldiers. As they saw the Em- peror, lantern in hand, taking charge of the work, they were inspired to renewed efforts in their struggles against the rocks and trees that opposed them. When the darkness of night had lifted from the field, a heavy fog remained to conceal from the unsuspecting enemy the movements of the French. The Allies were still fast asleep when, out of a thick mist, a shower of bullets began suddenly to rain upon their tents. Finding that the fire came from their rear the commanding officers were satisfied that the attack was being made by a mere skirmishing party which had contrived to climb the face of the hill. It is a fact that the battle had been in progress perhaps two hours before the seriousness of the engagement was appreciated. Napoleon's first object and need was to drive in the wings of the allied forces and gain a decent footing on the little field for his own constantly swelling army, which was separated from the enemy's lines by only 1200 yards. The precipice of the Landgrafenberg yawned behind him, and few commanders would have undertaken to open a great battle in such close quarters. Moreover it was noon before his reinforcements gave him as many men as the enemy. It was only by the swiftest marches that he was saved from being badly outnumbered, and the battle was won by the legs of the French. If they had travelled at the pace usual with armies, Jena would have been a defeat instead of a victory for Napoleon. While he waited for his hurrying troops to climb up on the plateau, he postponed the decisive stroke and the imperial guard burned with Gallic impatience to get into the fray. ' ' Forward ! ' ' some guardsman in the ranks shouted at last. Napoleon turned in the saddle to scowl sternly at the impetu- ous soldier. 224 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON "How, now!" he exclaimed. "What beardless youth is this who dares to offer his counsels to his Emperor ? Let him wait till he has commanded in thirty pitched battles before he ventures to give me advice!" Nevertheless he enjoyed the valiant spirit of the guardsman, and the rash youth and the Napoleonic scowl have been perpetuated at the palace of Ver- sailles in Horace Vernet's picture of the "Battle of Jena." By two o'clock there was fighting enough behind the garden walls of Vierzehnheiligen for the most ardent warrior. There the rout of the Allies began. There the kingdom of Frederick the Great was smitten to earth. At four, Napoleon was the master of the no longer disputed field, where the French ar- tillery, drawn at a gallop in pursuit of the fleeing mob, ground its way over the bones of the dead. It was a day of surprises for both sides. Napoleon thought he had beaten the army accompanied by the King until a courier arrived to report that Marshal Davout had come upon that army under the command of the Duke of Brunswick at Auerstadt, twelve miles from the battlefield of Jena. It was at Auerstadt that the greater fight was fought, the greater victory won by the French and with a force that was outnum- bered in that engagement nearly two to one. From both fields the Prussians were in wild flight; the Duke of Brunswick was mortally wounded ; Prince Hohenlohe was racing for safety; their armies were hopelessly smashed. Napoleon, having beaten the Allies on the field of battle, proceeded to employ the arts of statesmanship and diplomacy to divide them forever. He assembled and addressed in friendly terms the captive Saxon officers, who pledged them- selves not only to abandon the war against him and go home, but also to advise their sovereign to break the alliance with Prussia. On his march to Berlin, he entered the green gate and went to bed in the very rococo precincts of the great Frederick's much Frenchified palace of Sans Souci, which sits amid its terraces and fountains at Potsdam. Having overthrown the kingdom of Frederick in a campaign of seven days, he felt entitled to make himself at home in the favourite abode of the CRUSHING PRUSSIA 225 hero of the Seven Years' War. Like the tourists who daily stream through the green gate, he visited Voltaire's room, saw the chair in which Frederick passed the declining days of his lean old age, the bed on which he died, the clock which he used to wind and whose hands stopped at the very minute of its master's death. The uninvited guest of Sans Souci also made a pilgrimage to the Garrison church in the town of Potsdam, the place of worship of the Hohenzollerns, which is almost as plain as a New England meeting house. There in a bare, dingy alcove behind the severely simple Lutheran pulpit, two plain marble sarcophagi rest on the floor. One holds the dust of Freder- ick's quarrelsome father, Frederick AVilliam I, while the other, covered with wreaths, holds the dust of the illustrious son. The sword and sash and hat of the mighty warrior lay upon his sarcophagus when Napoleon visited the tomb and he promptly ordered that they be sent to the museum of the Hotel des Invalides in Paris. "I would rather have these than 20,000,000 francs," was his very practical computation of the value of those most impressive — if unworthy — trophies of his victory over Prussia. CHAPTER XXVIII EYLAU AND FRIEDLAND 1807 AGE 37 THE sorrows of the kingdom of Prussia in the humiliat- ing years that followed its sudden collapse under the blows of Napoleon are personified to the sympathies of posterity by the beautiful Queen Louise. The amazing wreck of the proud kingdom of Frederick the Great, and the distressing plight of the royal house of Hohen- zollern are not easy to imagine. That awful disaster, the swiftest and most complete that ever befell a great monarchy, is best measured by taking a journey of 700 miles along the path of Louise's flight from the field of the calamitous battle at Jena, in October, 1806, to the little stretch of sand by the Baltic which at last was the only refuge left her beneath the Prussian flag. First going to Berlin, whither she drove in an open cart, Louise was warned by the commandant of her capital that to escape capture she must leave the next morning. Quitting the palace, where in a few days Napoleon would take up his resi- dence and seeking safety in the fortress city of Stettin, she was to find no security even behind its walls. Its eighty-one-year- old commandant was quaking with alarm, and there the Queen heard that even the King, whom she had not seen since they parted on the eve of the overwhelming defeat at Jena, was ready to give up. "For God's sake," she implored him by messenger, ' ' no shameful peace ! ' ' Hoping to brace the will of her spineless husband, she hurried away to join him at Custrin. An epidemic of surrender had spread over the land. A paralysis had smitten all resolution throughout the country. 226 EYLAU AND FRIEDLAND 227 A contagion of fear had seized upon the leaders of Prussia, a cowardly aristocracy, who were surrendering everything at the sight of a Frenchman. A guard of 500 French had marched away from Erfurt with 10,000 prisoners; Prince Hohenlohe was a prisoner. Before a mere handful of Na- poleon's troops, 12,000 Prussians had laid down their arms at Prenzlau. Magdeburg, with 24,000 men, ran up the white flag before the invader could mount a gun in front of it. Berlin had only busied itself with arranging a courteous wel- come for the enemy. In all, five great military strongholds struck their colours within the fortnight after the Battle of Jena. The presence of the resolute Queen at Custrin overbalanced the majority in the King's council, which had been advising his acceptance of Napoleon's demands. Frederick William was persuaded to rely on the assistance of the Czar Alexander, for had not Alexander pledged his friendship over the tomb of Frederick the Great only a year before ? Napoleon grimly retorted to Frederick William 's refusal of peace : ' ' You have taken the box and thrown the dice. The dice shall decide." The King and Queen must now move on to the Vistula, the next river barrier against the advancing hosts of the con- queror, for soon Custrin, with its 13,000 troops and ninety guns, was to yield to a regiment of French. An army of 150,- 000 Prussians had melted away in four weeks, and only 8000 were left to uphold the standards of the kingdom. While the King and Queen were hiding in a little river town, where they occupied one small room in a miserable wooden house, Napoleon was comfortably at home in their great palace. Dating his orders from "The Imperial Camp at Berlin," he issued to a subject world his celebrated "Berlin Decree," forbidding all Europe to trade with England, use her products, correspond with her people or even send by post any letter written in English. It was not long until Frederick William and Louise in their never ending flight from the advancing French, had to put the Vistula behind them. Crossing into East Prussia, they made their toilsome way in the mud to Osterode, more than three 228 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON hundred miles from Berlin and nearly five hundred from Jena. The farther they went the greater grew Napoleon's demands. The war at the outset had filled him with genuine indigna- tion. However much or little he may have deserved it, he had not desired it. His rage overflowed all bounds when the King declined to make peace with him at Berlin and when he saw the Prussian court inviting "the Tartar barbarians," as he called the Russians, to take part in an affair between civil- ised nations of the west. Dropping the comparatively modest demands he originally made, he now insisted on the Hohen- zollern monarchy giving up everything from the Vistula to the Elbe, a territory 300 miles wide from east to west and including Berlin herself. Most of the King's advisers, distrusting the good faith of Russia, urged him to agree even to that heavy sacrifice. But once more Louise's influence outweighed their counsels. "The Queen has never once acted contrary to her instinct for hero- ism and tenacity," the Swedish ambassador accompanying the fugitive court has testified; "every one has followed her lead with enthusiasm." The ambassador correctly named the quality which governed Louise in that dark crisis. It was her woman's instinct. For that amiable Princess was not a politician, skilled in po- litical intrigue, as Napoleon was portraying her in his ungal- lant bulletins. Nor was hers a martial nature with the spirit of an Amazon. She was only a simple, loyal woman, born and brought up in the provinces, whose gentle bosom was agi- tated with the emotions of German patriotism, a thing un- known to the Prussian royalty and aristocracy as a whole. Another powerful instinct animated Louise, the maternal instinct. For the Queen was a good mother, who, although only thirty, had left behind in her flight the new-made grave of her eighth child. To her the kingdom was not a mere political institution, but a heritage to be preserved and trans- mitted to her children, with whom she was reunited at last when she took up her residence in the ancient castle at Konigs- berg. The royal family now had been hunted beyond the con- EYLAU AND FRIEDLAND 229 fines of Germany, as its boundaries were then defined. For at Konigsberg they were in that Old Prussia or Prussia proper which originally was outside the German world, although it was destined to give its name to the dominant state in the German Empire of a later day. The Queen found the castle, whose tower has risen these hundreds of years above the River Pregel as it flows through the city of Konigsberg, a big, bare barn of a place. Only by borrowing beds and chairs and tables from the wealthy mer- chants of the town was it made habitable. At last, however, Louise had her children around her, and that was sufficient to make the cheerless castle a home. Her oldest boy was eleven, and he was to grow up to be King Frederick "William IV. The second boy, William, was nearly ten. It was written in the book of fate that, on the death of the elder brother, he too would be crowned King some day in that very castle of Konigsberg, and be more than King — the first Emperor of a new German Empire which was to rise from the ruins that then confronted the royal family. Through his long life, "William never forgot the New Year's gift, the uniform of the Prussian Guard, which he received at Konigsberg. And it must have been an unforgettable disap- pointment that his mother could not see him on the parade ground. For the weeks of grief and privation had made Louise an easy prey to typhoid, which was raging through the town and the camps, and the court feared for her life. As a Russian army prepared to come to the relief of Prus- sia, Napoleon advanced to meet it. The new campaign opened on those luckless plains of Poland, which in 1914, became the theatre for the first act on the eastern front in the War of the Nations. The national boundaries then were very different from the lines afterward drawn. In the partition of the Polish kingdom, Prussia had taken a much larger and Russia a much smaller share than in the settlement made after the fall of Napoleon. The Russian frontier then ran only a little west of the city of Vilna, while the Prussian possessions in- cluded Warsaw and extended far to the east of that city. The strategic points, however, have not changed with time 230 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON and were much the same in Napoleon's campaign as in the "War of the Nations. The French pressed forward unopposed and without pausing, from fortress to fortress, from the Oder to the Vistula, from Thorn and Posen to Warsaw. As he went, the French Emperor freed the Polish serfs and aroused the patriot Poles, who welcomed him as their deliverer from the Russian and Prussian yokes. It was not until the Polish winter had come that the slow moving Russians entered Prussian Poland and challenged Napoleon. Leaving Warsaw, he opened the hardest campaign he had seen since he emerged from an Oriental desert and the hardest he was again to see until the invasion of Russia in 1812. The frozen wastes of northern Poland were hardly less barren of food for soldiers than the Egyptian sands. Even when they could get bread it was in loaves of black rye, which the French could neither enjoy nor digest. The peasantry, with nothing to spare from their scant pro- vision against starvation in the long winter, buried the little they possessed at the approach of the army, and took to the woods. Raiding soldiers flew at the wretched, depopulated villages only to have their hunger mocked by disappointment. A mutinous murmur rose and spread through the ranks. The soldiers had not seen a pay day since the war began. Not a few in their despair, resorted to suicide. The victorious troops of Austerlitz, instead of being led back to France in triumph and enjoying their well-won glory by their firesides, found themselves after a year marching farther and farther from home into the depths of a bleak desolation, where they ploughed through mud by day and were assailed by wintry blasts at night. While no commander ever excelled Napoleon in his atten- tion to the needs of his troops or equalled him in his ability to provide for them, it was, however, his maxim to "make war support war. ' ' But now he was in a country which could not support it. He drained its resources to the last drop and even employed 30,000 captured tents to make shirts for the sick. He cared nothing for tents in themselves, holding that they were unhealthful and that it was "much better for the EYLAU AND FRIEDLAND 231 soldier to bivouac in the open air, for there he can build a fire and sleep with warm feet." He had small sympathy with fault-finding soldiers in that terrible winter campaign because he shared their hardships and was thriving on them. He always felt better in the worst camp than in the most luxurious palace. While living on princely fare at Warsaw, he suffered from violent convulsions in the stomach which he feared were the symptoms of cancer, the disease that caused his father's death. But in the midst of rigorous campaigning, he wrote to Josephine: "I have never been so well. You will find me much fatter." Yet he was eating soldiers' rations and sleeping in foul hovels, where he dared not undress. Through one period of fourteen days in that campaign he did not take off his boots. . Marshals of France were glad enough some nights to lie on a manure pile and enjoy its warmth. The French had laboured up out of Poland and were now in winter quarters on the broad, Prussian plains, some fifty miles to the south of Konigsberg. On his own responsibility, the restless Ney did indeed threaten that city, whose gates were barricaded but defended by only a small force. The place was filled with panic, and Louise, although still low with fever, insisted upon being moved from the menaced town. To her anxious physician who was reluctant to risk the journey, she declared, "I would rather fall by the hand of God than into the hands of those men. ' ' ' It was in the depth of winter, with a storm sweeping in from the Baltic and beating against the windows of the castle, when the stricken but still resolute Queen, lying down on cot- ton bales in a carriage, resumed her long flight from Napoleon to the one refuge left her in all her kingdom. This was the little town of Memel on the Baltic, near the Russian border, and the last dot on the map of Prussia. The road followed a narrow strip of sand that forms a break- water between the Baltic and the Kurisches Haff, which is a great lagoon. That slender strand was covered with a forest a few years before and occupied by many fishing villages. But the Prussian kings in their greed had lately cut down the 232 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON trees. Thereupon the big sand dunes, often rising to a height of 200 feet and more, began to shift, overwhelming and burying the villages, until this strange tongue of land was left virtually depopulated. Those dunes are on their travels to this day along that desolate shore, the celebrated amber coast of the Baltic. For three January days and for nearly ninety miles Louise was driven over that wild and dreary track in snow and sleet, with the waves of the Baltic often threatening to engulf her coach. One night she had to sleep in a wretched tumble-down inn, through whose broken window panes the snow blew in upon her bed. Her physician, who had followed her all the way from Berlin, looking back with horror on that experience, sighed, "Never did a Queen know such want." Arrived at Memel, where no provision had been made for her, she was lifted in the arms of a servant and carried into the house of the Danish consul. A Prussian corps having been pieced together out of the widely strewn fragments of the broken army and joining in the Russian operations, the Russian General Bennigsen deter- mined to steal around Napoleon. At the first sign of Bennig- sen 's activity, however, the Emperor started to creep out of his hibernation and throw himself upon the enemy's centre. Here again, the campaign was in a field which after more than a century was recalled to the attention of the reading world by the operations of the armies in the War of the Nations. Four times Napoleon faced the Russians and squared off to deal his blow, and four times they stole away in the night. For ten days the man hunt went on like a game of blind man's buff over the fields of Old Prussia, as level as the prairies of Illinois. Everywhere the hosts of Napoleon and the Czar went, they left a wake of misery more terrible than their own. The fruits of generations of toil were swept away as if by a con- flagration. Not a cow or a pig, a handful of grain, a potato, a copper coin, hardly a shred of clothing was spared and the peasantry abandoned to a long winter of hunger and cold, died EYLAU AND FRIEDLAND 233 at a rate five, six, and ten times greater than the normal mor- tality. Out of the theatre of that war of hideous memory there rises the stone church tower of Preuss Eylau, so named to distin- guish it from the Eylaus and Deutsch Eylaus of Germany proper. From that tower one looks upon a village of half a dozen streets almost as silent as the churchyard itself, where in their narrow cells the rude forefathers of the hamlet slept their untroubled sleep while the soldiers of many distant na- tions fought over their graves. It was after a chase of many days when Napoleon alighted in a February afternoon of 1807 by a tree on a hill across the now flower-studded meadows — the hill and a lone tree standing on it continue to bear his name. Surveying the scene from the hill, he saw the Russians posted in the village, and at once he flew at them. The first wave of that horrible Battle of Eylau surged against the churchyard wall at the edge of the little town and crimsoned its headstones. Flowing onward into the town, it broke over the wide stony market place and there in front of the dirty village tavern, the cannon of France and Russia, racing over the bodies of the dead, belched at one another with their muzzles only fifty paces apart. Tartar and Gaul, French and Cossack, hunted each other like rats from house to house and fought in hand-to-hand combat for the possession of the poor little town. The French took it at sunset, the Russians retook it in the evening dusk, but only to drop it in thirty minutes and retire into the black countryside, where they slept without a fire to warm their feet lest their lurking place might be disclosed. Napoleon, thereupon, recaptured Eylau without striking a flint, and selected the largest house in town as a substitute for the Tuileries. The place to-day is an untidy tenement, and feather-beds and all manner of rubbish clutter what was once the imperial salon. At daybreak, Russian can- non in hiding on the snowy fields back of the town sounded his reveille from their 500 brazen throats, their shells suddenly crashing upon Eylau and setting the villagers shrieking. He 234 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON hastened to the church, climbed to the belfry and traced out through the grey dawn the enemy's lines. The enemy, after all, had not stolen away again under cover of darkness, and the real Battle of Eylau was on in full fury, with 75,000 men on either side. "While the Russians were try- ing to pound their way around the French left, Napoleon at- tempted to turn their own left and, getting in behind them, cut them off. But a fine snow blew in on icy blasts from the north and at times the soldiers could not see twenty feet ahead, while the melting snow so moistened the primings as to render many of their muskets useless. At the height of the blinding storm, Napoleon ordered in Marshal Augureau's corps, with instructions to seize a hill out of the town, where in these days a battle monument rises among the tall pines. Although ill with fever and tortured by rheu- matism, the marshal, unable to resist the sound of strife, was borne on a sledge to the battle line. There he was lifted to the back of his horse and, strapped in the saddle, he dashed for- ward in a furious snow squall. Suddenly the snow ceased to fall, and Augureau's 15,000 men found themselves eighty paces from a great Russian battery, which swept them with dense sheets of case shot. At the same time Russian infantry were raking them on one side and yelling Cossacks charging them on the other. Yet the 15,000 rushed upon the cannon and broke the artillery line, only to be overwhelmed at last by a swarm of Cossacks who galloped from their hiding place be- hind the hill. In twenty minutes the corps of Augureau was gone from the list of the Grand Army. It had been shot to pieces under the eyes of Napoleon, as he watched from the churchyard. At evening roll call only 3000 of the 15,000 stood to be counted. The Cossacks raced over their fallen foes, galloped up the churchyard knoll and plunged among the graves. "Save the Emperor!" rose the cry, and Marshal Berthier loudly called for the imperial horses. But the Emperor silenced him with a glance and, without moving a foot, simply exclaimed, "What audacity ! ' ' The invaders of his august presence already had EYLAU AND FRIEDLAND 235 exhausted themselves in their daring charge and were easily brushed back by the cavalry of the Guard. Murat's cavalry with their 12,000 sabres now flung them- selves at the enemy 's centre, while Davout pushed around the left of the Russians. The French seemed to have retrieved their mishaps, and at four o'clock they were apparently the victors. They were in the Russian rear and the battle was believed to be over. But as the sun was setting, the head of a Prussian column, which had been hurrying all day through the deep snow, rushed into a grove of birch trees. There it fell upon the vanguard of the French flanking force and drove it back foot by foot until the Russian rear was clear again. The army of the Czar had been saved by the Prussians. For the first time in ten years, Napoleon was obliged to ac- cept a drawn battle. In the trampled, blood-stained snow, 10,000 men lay dead and 30,000 more lay wounded among the thousands of dead horses, a frightful sacrifice without a gain. "The country is strewn with the dead and wounded," Na- poleon wrote to Josephine, in a tone of lamentation as he sat in the salon of the present-day squalid tenement house of Eylau. The French survivors passed the night in robbing their own and the Russian dead and dying. They stole from the sur- geons while they were absorbed in their humane tasks. They rifled the pockets of the lifeless and the helpless living. They ripped off the gold braid and jerked off the boots from stricken officers. They tore open coffins and graves. Emerson says that half of Napoleon's soldiers at Eylau were thieves and burglars. At any rate, a season of privation had brutalised the army and left its better nature winter-killed. When morning came only the Cossacks remained before the town to guard the retreat of the Russian army to Konigsberg. To have balked and escaped the Great Captain was victory enough for the foe, and the Russians and Prussians were filled with rejoicing as they marched away from the bloody scene. The King of Prussia unhesitatingly rejected the more liberal terms which Napoleon now offered. Sniffing victory from 236 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON afar, the young Czar came on from Petrograd to visit the King and Louise in their retreat at Memel. That town, whose one street faces the sea, thrilled with added pride in the pres- ence of an imperial personage as well as of royal guests. As Alexander embraced Frederick William, he declared, "We shall never fall singly; we fall together or not at all." And the two monarchs registered a vow that neither would make peace until Napoleon had been driven beyond the Rhine, which is a march of 800 miles ! With the coming of spring the war was renewed. Napoleon had built up his army to a total strength of 175,000 men, for he had a wide front to cover. Facing him were 120,000 Rus- sians and Prussians. Having rested and found food, both armies were in far better spirits than when they dragged them- selves to slaughter at Eylau. A French force, under Marshal Lefebre, captured the fortress city of Dantzic in May. In early June, the main bodies of the two armies came into a frightful collision at Heilsberg. But the decisive battle in this second campaign occurred on a hot day of June at Friedland, only a few miles across the country from Eylau and a little more than thirty miles from Konigsberg. The pretty village of Friedland, with its shady streets and well tended gardens, is one of the most awkward battlefields that the chances of war ever chose, perched as it is on a bluff and hemmed in between the River Alle on one side and a creek on the other. With his back to the 200-foot river, Bennigsen was pressing hard Marshal Lannes' small force when, at noon, Napoleon rode upon the scene and quickly saw that he could catch the Russians in the tight little town. He reflected that it was the anniversary of Marengo and a lucky day for him. Sitting down in a grove on a baronial estate at the edge of Friedland, where the present baron displays the site of Napoleon's kitchen and some cannon balls that fell among the trees, he scheduled his nicely laid plans for trapping the Russian bear. The baron recounts, too, the story of a gentle rebuke the Em- peror gave a young officer who dodged as one of the balls whistled over his head. "My friend," the great fatalist said EYLAU AND FRIEDLAND 237 to the youth, ' ' if that ball were destined for you, it would be certain to find you though you were to burrow 100 feet under the ground." As the French reinforcements hurried up, Bennigsen tried to escape by crossing the river. But the fire had grown so hot in his rear that he had to turn and accept battle in earnest at five o'clock in the afternoon, when 60,000 soldiers of the Czar began to wrestle with 80,000 troops of Napoleon, with a village for the prize. Soon 60,000 men were fighting in a line only the length of three city blocks. Ney hurled his force through the first and second Russian line, only to be driven back by the Czar's imperial guard, when Victor pressed through the retreating ranks and smashed the winded Russians. For that feat Napoleon promptly rewarded his old Toulon comrade with a marshal's baton. Friedland was now in flames from French shells, but the Russians, with Slavic stolidity, fought on amid the burning buildings until darkness fell. By that time, Bennigsen had withdrawn to the opposite side of the Alle as much of his army as he could save. He left behind, however, 20,000 dead, wounded and captives, while other thousands flung themselves into the river. Sending a force to take Konigsberg, Napoleon followed the broken army of Bennigsen until he had driven it across the Niemen, by whose banks he sat down at Tilsit to await the sur- render of the Czar. CHAPTER XXIX AT TILSIT 1807 AGE 37 THE sword of Napoleon, having in nine months cut its way like a scythe from end to end of Germany, his allied foes hoisted the white flag in the month of June, 1807. To signalise the submission of the Czar, the conqueror carefully dressed the stage at Tilsit, and a rude, far away, little town of 10,000 people, lying a few miles upstream from the bleak shores of the Baltic, thus became the scene of the most celebrated and dramatic meeting of monarchs since the royal interview on the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Tilsit is approached from the west over a plain of steadily thinning soil and population, where solemn storks and lonely windmills make the landscape all the more drear. Farms and grain fields give way to cattle ranges and hay fields, and these seem about to surrender at last to scrub forests and sandy wastes, when there rise against the grey sky the smoking fac- tory chimneys of the town, where once the Caesar of the west and the Caesar of the east divided the earth between them, while the King and Queen of Prussia stood by to pick up the crumbs. However crude a stage setting the Tilsit of 100 years ago may have been for the gilded staffs of two empires, the Tilsit of to-day is not an unworthy background for the historical pic- ture. With 40,000 population, with avenues as broad and leafy, as well paved and well swept as any Parisian should expect, with shady squares and pretty parks, in one of which stands a statue of Queen Louise; with trolley cars and taxi- cabs, the town wears a worldly air becoming its celebrity. The Niemen, across which the cheers of the armies of Napoleon and the Czar rolled in fraternal greeting, flows by in imposing 238 AT TILSIT 239 breadth, rafts of logs floating now where a century ago the autocrat of all the Russias met and folded in his arms the son of the Revolution. Beyond the river, spanned by two great modern bridges, one of them dedicated to the memory of Louise, the visitor looks to where the eastern horizon, twelve miles away, bends to the desolate boundary of Russia, that land of gloom and mystery. The spacious three-story stone house, which was Napoleon's palace and the seat of imperial power for two weeks, stands upon one of the principal streets. Within it the business of a doctor, a paper hanger and a dealer in picture post cards has succeeded to the business of empire. But the urns above its cornice remain to assert its former pretensions, and its door- step, by which Napoleon forever holds the hand of Queen Louise in the familiar picture, still abuts upon the sidewalk. The Czar's house, where he dwelt a near-by neighbour of the French Emperor on the same Deutschestrasse, has given way to a modern building. But Louise 's house stands almost unchanged a few squares away in a humbler quarter of the town, befitting her unhappy role in the drama of Tilsit. It was and still is the miller's house, with a grist mill next door. But did not even Frederick the Great have to put up with a mill at the gate of Sans Souci? Over the door of the house of the miller of Tilsit is a bust of Louise, and on the outer wall a memorial tablet. In the front room, one flight up, is her parlour, where her first fenc- ing match with the conqueror of her kingdom took place. A marble bust of her in a corner commemorates now that most anxious hour in a period crowded with anxious hours. Although Tilsit is off the tourist path, that old white house by the mill is the shrine of such German patriots as visit the town. In this refuge of his stout-hearted great-grandmother from the disasters that for a time overwhelmed the Hohen- zollerns, Kaiser William II has sat in silent revery. But the house of Napoleon is not the goal of pilgrims. It bears no tablet, and its site is not even indicated on the map of the local guide book. With the French army encamped on the Tilsit shore of the 240 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON Niemen and the Czar 's on the opposite side, Napoleon ordered an imperial pavilion to be erected on a raft, and this strange structure was moored midstream, with the French and Rus- sian pennants flying above it. On the eleventh day after the rout at Friedland, the armies of France and Russia were drawn up on their respective shores, when, at one o'clock, the two Emperors appeared on either bank and entered gaily decorated barges, Frederick William standing forlorn in the crowd of spectators that lined the Rus- sian shore. Napoleon had not invited the King, whom he had scornfully described as "no more than an aide-de-camp" of the Czar, and whom he despised for his incompetency in the conduct of a war he had rashly precipitated. The Emperors having arrived at the raft, stepped upon the deck of the pavilion simultaneously, when Alexander, in the view of the legions of two empires, bestowed a fraternal kiss on the man whom he had ever before refused to salute as a brother monarch. "I hate the English as much as you do," he exclaimed, according to a French report, "and I will second you in all your actions against them. ' ' "In that case," Napoleon replied, "everything can be ar- ranged and peace is already made." Leaving their attendants outside, the Emperors then en- tered the pavilion, where the two childless monarchs sat alone for an hour and three quarters while they partitioned the world between themselves, for Asia as well as Europe seemed then to be a melon ripe for cutting. Happily neither pos- sessed anything that the other coveted, their boundaries lying far apart, and the Russians always being more greedy for con- quests in the east than in the west, Napoleon craftily diverted Alexander's attention and ambition from Europe. Seizing upon the timely news that a revolution had lately taken place in Turkey, he assured the Czar it was a decree of Providence that the Turkish Empire could no longer exist. As always, however, when nations sit down to feast on Turkey, the two Emperors could not agree which should have the Constantinople slice. "I could have shared the Turkish Empire with Russia," Napoleon said in after years, "but Con- The Emperor of the West ano the Emperor of the East Meeting on the Raft at Tilsit Napoleon Greeting Queen Louise of Prussia AT TILSIT 241 stantinople always saved it. Russia wanted it and I would not grant it. Whoever holds it can govern the world." When the Emperors came out of the pavilion, the Czar, an impressionable, almost hysterical young man, had completely passed under the magic of Napoleon. "I never," he said, "had more prejudices against any one than against him, but they have all disappeared like a dream. Would that I had met him earlier ! ' ' While the two Emperors continued fondly to caress each other, Frederick William remained a silent and lugubrious looker-on at the festivities, which included grand military re- views and dinners of Parisian excellence on gold plate brought from the Tuileries. No menials served the feast, but officers of the imperial household were the waiters, swords at their sides and every seam gold-laced, with Grand Marshal Duroc standing in the attitude of a headwaiter. Napoleon parried every attempt of the Czar to return the dinners, because, it is said, he was unwilling to run the risk of being poisoned. There is a tale of his holding a cup of tea in his hand throughout a call on Alexander and never venturing to taste it. Sometimes he rained all manner of questions upon his guests. Once his eye surveyed the long row of buttons on the side of Frederick William's grey pantaloons, a garment that was only then coming into use. "Are you obliged to button all those buttons every day?" he asked the King. "Do you begin at the top or bottom?" Again he would turn upon the Czar and overwhelm him with questions he could not answer: "How much does the sugar duty bring you?" "What does your sale of pelts and furs amount to in a year?" "Do you make money or lose money on this or that feature of your ad- ministration ? " Such a catechism was likely to embarrass a man born to rule, and who had not been obliged, like the French Emperor, really to learn the trade. In other moods he turned monologist, and moved the listening monarchs to admiration and wonder by the seemingly boundless range and depth of his knowledge of the commerce in the many countries gathered in his empire. 242 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON It was after the conference at Tilsit had been in progress more than a week when Louise finally was persuaded, ' ' amid a thousand tears," her physician tells us, to make her appear- ance there. "God knows what a struggle this has cost me," she confided to her diary. ' ' Yet this hard thing is required of me, and I have grown used to sacrificing myself." Arriving from ]\lemel at four in the afternoon, she awaited the painful ceremony of Napoleon's call at the miller's house. "If he will give me back a village or two, my errand will not have been in vain, ' ' she said to her court. One of the ladies in waiting who received Napoleon at the door has drawn with ill-concealed prejudice an unflattering portrait of him: "Excessively ugly, with a fat, swollen, sal- low face; very corpulent, being short and entirely without figure; his great eyes roll gloomily around; the expression of his features is severe and he looks the incarnation of fate ; only his mouth is well shaped and his teeth are good." The lady did admit that "he was extremely polite," and Louise herself has said that he wore the ' ' head of Caesar. ' ' Bravely putting on her most winsome manner, the Queen took the hand of her pursuer and led him to a window in the parlour, where they stood and talked for an hour. In the course of the inevitable conventionalities, which ranged from literature to botany, she asked him how he liked the northerly climate of East Prussia and he answered, "The French sol- dier, madame, is seasoned to all climates." Then in his most soothing tones he asked, ' ' How could you think of making war on me?" Louise happily fashioned her reply to remind him that Prussia had not always been unequal to France : ' ' Sire, we may be pardoned for having built upon the fame of Freder- ick the Great!" Approaching her real mission, the Queen said : ' ' Sire, I am a wife and mother, and it is by those titles I claim your inter- vention on behalf of Prussia. The King attaches more impor- tance to the province of Magdeburg than to any other on the left bank of the Elbe which your Imperial Majesty takes from him. I appeal to your generous heart ; it is from it that I ask and expect a happy issue. ' ' AT TILSIT 243 ' 'Madame, I shall certainly be very happy — but," and he cast an admiring glance at her, "you are wearing a superb dress! Where was it made?" "In Prussia, Sire." "At Breslau? At Berlin? Do they make crepe in your factories too ? ' ' "No, Sire, but," the Queen persisted in returning to the main subject, "Your Majesty does not say a word of the inter- ests that alone occupy my thoughts at the present moment, when I am hoping to win from you a happier existence for all who are dear to me. Are we to talk about fashions at such a time? Your Imperial Majesty's heart is too noble; it unites with other qualities too exalted a character to be insensible to my sufferings." While Louise was in the midst of her appeal to his sense of justice, to his emotions of mercy, to his conscience, and just as her anxious eyes were detecting some signs of relenting in Napoleon's countenance, her long-faced husband entered the room, darkening it with his cold and silent melancholy. ' ' The King came in the nick of time, ' ' Napoleon laughingly assured the Czar when they next met. "If he had stayed away half an hour longer I fear I should have found myself promising the Queen anything. ' ' But under cover of his greet- ing to Frederick William he made his adieux to Louise — and escaped with Magdeburg ! When she came to dine with him in the evening he went out upon the sidewalk to welcome her and escort her into his house. He was equally polite at the table and most flattering in his attentions to his guest, the one woman in the company. After he had led her out to her carriage and bade her good night, he said to the Czar, * * The Queen is a charming woman, whose soul matches her face. Instead of robbing her of a crown, I might be tempted to lay one at her feet." While Alexander was hastening to congratulate the Queen on her conquest, how- ever, Napoleon was saying to Talleyrand, "Magdeburg is worth a dozen Queens of Prussia ! ' ' After his experience with them, Napoleon did not trust Frederick William and his court. They had been running 244 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON with the hare and hunting with the hounds for ten or twelve years. First when he was Consul they had joined him in despoiling Austria, and next they made ready to jump on his back while he was facing Austria and Russia at Austerlitz. The moment he was victorious there, they sacrificed their sworn allies and began to barter with him again, but only to turn upon him once more. He had been vainly proffering them terms of peace throughout the campaign of 1806-07, but they rejected his advances and threw themselves into the arms of the Czar, thus bringing on a terrible winter campaign that took him 1000 miles from his capital. It was a maxim of Frederick the Great, ' ' Never maltreat an enemy by halves." Now that Napoleon had Prussia down he dared not let her up. He sternly informed the King the day after the interviews with Louise : " I do not mean that Prus- sia shall again be a power to weigh in the political balance of Europe." Frederick William grew red of face and Napoleon livid, in the course of the stormy talk that lasted three hours. That black day for Prussia ended with another dinner at the house of the French Emperor. It was a solemn feast, with the Queen sunk in grief, the King still flushed, Napoleon full of anger, and Alexander vainly trying to smooth the troubled waters. All alike avoided the one subject of their thoughts, the dismemberment of the kingdom of Frederick the Great. Only as the Queen was leaving did she venture to refer to the matter. "Sire," she said, "after the conversation we had to- gether yesterday, after all the kind things Your Majesty said to me, I left you believing I was to owe you our happiness, the happiness of my country and my children. To-day all my hopes are gone, and it is with very different feelings I take my departure. ' ' By the treaties of Tilsit, the Czar pledged himself to offer his mediation to England with a view to inducing her to recog- nise the equality of all flags at sea. His efforts for peace fail- ing, he promised to become the ally of Napoleon in coercing Sweden, Denmark, and Portugal to close their harbours against England and thus leave not a port for a British ship on the coasts of continental Europe. AT TILSIT 245 With the easy sense of honour characteristic of princes, Alexander accepted in return a miserable little strip of Polish soil that Napoleon had taken from Alexander's sworn friend, Frederick William, whom the Czar really had seduced into con- tinuing a disastrous war after the fall of Berlin. He received also a vague but glittering permission to steal Finland from the Swedes and European Turkey from the Sultan — with the ex- ception of Constantinople ! Merely as ' ' a testimonial of respect ' ' for the Czar, Napoleon restored to Prussia half of her 10,000,000 subjects. Prussian Poland was formed into the Grand Duchy of Warsaw under the sovereignty of the King of Saxony, whose alliance Na- poleon had won after the Battle of Jena. The great Prussian fortress of Magdeburg and all the rest of the Prussian terri- tory west of the River Elbe was added to Jerome Bonaparte's new kingdom of Westphalia, or to Louis Bonaparte 's kingdom of Holland. Moreover, Frederick AVilliam, now a mere vassal of the French Empire, had to find somewhere more than $30,000,000 to reimburse the conqueror for the cost of the war. Until he found it, Berlin and all his great fortresses were to remain in pawn, with the French army continuing to occupy them. Louise returned to Memel, by whose lonely Baltic shore she was to pass many long and sorrowful months. While waiting there for the evacuation of Berlin and the restoration of her capital and her home, she and the royal family of Prussia were reduced to plainer fare than some of the villagers. Servants were dismissed and horses sold. The service of gold plate, a treasured heirloom of the Hohenzollerns, was melted down and coined into money for the bankrupt treasury of the king- dom. Louise even parted with her diamonds. But she kept her pearls, ' ' for pearls betoken tears, and I have shed so many of them." It was not until Christmas week of 1809, after an absence of more than three years, that Louise returned to her capital. But, as her pastor tells us, the sparkle in her eyes did not come back with her and on her cheek there were now white roses instead of red. 246 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON While Prussia was yet sunk in the depths, the Queen found release from her too heavy sorrows. In the summer of 1810 and in the thirty-fifth year of her life, the King closed the eyes "which had so faithfully lighted up his dark path." Seven of the nine children Louise had borne in sixteen years of wifehood survived her. The eldest was to reign as King Frederick William IV, and on his death to be succeeded by the second son, William I, while a daughter, as the wife of Nich- olas I, was to become the Czarina of Russia. The wasted body was laid to rest among the pines in the park of the palace of Charlottenburg, that now populous sub- urb of Berlin. Her effigy, carved by the celebrated sculptor Eauch out of Carrara marble as white and pure as her woman's soul, reclines upon her sarcophagus, after having been, like herself, a prey to war. For while it was on its voyage from Italy aboard a British merchantman, the statue was seized by an American privateer in the War of 1812, but only to be re- captured by a British frigate which carried it in safety to its destination. Though the mortal Queen slept in her grave, her dauntless spirit went marching on, a lamp unto the feet of her people. When threescore years had passed, an old man came to kneel in prayer by her tomb. It was on that day, July 19, 1870, the sixtieth anniversary of her death, that the Franco-Prussian War began, a conflict which history was to charge to a Bona- parte Empress as it had charged an earlier conflict to a Hohen- zollern Queen. The aged man in the mausoleum at Charlottenburg was William I, King of Prussia, and he had come on a filial pil- grimage to invoke the inspiration of his mother's memory as he was setting out upon his avenging march to Paris and to the realisation of Louise 's vision, a union of the Germanic na- tions in a German Empire. CHAPTER XXX NAPOLEON'S MARSHALS THE marshals who surrounded and supported the throne of Napoleon form a remarkable exhibition of the pro- ductive power of democracy. Although the Emperor flattered himself that he made his marshals out of mud, those eagles really were hatched out of the fertile egg of the Revolution. The Republic, not the Em- pire, was their opportunity. Every one of them already had won rank before serving under Napoleon. Three among them were colonels, four brigadiers, and one was a chief of staff, while full fifteen had risen to the high distinction of division commanders ere he became the fountain of honour. All but five of that brilliant company were sons of the peo- ple, and all but seven started at the bottom as common soldiers. Murat's father was a country tavern keeper, Ney's a cooper, Augureau's a mason, Lefebre's an enlisted soldier, Massena's a tanner and soap boiler, Oudinot's a brewer, Macdonald's a Scotch crofter, Suchet's a small manufacturer, Lannes' a poor mechanic, while Jourdan and Bessieres were sons of country physicians, Bernadotte, Soult, Moncey, and Brune of country lawyers or notaries, and Mortier and St. Cyr of little farmers. Berthier's father was an office holder of modest rank and only Davout, Marmont, Grouchy, Poniatowski, and Perignon were of noble origin. None but Davout, Marmont, and St. Cyr ever had seen the inside of a military school. All except Berthier, Davout, Mac- donald, Marmont, Grouchy, Perignon, and Poniatowski had started in the trade of war with the musket of a private. Massena was content to serve in the ranks fourteen years, and Bernadotte nine years without rising above a ser- 247 248 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON geancy. Soult, in spite of a club foot, was accepted by the enlisting officers and well content with a sergeant's chevron. Lannes ran away from a dyer to whom he had been appren- ticed, and went into the army, but was turned out as a person of insubordinate temper, while Oudinot after two years of soldiering preferred a life among his father's beer vats. Ney, on the other hand, chose to be a hussar rather than the coal miner his family wished him to be. For the better part of twenty years, Augureau was a wandering soldier of fortune, serving in the armies of France, Russia, Prussia, and Naples. Moncey alone among those future marshals hidden in the ranks of King Louis' army did win a captaincy, but only after twen- ty-three years of service, while Victor saw ten and Lefebre sixteen years of service without a commission. The Revolution came and the aristocratic froth was blown off at a breadth ; the pressure of caste was lifted from the army, and merit creamed to the top. Privates were transformed into colonels, and sergeants into generals in a month of cam- paigning. Every man quickly found his true level. It was a wonderful example of what democracy can do. If the civil life of France had been democratized as the army was, the Empire might never have risen. If the Revo- lution had gone to the people for its political leaders as well as for its army leaders, if the doors had been thrown open as freely to civil as to military talent, the Republic might have been saved. But while the republican armies under the leadership of men who had sprung from the lowest ranks were conquering the martial aristocracies of Europe, the politicians of the revo- lutionary epoch were all drawn from the old ruling classes. The Republic, triumphant abroad, perished at home under the feeble and selfish rule of ex-nobles, ex-clergymen, and lawyers. It was not the sword, but the statesmanship of Napoleon that France needed and invoked when she surrendered to his mas- tery. With the fall of the Republic, the democracy of the army was lost. When the Corsican artilleryman seized for himself the sceptre of empire, he rewarded and reconciled his com- NAPOLEON'S MARSHALS 249 panions in arms, the one-time privates and sergeants, by plac- ing in their hands the batons of marshals of France. Creating at once fourteen active marshals and nattering four old gen- erals of the Revolution with the title of honourary marshals, he distributed in all twenty-six batons in the course of the Empire. Love of country no longer being potent to inspire devotion, he frankly appealed to personal selfishness as the incentive to service. "In ambition," he said, "is to be found the chief motive force of humanity, and a man puts forth his best powers in proportion to his hopes of advancement. ' ' But am- bition, once aroused, never is satisfied. The more it has, the more it wants. Mere batons did not long suffice the marshals, who clamoured for more and yet more. Naturally men are not content to serve a throne as cheaply as they will serve a people, that is to say, serve themselves. The generals of the French Republic were happy with $8000 a year, while the American Republic has put armies in the field as large as those enrolled under the Empire of Napoleon, and yet never has found it necessary to pay its greatest generals more than $13,500 a year. "When the title deed to France had been made out anew in the name of one man and the nation became the patrimony of his heirs, the peasant marshals soon had to be appeased with hereditary titles and estates that they could transmit to their children. The Emperor, therefore, established an aristocracy with his marshals for its pillars. Once he had proclaimed the Empire and set up a throne, this step may have been a necessity, as it surely was a pleasure for Napoleon. He was always glad to share his fortunes with those around him, and now he opened wide his hands and rained titles and riches in a torrent. He scattered abroad in ten years more titular honours than ever fell from another throne in 100, creating 48,000 chevaliers of the Legion of Honour, 1000 barons, 388 counts, 31 dukes, and 4 princes. With each patent of nobility, he made a gift enabling the recipient to support his title. But he prudently took care not to burden the French taxpayers with the upkeep of the newly 250 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON made aristocracy. He did not venture to challenge the dor- mant republicanism of the country by drawing even the bare titles from France. On the contrary, he drew upon conquered lands for his ducal names, the marshals often being ennobled by titles that recalled to French pride victories on alien battle- fields. Just as it was his practice to quarter his army on foreigners, and make it cost the people of France as little as possible, he quartered his nobility on foreign countries. He distributed among his military men some $5,000,000 that he brought back from his Prussian campaign, and besides he bestowed upon the marshals and their heirs forever a fixed percentage of the yearly revenues of crown domains wrested from conquered sovereigns and of ancient fiefs in Italy, Dalmatia, Poland, and Germany. Lannes received at once $250,000 in cash and $65,000 a year ; Davout $60,000 in cash and nearly $40,000 a year; Berthier $100,000 in cash and $80,000 a year; Ney $60,000 in cash and $45,000 a year, and thus the donations ranged. From time to time they were enlarged as fresh rewards were won until the most fortunate drew $250,000 a year. "Pillage not," the Emperor abjured them. "I will give you more than you can take. ' ' His benefactions fell upon the entire army, including the privates, every rank receiving its share. It was the Emperor's boast that he made giants out of dwarfs among his marshals, but it is equally true that in a few cases he made dwarfs out of giants. His genius developed the lesser men but arrested the development of the larger natures. The former shone in his reflected glory, but the latter languished in his shadow. Those fitted only to obey climbed to fame on his shoulders, while those capable of command lost their native independence. ' ' I alone know what I want done, ' ' he gave all his marshals to understand. "The Emperor," his chief of staff announced to them, "has no need of advice or of any one acting on his own responsibility. No one knows his thoughts ; it is our duty to obey." NAPOLEON'S MARSHALS 251 Napoleon could add nothing to the stature of Massena, Soult, Davout, and Suchet, born leaders whom he led until their power of initiative was weakened. Not that they would have been really great in any circumstances; yet they might have been stronger but for his overwhelming strength. On the other hand, marshals like Murat, Ney, Berthier, Le- febre, Augureau, Bessieres, were perhaps only ordinary men, each with some extraordinary quality which Napoleon knew how to employ without suffering from the consequences of their defects and their ill-balanced characters. For he was not afraid of the wildest genius, but was confident that he could bridle and ride it. "I know the depth and draft of all my generals," he said. This one was stupid, that one mad, this one was an ass, that one a tiger ; this one was too slow, that one too swift ; this one had no nerve, that one had no prudence. But when yoked together and guided and goaded by the master hand, those strangely assorted marshals of the Empire were such a team as never has been matched in the annals of war. The Emperor rejoiced in fulfilling his promise to make "the fortunes of those who have worked with me to found the Em- pire and the fortune of their children." As the valiant sons of the Revolution gained the heights of imperial grandeur, however, the ladder by which they had climbed from obscurity to distinction, from democracy to aristocracy, was kicked over. The Emperor still stirred his soldiers with the illusory hope that any one of them might find a marshal's baton in his knap- sack. Alas, none of them did. For the batons were all gone and no marshal of France emerged from the ranks of the Grand Army. Although the Emperor continued to proclaim the promise of a career open to every talent, all those titles and estates which he had created were mortgages on posterity, perpetual entails, each of which forever closed a door to talent and merit. Free trade in genius was at an end. CHAPTER XXXI VICTORIES OP PEACE MORE blood has been spilt in the streets of Paris to overthrow monarchies than on any other equal space of earth. Yet those streets all seem as if they surely must lead up to a throne. London, in whose narrow, tangled ways confusion reigns and there is no sign of the presence of a king, expresses English freedom and English individualism. But its sister city across the Channel plainly is a made-to- order town and the prettily arranged stage setting of a court. The broad, tree-lined boulevards, with their miles and miles of windows and mansard roofs on a tyrannical level, with their arbitrary vistas of splendid palaces and churches and monu- ments, wear an air of regal magnificence that mocks the French Republic in its own capital and ridicules the republican sim- plicity of a president. Napoleon, at the height of the Empire, stamped his image upon the city and made it his monument. The Empire fell and rose only to fall again. Bourbons and Orleanists have come and gone. The Commune tossed in its fitful fever. The Republic lived and died and has been born anew. But through all its vicissitudes Paris has remained unchangingly imperial. Art is long and beauty endures. Although the British metropolis, with a population of 1,100,000 in 1801, was twice the size of the French metropolis, Napoleon boasted that ''London is a corner of the world; Paris is the centre." He resolved at once to make himself the Caesar and his capital the Rome of the modern world. AVars delayed and his downfall defeated many of his plans. The Second Empire took up the unfinished work of the First and completed the transformation of the city from a dingy, mediaeval town. 252 VICTORIES OF PEACE 253 Napoleon enlarged the palace of the Louvre, which 500 years before had been built in the field by the Seine where the wolf hunters met, and he crowded it with the art of con- quered lands until it held the greatest collection of paintings and sculptures ever assembled under one roof. From the win- dows of the adjoining palace of the Tuileries, which 250 years before had been erected among the tile kilns, he looked out on the clothes yard of Paris, where the housewives came to do their washing in the river. On the other side of the palace he found himself shut in by a lot of old convents and all manner of ramshackle buildings. He cleared the river bank and lined it with broad quays. He tore away the huddle of unsightly structures at his palace gate and laid out there what is still one of the most important and imposing sections of the city. Opening a magnificent street facing the Seine for nearly two miles, he named it for the Battle of Rivoli. Directing that it should have an arcaded sidewalk in the Italian manner, he prescribed so closely a uni- formity in skyline and architecture that every window and roof and corner of this Rue de Rivoli still must conform to his original design. Out of that great street, he ran two other now noted streets, which commemorate his battles — the Rue Castiglione and the Rue des Pyramids — but a third no longer is the Rue Napoleon ; it has become instead the street of peace, the celebrated Rue de la Paix. In the centre of this magnificent quarter, he reared on a pedestal of Corsican granite the noble column that adorns the spacious Place Vendome and encased its masonry in metal plates made from 1200 Austrian and Russian cannons. On those sheets of bronze he caused to be engraved in pictures the story of the campaigns of Ulm and Austerlitz, while he sur- mounted the lofty column with a statue of himself in his im- perial robes. When the Empire fell, the Bourbons hurled to the earth that effigy of the Emperor and recast its metal into a statue of Henry of Navarre, which now stands on the Pont Neuf over the Seine. King Louis Philippe, however, crowned the column with another statue of Napoleon, but in the familiar garb of 254 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON the victorious General-in-chief, which in due time Napoleon III replaced with still another in the drapery of the Emperor. This, in turn, was overthrown by the communists in 1871, but the Third Republic gathered up the fragments, joined them together, and the conqueror in his imperial mantle continues to dominate Paris. Even while the Vendome column was in process of construc- tion, Napoleon suddenly determined to have another memorial of the campaign of 1805. Summoning his architect in the night, he ordered him to begin the work the next day. When the Emperor looked out in the morning, he saw 500 workmen digging the foundations for the now famous Arch of the Car- rousel, between the Tuileries and the Louvre. On the comple- tion of the arch he crowned it with one of the proudest of his trophies of conquest, the celebrated bronze horses of Venice, which had been prizes of war in the reigns of Nero, Trajan and Constantine, if not indeed of Alexander the Great. Another arch, the largest in the world, the Are de Triomphe de l'Etoile, was begun at his command. Seen afar, this beau- tiful arch of the star, rising from a gentle eminence in the present day centre of fashion, seems to be swimming in the sky above the trees of the Champa Elysees and as impalpable as a fleecy cloud. The streets approaching it are the namesakes of the fields or companions of Napoleon's glory. The Avenues du Bois Boulogne, de la Grande Armee, Jena, Wagram, Fried- land, and Kleber, and the Rue Tilsit, and the Rue Pressbourg, each brings its special tribute to the feet of the arch. Among the bronzes that embellish this huge and noble pile of marble, there is one which celebrates no victory and yet commemorates the victor at his best. It is the memorial of a simple friend- ship of his youth and represents the death of young Muiron, who was a comrade at Toulon and who laid down his life for his friend on the bridge of Arcole. One more monument to war which Napoleon designed, he afterward changed into a church, the classic Madelene, whose pagan beauty betrays its builder's first purpose, when he planned to make it a Temple of Glory and fill it with the statues and tombs of his warriors. But he himself was not Some Portraits of the Emperor 1, by Gosse, 2, by Vernet, 3, by Delaroche, 4, from a miniature 5 by David VICTORIES OF PEACE 255 to lie in the midst of them. On the contrary, he chose to sleep among the kings that crowd the homely old church at St. Denis on the edge of Paris. Personally reserving there a space for his grave, he ordered the restoration of the edifice which had been desecrated by the revolutionists. While providing burial places for himself and his marshals, he took thought at the same time of the mortuary needs of all the people of Paris outside the city and directed the opening of four cemeteries such as he had seen in Germany. The first and most renowned of these was laid out in what formerly was the private park of the father confessor of Louis XIV — Pere La- chaise. Until then cemeteries were unknown in Paris, and bodies were heaped in confusion beneath church floors or found no abiding place anywhere. A complete catalogue of Napoleon's contributions to the beauty of Paris would be large. He gave the present Chamber of Deputies its classic fagade, the Pantheon its noble pediment and the Luxembourg its now celebrated museum. He had none of the soldier's indifference to nor the aristo- crat's contempt for trade. He wished to see Paris the finan- cial as well as the political capital of Europe. While engaged in his Polish campaign, he issued orders for the construction of an exchange which should correspond to the splendour of his capital and the great volume of business he hoped to develop. "It must be vast," he insisted, "with walks all round it. It must stand by itself." Therefore, the famous Bourse, the richest stock exchange in the world, rises like a temple in the busy marts of the city. The Emperor dreamed of a Paris with 2,000,000, even 4,000,000 people gathered within its boundaries, the most populous city in the history of the earth — "something fab- ulous," he said, "colossal, unexampled." A minister urged him not to stimulate the growth of the city because it was already difficult for its inhabitants to supply themselves with food and water. Napoleon met that objection by summarily abolishing the hundreds of inefficient and insanitary slaughter houses and promptly establishing a few great central abattoirs and organising a vast public market. 256 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON At the same time he ordered that the construction of a canal be started the very next day for the twofold purpose of bring- ing to the city water and barges laden with the produce of the country. There was then no water for the streets or for horses, and the people had to buy the water for their household needs at one cent a pail, but he persisted in his plan until it was as free as air in Paris. New fountains were set up and old ones revived, which together yielded an abundant supply on every hand for the people, the horses and the streets. "In the dis- tricts of St. Denis and St. Martin," the watchful master of Europe complained after all these provisions had been made, "there are three fountains without water." He was as attentive to the streets of his capital as to his military lines of communication when conducting a campaign. There were only three or four sidewalks in all Paris until he ordered them laid throughout the city. He found the streets swarming with robbers at night and beggars by day. He sup- pressed robbery by introducing an efficient police force, the familiar gendarmerie which all the cities of Europe have imi- tated, and he attacked mendicancy by opening houses of charity and workshops. "Every beggar shall be arrested," he directed; "but to arrest him in order to put him in prison would be barbarous and absurd. He must be arrested in order that he may be taught to earn a livelihood by work." This ruler who had hungered in those streets of Paris knew that bullets were not the proper remedy for want. ' ' I would rather fight an army of 200,000 men than have to put down a bread riot," he said, and he expressed two simple and prac- tical measures in these orders : "If the cold returns, have big fires lighted in the churches and other public places so they may warm large numbers of people." "The winter will be severe and meat very dear. We must make work in Paris. ' ' While he was in Germany, nearly a thousand miles from Paris, he wrote to his officials that a "disease called croup," which was fatal to children, had risen there and was spreading to France. He offered a liberal money prize for the physician who should propose the best treatment of the ailment. Nor did he neglect the nation or any part of his immense VICTORIES OF PEACE 257 Empire. The network of canals that carry the commerce of France to-day was systematised by him. It was he who or- dered the construction of waterways that linked all the rivers in the country. The unequalled system of highways in France was inau- gurated by him and toll gates were torn away. Applying his hammers to the Alps, he did what the Romans had not dared to try, tracing through blocks of granite, smooth, spacious roads over and under mountains which had interposed since time began to Make enemies of nations who had else Like kindred drops, been mingled into one. Wherever he found a barrier between men, whether of na- ture or of law, he impetuously threw himself against it in a fury to remove it. Capturing a city, he levelled its walls. Capturing a citadel, he dismantled it. The first general of modern times to lead a big army over the Alps, he constructed pleasant promenades across them by which the merest holiday soldier was freely challenged to invade France. The great Simplon road from Switzerland into Italy cost $25,000 a mile and as many as 30,000 workmen were employed upon it at one time. There is no more fitting monument of the constructive genius of Napoleon than the gallery of Gondo on the Simplon, where a tunnel nearly two hundred and fifty yards long pierces an enormous mass of rock that seemed to make the road impossible. No traveller reads without a thrill of admiration the inscription at the portal of the tunnel : Aere Italo, 1805, Nap, Imp. Two other Alpine roads of his reign are the Mt. Cenis and that over Mont Genevre, both leading from France into Italy. A fourth is the Grande Corniche, the noblest road in the world, which he built so high up on the brow of the Maritime Alps from Nice to Mentone that the British gunboats could not shell an army marching by it into Italy. From Metz to Mayence on the Rhine he threw a highway across trackless marshes and through vast forests. 258 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON The great ports of Antwerp, Cherbourg, and Boulogne are more indebted to his reign than to any other for their present importance. The facade of the Milan cathedral had waited 400 years to be completed, but he ordered it finished in short order. At the same time, he decreed the construction of the pretty marble arch which marks in that city the completion of the Simplon road. Canova's bronze statue of the Em- peror's nude figure, which was designed for the arch, stands instead in the courtyard of the Brera Gallery at Milan. On a brief visit to Venice, Napoleon ordered the demolition of a group of old monasteries and laid out the Public Garden ; transferred the cathedral honours from St. Peter's to the more famous church of St. Mark's, and authorised the expenditure of $1,000,000 in improving the harbour and the canals. He was never to see Rome, but in anticipation of a visit to the Eternal City after his return from Russia, he planned its restoration and the construction of roads and canals for its benefit. To the same end he ordered from the sculptor, Thor- waldsen, the celebrated relief, the Triumph of Alexander, as an adornment for the walls of the Quirinal palace, but reverses overtaking him, the sculpture passed into other hands. It now forms the frieze of the Marble Hall in the Carlotta Villa on Lake Como, while only a plaster copy of it has been set up in the palace of the King of Italy on the Quirinal. For the most part Napoleon wrought in stone and was in reaction from the idealism that preceded the Empire and ran riot. Still he remained obedient to many of the solid, tangible purposes of the Revolution which sent him forth. He up- rooted ancient injustice all along his way and planted liberal institutions throughout Europe. Even to faraway Poland, he carried modern laws, freeing the serfs and the land, while Prussia emulated the example of her conqueror and feudalism disappeared from Germany in a year. "Let every species of serfage be abolished, ' ' he commanded his brother Jerome, when setting him upon the throne of Westphalia. ' ' The benefits of the Code Napoleon, the publicity of court proceedings, the es- tablishment of juries should form so many distinctive char- acteristics of your monarchy." Some Napoleonic Autographs VICTORIES OF PEACE 259 He did more for the emancipation of the Jews than all other rulers together in three centuries. He convoked their leaders in the famous French Sanhedrim of 1807 and his Madrid decree still is their charter of rights in the lands that formed his Empire. "All men are brothers before God," he de- clared to a deputation composed of a Catholic priest, a Protes- tant minister, and a Jewish rabbi, and he gave that brother- hood the force of law nearly everywhere in Europe. How far he stood in advance of even the more progressive nations may be measured by the fact that the earl marshal of England, the Duke of Norfolk, still was debarred from a seat in the House of Lords because he was a Catholic, while George III dismissed a British cabinet in 1807 because it favoured the emancipation of the Catholics, a measure of justice that was refused until 1829. And it was not until 1858 that England emancipated the Jews. Notwithstanding its comparative liberalism in many things, the Empire of Napoleon was not of the higher realm of the spirit, but a splendid materialism. While he established the University of France and organized schools for the few, his energies were wholly directed toward fitting men for his serv- ice. He did nothing for popular education. The Empire found 96 per cent, of the people illiterate — think of it, only four Frenchmen in 100 could read or write ! — and it is doubtful if there were more than 25,000 children in the public primary schools of France at any time while Napoleon was on the throne. The finer arts languished in the deep shade of this massive figure. Notwithstanding he offered liberal yearly prizes, no great poem or song, no great opera or play found its inspira- tion in him. Beethoven dedicated his symphony, "Eroica," to the First Consul. When his republican hero put on the crown, however, the composer angrily tore off the dedication, trampled it under his feet and dedicated the immortal sym- phony anew to the ' ' memory " of a great man ! Although he ordered and paid for paintings by the yard — "eight metres, three decimetres in height and four metres in breadth, the price to be $2400" — he admitted that it was "ab- 260 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON surd to order a poet to write an ode as you would order a dressmaker to make a muslin gown." Yet he seemed often tempted to arrest the poets and musicians for their ineffectual attempts to gild the gold of his achievements. "If things do not go on better at the opera, ' ' he threatened, ' ' I will put in a good soldier to manage it. ' ' In the end this masterful man, in his infinite variety, made himself the poet and the orator of France. The map of Eu- rope was the sheet whereon he wrote the greatest epic of his time. "However vigorous his practical faculty," says Taine, in his study of Napoleon, "his poetic faculty is stronger. It is even too vigorous for a statesman ; its grandeur is exag- gerated into enormity, and its enormity degenerates into mad- ness." Napoleon's proclamations to his army often rose to the clear heights of oratory. Emerson pronounced his battle narratives as good as Caesar's. A measure of his activities as a writer is offered by his published correspondence, filling more than thirty volumes and comprising nearly 30,000 documents. Yet very little of it did he write with his own hand. No pen could keep up with his thoughts. His words flew from his lips while the quills of his secretaries, with no system of stenography to aid them, raced to put on paper a few main points and characteristic expressions from which to frame letters, orders, proclamations, and speed them by couriers to all corners of the Empire. If they were engulfed by the tor- rent and floundered, he cried out as if in pain, "I cannot re- peat ; you make me lose the thread of my thought. ' ' He did not have time even to subscribe "Napoleon" to the documents which his secretaries laboriously wrote out and laid before him ; he merely jabbed them with his quill and made an undecipherable sign which yet sufficed to give them full force and effect throughout Europe. Sometimes the illegible scratch was intended for "Nap," but as the terrible pressure weighed heavier and heavier upon him he made only a fish hook for an "N." Thus while the power and care of the Emperor in- creased his autograph diminished ; as the man grew in au- thority his signature grew smaller and meaner. VICTORIES OF PEACE 261 Just as the one letter "N" hastily scrawled sufficed to pro- claim his will to a docile world so his presence needed not to be heralded by any long title. As kings and princes entered the court they were announced by all their proud designations, but when the doors were thrown open for the sovereign of sovereigns the attendant pronounced only the simple, yet thrill- ing title, "L'Empereur!" He became the literature, politics, and trade of France. He held no councils in war and no cabinet meetings in peace. He let Talleyrand go — "he was always in a state of treason" — and acted as his own minister of foreign affairs. He abolished the Tribunate and his own was the one voice left in the nation. Strong, stubborn natures fled him, and those who remained sank into clerks to do the bidding of one whom Gladstone rated "the greatest administrator in history." Generally he was at work as early as seven in the morning, tearing through the multitudinous duties of an Empire which embraced half a dozen kingdoms and thirty principalities. Sometimes he awoke at a most unreasonable hour and called for his assistants, shouting, as Baron de Meneval tells us, "Let every one arise." The financier who financed that enormous Empire, clothed, fed, armed its tremendous armies, was Napoleon himself. Gal- loping back from Austerlitz, he stole into Paris in the night, and after an absence of 125 stirring days, sat down at his table as if he had only returned from a stroll. Summoning his ministers in council at eight in the morning, he began to straighten out the tangled finances of his government, re- organise its income and outgo and establish a new system of double entry accounting. He hated a public debt. The debt of France was $100,000,- 000, when he began to fund it, and he swore that ' ' as long as I rule I shall not issue any paper." At the height of his power the yearly expenditures ranged from $140,000,000 to $180,- 000,000. He made his army pay its own way with indemni- ties from conquered lands and subsidies from allied states. Warfare was cheap in a time when soldiers received only a few cents a day, lived off the country, and ordnance was simple 262 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON and inexpensive. The army pay roll was hardly ever more than $1,000,000 a month. No stock speculator ever watched the ticker more closely than Napoleon watched the fluctuations in the price of rentes, or the public securities. Their par value was 100 francs,' but where they sold for only twelve francs the day before he seized the reins, they rose steadily until the victory of Austerlitz boosted them to seventy and the peace of Tilsit to ninety. Shortly afterward they touched ninety-three, which represented interest at the rate of about 5 per cent. ^ The Emperor's attention to money matters was not limited to high finance. He watched the centimes as vigilantly as the francs. He corrected even the Empress' laundry bills and re- joiced over the saving of $7000 a year effected by his having systematised the expenditures for the 155 cups of coffee daily drunk in his palaces. He made his marshals and courtiers, when in attendance at court, furnish their own blankets, linen' towels, firewood, and candles, and gave them nothing but the bare beds. Not a sip of soup or wine could be obtained in any of the palaces without a cheek from Dtiroc, the grand marshal. Life at court necessarily was robbed of its joyousness by such a spirit of cheese paring in the palaces, the upkeep of which was reduced to an allowance of only $600,000 a year, whereas it had been as much as $5,000,000 under the Bourbons,' when the broth for a two-year-old princess cost $1000 a year! and rolls for each lady in waiting $400. Louis XVI spent $400,000 on a court journey to Fontainebleau, a function that Napoleon duplicated, in outward form at least, for $30,000. Yet he was prodigal with rewards. Every man in France knew that if he devised anything useful in science or rendered an important service the Emperor would handsomely repay him. Napoleon had insisted from the outset that the Legion of Honour should not be for the reward of soldiers alone. He contended, on the contrary, that "all sorts of merits are broth- ers," and that "intelligence has rights before force." Hon- ours fell upon exceptional men in every calling. As the cheva- liers of the Legion came and went through life, with their deco- rations on their coats, sentries presented arms and the gen- VICTORIES OF PEACE 263 darme lifted his sword; their sons and daughters were edu- cated by the state, and when they themselves died, a squad of twenty-five soldiers marched beside the funeral car. Many broke under the heavy yoke of Napoleon. He said of one of his ministers that he had some merit at first, "but by cramming him too full I have made him stupid. ' ' Decres groaned, "that terrible man has subjugated us all." Another of his ministerial tools said, "I used to think I saw the Em- peror standing over me as I worked shut up in my office." Compassionless toward himself, this taskmaster was not with- out compassion toward others. He confessed at one time that he had already worked to death two of his ministers and would have killed a third had he not been so tough. "The lucky man," he said, "is he who hides away from me in the depth of some province. When I die, people will draw in their breath and say 'ouf !' " For himself there was no hiding place, no refuge from his morbid restlessness, no escape from the terrible energies that boiled up and clamoured within him, no release from the super- normality with which nature had visited him. Power warped his whole being. He lost the capacity to smile — he never could laugh. Care furrowed his face and left his eye cold and searching. ' ' That devil of a man ! ' ' the bold ruffian Van- damme exclaimed. "I, who fear neither God nor the devil, tremble like a child when I approach him. He could make me jump through the eye of a needle into the fire." From the towering summit of his own eminence, he saw mankind so nearly on a dead level below him that individ- uality was almost lost. The imagination and plans of others could not keep up with his own and were but a drag upon him. He needed only the arms and hands and legs of men to execute his thoughts, which gushed forth spontaneously like water from a geyser. Thus, one man absorbed France and Europe until he was all in all, nations and armies, commerce, industry and litera- ture, kings, queens, princes, ministers, and marshals, like fly- ing horses in a merry-go-round, revolving on his Atlantean shoulders. CHAPTER XXXII FORTUNE TURNS 1806-1809 AGE 36-39 RETURNING to Paris from Tilsit on a mid-summer morning in 1807, Napoleon stood on the summit of power and looked down upon a continent obedient to his will. As he walked the giddy heights, however, he saw distant peaks that seemed to rise above him and challenge his aspiring spirit to climb higher still. Yet all the roads opening before him, whether their finger posts invited him to Spain, or to Rome, to Divorce or to Moscow, inevitably ran down hill, since he was already in fact at the top. He was at peace with the world save for a little island that lay off in the fog of the North Atlantic like "a wart on the nose of Europe," as he contemptuously described it. He was confident he could conquer England in a bloodless campaign without firing another gun and without leaving his capital. With the flags of France and her allied nations swept from the ocean, and English vessels excluded from the harbours of the continent, the American flag had become the favourite ref- uge and protector of a great commerce. To prevent the infant republic of the west taking from them the lead in the carrying trade, the British ministers adopted the watchword, "No trade except through England." To that end they forbade neutral ships to enter any port of Napoleon's empire unless they first visited an English port, and paid a heavy tribute to the British treasury. Napoleon thereupon retorted with a decree which condemned to seizure any vessel submitting to that exaction. With that stroke the doom of the commerce of the seas was complete. The great waters all but reverted to the trackless 264 FORTUNE TURNS 265 wastes they were before the voyages of Columbus, Gama, and Magellan, while Napoleon undertook to reopen the ancient overland routes to the east. The new world was now involved with the old in a universal conflict. It was estimated that only one in eight American vessels crossing the Atlantic escaped capture at the hands of France or England. The United States, seeking at once to protect its ships and retaliate on both of the belligerent powers, adopted the Em- bargo Act in 1807. To that end Congress forbade American vessels to clear for European ports, and it sought to cut off Eu- rope from American supplies. Nevertheless the stars and stripes continued to appear in European waters. Many American ships eluded the Embargo Act by staying away from home and engaged in the carrying trade between foreign ports. By a further decree, however, Napoleon condemned all ves- sels of the United States entering his harbours, since they had no right under American law to be absent from their own ports. Obedient to this last act, 134 American ships were seized in a year, and their cargoes, aggregating in value $10,- 000,000, were confiscated. "When England saw the bayonets of Napoleon, like a barbed wire fence, enclosing the shores of the Atlantic and the Baltic, the Mediterranean and the Adriatic, she sought to keep the port of Copenhagen open to her trade by bombarding that city and carrying off the Danish navy. The Emperor at the same time was menacing a feeble nation at the other extremity of Europe and demanding that Lisbon, the only southern port where the British flag still found a welcome, should be closed. ' ' If Portugal does not do as I wish, ' ' he stormed at the Portu- guese ambassador, ' ' the House of Braganza will cease to reign in two months. I will no longer tolerate an English ambas- sador in Europe, but will declare war against any power that receives one at its court. ' ' He was determined to plant his guns at every harbour mouth on the continent and bar England from the land as effectually as she was barring France from the sea. The few poor little 266 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON ports of the Papal States did not escape his attention. Pope Pius VII was sternly commanded to close them to British trade and join the continental alliance against Great Britain. While Pius VII discreetly yielded to the Commander-in- chief of an army of 800,000 soldiers so far as to consent to the exclusion of British trade from his dominions, he refused to declare war against England and become a militant ally of France. Thereupon an imperial army suddenly entered Rome, where the Papal secretary of state and various members of the cardinalate were arrested and deported until only twenty-one cardinals remained in the city, which now lay beneath the sword of Napoleon. The little kingdom of Portugal, torn between the master of the land and the mistress of the sea, also failed to meet the Em- peror's demands in full, and he hurled upon it a French army of invasion, under the command of Junot. Sir Sidney Smith, the ubiquitous rover of the sea, who had baffled Napoleon at Acre, was in Lisbon harbour as the invaders approached the city, and he induced tin' poor mad Queen and her Prince Re- in 'i it to hoard one of his ships. When, therefore, Junot arrived at the palace he found that Smith had removed the Portuguese crown beyond his reach and that the royal family had flown to their Brazilian colony. There the fugitive Braganzas set up a throne for the first time in the western hemisphere and ul- timately founded the Empire of Brazil. A squalid brawl in the wretched royal family at Madrid now tempted Napoleon to take their throne away from them. Ferdinand, the Prince of the Asturias and heir to the crown of Spain, a narrow, dark souled young man of twenty-three, rebelled against his father, and both turned to the mighty Emperor, each appealing for his protection against the other. Son and father were plainly told that neither should have the crown, and the ignominious pair were not long in resigning themselves to their imperious master. Signing away their do- minion in two worlds, they accepted in return large pensions and gilded prison cells in French chateaux. As coolly as if he were appointing prefects to govern French departments, Napoleon in 1808 assigned Joseph to be King FORTUNE TURNS 267 of Spain and Emperor of the Two Americas, and ordered Murat to mount the throne of Naples. At the same time, as always when incorporating a new country in his empire, he gave Spain the boon of a liberal constitution and sound guaran- tees of a government infinitely better than it ever had known. To his astonishment he found that the Spanish people cared much more for their pride than for any progress he could offer them. They preferred their own antiquated, oppres- sive and corrupt government to any modern improvements introduced by a foreigner. Instantly rising in a frenzy of indignation at the insult to their nation, they drew their knives and cut every French throat that lay bare to their revengeful hands. This was a wholly new experience for Napoleon. In Italy and Egypt and Poland he had battled only with the alien op- pressors of the population, to whom he presented himself as a liberator. In Austria and Prussia he had not fought the people, but only a stupid and selfish aristocracy. When, however, he accepted the challenge of the popular re- volt in Spain and undertook to crush a people, he definitely ceased to be the champion, and became the enemy of democracy. In the picture that he was contemplating, he saw himself a second Charlemagne uniting Europe in a new empire of the west. But in the ten centuries since the Carlovingian Empire was founded, nations had risen and the sentiment of patriotism had become a mighty force among men. Napoleon himself had no nation and had grown up a stranger to patriotism. By a strange stroke of poetic justice he had left his subjugated Corsica, had conquered its conquerors and brought the con- tinent under the rule of an islander. His army was a medley of nations and races; his camp a babel of tongues. Italians guarded his eagles on the dykes of the North Sea ; Poles bore them through the passes of the Pyrenees, and Spaniards patrolled the sandy bounds of his dominion by the Baltic. He viewed with contempt the savage fury of the undisci- plined rabble that had set all Spain ablaze. "Be gay," he commanded King Joseph, "and do not let yourself be trou- bled." But poor Joseph could not fairly be expected to dis- 268 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON play much gaiety as he found himself elevated on the point of a bayonet and enthroned on a keg of gunpowder. Within nine days of his entry into his new capital, the imported King was in flight northward from the rebellious hordes that overran his kingdom. Had that misfortune come singly it would have been bad enough, but it was accompanied by a disaster that stunned the Emperor and left him speechless with grief and rage. A French army under General Dupont had been caught between two fires at Baylen, in Andalusia, and nearly 20,000 French- men had laid down their arms to the Spanish mobs that hemmed them in. The Emperor was in southern France when he was struck by that "blow of fate," as he called it. Through three hours of silent agony he held the direful news in his breast, without lisping a hint of it, until at last plaintive cries escaped his lips. For the first time an army of Napoleon had surrendered. For the first time his imperial eagles, bestowed on his bat- talions by his own hands, were captives in the hands of an enemy. As if promptly to point the prophecy which that event held, another of his armies surrendered in the following month to Sir Arthur Wellesley, in the first battle between a French force and the destined victor of Waterloo. The future Duke of Wellington had landed an English army on the Portuguese coast to reopen the harbour of Lisbon and drive the French from the country. Junot had marched out from Lisbon to repel him with an inferior force. Then for the first time since Yorktown, an English and a French army faced each other in battle, and the English won. The French capit- ulated and agreed to abandon their occupation of Portugal. While the Spaniards were placing the captured eagles of Napoleon among the treasures in the cathedral of Seville, the amazing report of their victory and the English victory in Portugal ran throughout Europe and awakened a new hope in the foes of the Empire everywhere. Austria grew bolder and more urgent in the war preparations which she had been mak- ing ever since Austerlitz. To eclipse the thoughts of his recent defeats and revive the FORTUNE TURNS 269 memories of his victories, to convince the Hapsburgs and all other restless elements that the compact of Tilsit still united the two greatest powers of Europe, Napoleon in- vited his ally, the Czar, to meet him in Germany. This second meeting of the Emperors took place in the early autumn of 1808 at Erfurt, where Napoleon and Alexander played Damon and Pythias before a retinue of four kings and a score of princes and a dozen dukes, who humbly waited upon their im- perial majesties. Having fortified the Franco-Russian alliance, Napoleon turned to face the Spanish mobs. Leaving Paris in the im- perial state that now marked his going to war, fresh horses, sent on ahead, awaited him at each nine or ten mile stage of the journey. Berthier sat beside him in the great lumbering coach, with iron tires almost as broad as an automobile's. In front of the Emperor's seat, which at night was converted into a bed on which he could lie at full length, was a door that could be let down and employed as a table, while behind it were the drawers and pigeonholes of a complete office desk. Duroc, grand marshal of the palace in charge of all the travelling arrangements, galloped on one side of the carriage. On the other side rode Caulaincourt, master of the horse, with the maps which must always be at the Emperor's call. The horses of a score of aides-de-camp and orderlies pranced about the vehicle, with four pages mounted behind and on top of it. At the rear right wheel Roustan, the mameluke, always rode, with a luncheon ever ready to be served. Beside the opposite wheel rode two mounted chasseurs carrying portfolios filled with papers. Equerries and grooms and the Emperor's per- sonal stud of eight or ten led horses followed. The escort con- sisted of a detachment of chasseurs of the Guard and whenever and wherever the Emperor set foot four of them with drawn sabres surrounded him in a square, nimbly jumping this way and that before and behind him as he walked about. On a melancholy day early in November of 1808 this caval- cade passed into the sombre land of the Spaniards, where Na- poleon took command of a superb army of more than 200,000 270 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON troops to confront 170,000 Spaniards and British. For Eng- land had now made common cause with the revolting Spanish. As the Emperor sped toward Madrid, he drove a wedge be- tween the wings of the enemy's army. He left the wings un- wounded, however, and in condition to unite and flap together again. Meanwhile no serious resistance was offered to his ad- vance. The nation parted, to let the invader pass, as a sea parts at the prow of a ship, but only to close in when he was gone and leave no trace of his passage. Entering the Spanish capital in less than four weeks from the opening of the campaign, he patted the mane of one of the white marble lions that guard the grand stairway in the royal palace and exulted, "I possess you at last, the Spain I desire !" But all his possessions in Spain were limited to mere symbols of power, like those lions of the stairway. He had conquered roads, and castles, and palaces, but he had not subdued the people anywhere. At the fall of their city, the inhabitants of Madrid haughtily drew their cloaks about them and in silent disdain received the conqueror. In vain he proffered his unwilling subjects the solid advantages of modern institutions and laws. The Span- ish people would accept nothing from his hand. He opened the theatres in order to reawaken the gaiety of Madrid. The Spaniards would not enter them. For days hardly a woman appeared in the streets, and the gallant invaders sighed in vain even for a glimpse of a pair of black eyes behind the grilled gates of the houses. The Emperor heralded abroad his appear- ance at grand reviews, but pride overcame curiosity and the people refused to come out to see the most extraordinary per- sonage of modern times. Napoleon was organising at Madrid an expedition to drive the English out of Portugal, when 30,000 British, under Sir John Moore, crossed the Portuguese frontier to drive him out of Spain. As they moved straight toward his communications, the threat at once diverted him from his Lisbon campaign. Leaving Madrid in mid-winter, after a stay of three weeks in that capital, he began the pursuit of Moore. Afoot in a storm of hail and sleet he led his army over the Sierra de Guadar- FORTUNE TURNS 271 rama, whose peaks divide old Castille from new. But in spite of his swift marches the English escaped him and were well along in their retreat to Corunna. Already a fresh alarm about Austria had recalled him from his dreams of "planting his eagles on the towers of Lisbon." Quickly turning to hurl himself against the walls of Vienna, 1800 miles away, he abandoned to his marshals the war on the peninsula. General Savary with difficulty kept ahead of his master, but Duroc and Roustan lagged in the dust, while the Emperor, with a solitary aide-de-camp at his side, spurred on from relay to relay of horses in his race to Paris. CHAPTER XXXIII HIS LAST VICTORY 1809 AGE 39-40 AS Napoleon galloped back to Paris on lathered horses, the flames of the Spanish revolution, bursting forth with new fury, lit up the southern sky behind him, while the camp fires of the Austrians blazed before him in the northern sky. He was caught between two great wars, and must now take up arms against that sea of troubles whereon he was to battle for six years with the ever-rising waves of disaster which at last were to dash him upon the rock of St. Helena. At four o'clock of an April morning in 1809, the Emperor, with Josephine beside him in his coach, started for the front to enter upon his last victorious campaign. After leaving the Empress at Strasburg and making calls on two kings along the way, he arrived at the headquarters of his army in ninety- seven hours. The distance from Paris by rail is about 500 miles, and the time by express train to-day is twenty hours. Napoleon instantly grasped the reins, and in an hour his couriers were spurring their horses in every direction with orders designed to unite the army against the Austrian forces. " Activity!" "Activity!" ''Rapidity!" he scrawled in a postscript to Massena. The hills and valleys everywhere rang with salvos announcing to the soldiers that the Great Captain had come. There followed one of the most brilliant weeks in his mili- tary life. After fighting four or five battles in as many days, he stood at the brink of the moat around the mediaeval walls of Ratisbon, when he was struck in the right heel by a long- range Tyrolean rifle. Although the ball "scarcely razed the 272 HIS LAST VICTORY 273 tendon Achilles," he assured Josephine in a letter, it inflicted a painful sting. As he sat on a drum, while a surgeon dressed the wound, thousands of his soldiers broke ranks and surrounded him, in- different to the Austrian guns, which were pelting the excited assemblage. To disperse the group and reassure the army, he mounted his horse and rode down the lines on waves of cheers. Pausing before each command, he called upon the commanders to name the men under them deserving of special honours. Privates and corporals and sergeants were transformed there on the field into knights of the Empire and chevaliers of the Legion of Honour. That extraordinary review under fire having been finished, he ordered the scaling ladders against the old town wall and returned to his hillock, where as Brown- ing portrays him A mile or so away on a little mound, Napoleon stood on our storming day, With neck outthrust, you fancy how; Legs wide, arms locked behind As if to balance the prone brow Oppressive with his mind. One week after the Emperor's arrival at headquarters, he was within the fortress walls of Ratisbon, and the Austrian Archduke Charles was running off into the wilds of Bohemia. The victorious invaders poured down the valley in a torrent that overwhelmed all the strongholds on the road to Vienna. While Napoleon was riding with Berthier and Lannes one day, he saw the towers of the old castle of Dirnstein reaching sky- ward from its rock beside the Danube. As he pointed to the towers, he told his companions the story of an emperor that had treacherously imprisoned within those castle walls, Rich- ard Cceur de Lion, who, like themselves, had fought at the gate of Acre. How far removed are we now from those barbarous times ! ' ' he exclaimed. "I have had princes, kings, and emperors in my power, and, far from taking away their liberty, I have not exacted a single sacrifice of their honour. Would they do as much for me?" The party rode on in silence, the Emperor's 274 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON gaze still fixed upon the castled ruin. But in his reverie he probably did not dream how much less kind fate could be, even in a later time, than it was to Richard the captive of Dirnstein ! At the opening of the campaign, the Emperor Francis with his court had journeyed to the front to enjoy the confidently expected triumph of his arms over the conqueror of Auster- litz. Even as the army fell back in the first days, misleading reports of victories had stimulated the spirits of the Viennese and of the imperial family at the capital. When she heard the false news of victory, the young Arch- duchess Marie Louise, who had already been twice driven from her home by Napoleon, wrote this pathetic and childish letter to her father, the Emperor: We have heard with delight that Napoleon was present at the great battle which the French lost. May he lose his- head as well ! There are a great many prophecies about his speedy end, and people say that the Apocalypse applies to him. They say he is going to die this year at Cologne in an inn called the Red Crawfish. I do not attach much importance to these prophecies, but how glad I should be to see them come true ! Napoleon had announced to his army at Ratisbon that he would be in Vienna in a month. In less than three weeks he was dating his orders from Schonbrunn, the palace of the Haps- burgs. There he strolled in the leafy lanes, for which Marie Louise was sighing in her banishment, and he slept in the very room where in the yet veiled future her son and his was to languish and die in exile. He was once more master of the Austrian capital, as in 1805. No sooner had he entered the city than he opened a campaign that remains unique in the history of warfare. He was still confronted by the army of the Archduke Charles. Between them flowed the Danube, the bridges over which had been destroyed by the Austrians as they evacuated the city. The mountainous banks of the upper Danube, rising almost sheer 500 and 1000 feet on either side, often shut it in a narrow bed. Those cliff-like walls give way as the river approaches HIS LAST VICTORY 275 Vienna, and its pent up waters burst upon and spread over a great plain, the Marchfield, forming there a remarkable tangle of islands. Seizing upon those islands as stepping stones, Napoleon, with his customary rapidity, threw bridges of boats from island to island a few miles below the city. In hardly more than a week after his capture of Vienna, he began to march his army across to the northern bank. Although within sight of the Byzantine domes and towers of the great city of Vienna, which has grown from a popula- tion of 200,000 to more than 2,000,000, the historic plain of the Marchfield remains to-day, with the exception of a street car line, the same simple, quiet country side that it was when the battle of the empires burst upon it and broke its stillness in the first decade of the nineteenth century. The wide, open field lying in front of the desolate wooded island of Lobau is even now dedicated to military use, but not to a combat of foot and horse, as in 1809. The big, ungainly hangar of the Austrian army rises in the meadow, and out of its barn-like door such chariots of war sail into the air as would have struck Napoleon dumb with amazement. Beyond that "flugfeld" by the Danube, and a mile or more from Lobau, two little stone villages dot the plain. The one on the right is Essling and the one on the left Aspern. Na- poleon ordered his advancing forces to seize those hamlets and convert their stone cottages and stone walls into forts. The Archduke Charles stood on the crown of the Bisamberg, which lifts itself like a grandstand at the upper end of the Marchfield, when he saw his audacious antagonist thus cast the gauntlet at his feet. Charles eagerly accepted the bold challenge of an army divided by a river. Only 30,000 French had crossed, when the Archduke de- scended the plain in five columns and hurled 80,000 Austrians upon their left and right wings at Aspern and Essling. Na- poleon sat in the brickyard at Essling while Marshal Lannes beat off the storm of battle which beset that town. Six times in that May afternoon, Aspern was tossed back and forth like a ball. When night fell, the French and the Austrians were clinched 276 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON in the churchyard square of Aspern and only broke away to bivouac, leaving their outposts at opposite ends of the vil- lage, to glare at one another around the street corners. Na- poleon himself lay through the night in the grass by the bridge, urging on the reinforcements from the other side of the river. Once the bridge broke under the pressure of the swiftening current, but the rickety structure was fastened together again. When, at two o'clock in the morning, Charles' batteries suddenly belched fire in the darkness and poured their lava streams upon Massena's command in Aspern, there were in all only 55,000 French to face him. Having received word that Davout, the lion of Auerstadt and Eckmiihl, was crossing to his assistance, Napoleon ordered Lannes and Bessieres to throw themselves upon the Austrian centre. Seeing his line between the villages breaking under the blow, Charles seized an Austrian flag and, with reckless daring, dashed forth beneath its waving folds, and rallied and led his troops forward. As so often happened in the old warfare, the tide of a great battle was turned by one man, and the Archduke's gallantry at that moment is celebrated in a spirited statue which stands in the centre of Vienna. While Napoleon was exerting himself to steady his lines as they fell back, he received the appalling news that the Danube had risen in his rear. Nature had cut his communications. The mighty river was booming with a spring freshet, which, sweeping trees and boats from its banks, hurled them against the main pontoon of the French, between Lobau and the Vienna shore. As this great bridge was smashed and swept away in the thunderous torrent, Davout with his army, stood by the opposite shore a helpless spectator of his Em- peror's desperate plight. Even the ammunition supplies were cut off, for nothing could be ferried over the swollen waters. Napoleon was compelled to sound retreat for the first time since he was turned back from the walls of Acre. And now a flood threatened him with greater perils than he met in the arid desert. Even if the frail, creaking bridge from the Aspern shore to Lobau withstood the buffets of the angry river, he still must beat off the victorious foe the remainder HIS LAST VICTORY 277 of tho morning and throughout the afternoon, in order to get his tens of thousands of men over to the island under cover of darkness. Massena, afoot and sword in hand, held back the Austrians all day at the Aspern church, and the statue of a lion which now stands in the churchyard even more fittingly expresses his defence than the Austrian victory which it was erected to commemorate. Meanwhile Lannes faced the Austrian centre and parried its blows until he had only 300 grenadiers. His horses were dead and his cartridges gone. But in a message to the Emperor he gave his pledge, "I will hold out to the last." And he left the field only when borne off dying. A cannon ball rolling along the ground had given him his thir- teenth battle wound and carried away both legs. When the sun had gone down at last on a day of frightful sacrifices, the retreat to Lobau was made in the shadow of night. In thirty hours of fighting, the Austrians had lost more than 20,000 men, and the French quite as many from their smaller force. Soon secret messengers were speeding throughout the Em- pire and whispering the news that the child of destiny had received a parental chastisement, that the favourite of for- tune was not invincible. Two of his armies had surrendered within a year, and now even he himself had been defeated. Great, if silent, was the rejoicing in Germany and wherever an imperial eagle perched above a subjugated people. Napoleon, however, was moving with no less decision and vigour to repair a defeat than if he were taking measures to complete a victory. He at once set his army to the task of conquering the Danube, while he summoned reinforcements from every quarter. At the end of six arduous wonder- working weeks, he had 200,000 soldiers at Vienna and was ready to make good his boast that "the Danube exists no more. ' ' A bridge of sixty arches and wide enough for three carriages to pass abreast had been completed to Lobau ; another bridge eight feet wide had been constructed on piles, and a third bridge, formed of boats, was in readiness. The army thus on 278 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON July 1 could advance in three columns, and on that day the Emperor himself pitched his tent on the great island. Thence, dressed as sergeants, he and Marshal Massena personally recon- noitred the northern bank of the river, under the eyes of Austrian sentries, who, seeing them take off their coats, were not unkind enough to molest two common soldiers out for a bath. The next deception perpetrated upon the enemy was a more serious one. A bridge was thrown across from Lobau on the site of the old bridge in the Aspern-Essling fight. The Arch- duke Charles, therefore, prepared for a renewel of the struggle on the same lines as before. But in two hours of the dark and stormy night of July 4, six pontoon bridges were thrown across from the farther end of the island without attracting the fire or even the attention of the foe. By noon of July 5, Napoleon stood on the Marchfield again, but this time with 180,000 men behind him and only 140,000 Austrians in front of him. Sweeping around Charles' well constructed entrenchments about Aspern, he aimed his blow straight at the village of Wagram, nearly ten miles across the plain from the former battlefield. His object was to strike the left wing of the Austrians in that village and cut off an- other army which was then hurrying to the aid of Charles. The battle did not begin until seven in the evening. Al- though Marshal Bernadotte with his German troops succeeded in capturing "Wagram, they lost it in a few minutes, and Na- poleon bivouacked that night with one more defeat recorded against him. Still he was up at break of day and the real Battle of Wagram was in full fury as early as four o'clock. More than 300,000 men were trampling the tall wheat of the Marchfield and wrestling for the possession of the little cluster of stone cottages which constituted the hamlet of Wag- ram. Fired by their repeated successes, the Austrians at once took the offensive and held it for six hours. At ten o'clock they saw the left wing of the French army crumpling and opening the way toward the bridges. If they could seize the bridges, a. fatal blow would be dealt the enemy's lines. Napoleon met that perilous situation not only by strengthen- HIS LAST VICTORY 279 ing his left wing, but also by bringing up 100 guns and train- ing them at half-range on the Austrian centre. The effect was the same as a heavy blow on the centre of the human anatomy. The triumphant Austrian army stopped, winded. Then Na- poleon moved forward to turn Charles' left at Wagram, toward which Davout and Macdonald pushed through blazing wheat fields, where all who fell were cremated in the flames. At two o'clock, Charles, cut off from hope of reinforcements, was in retreat toward the north country. Once more — and for the last time — Napoleon had brought to a close a victorious cam- paign. The Marchfield was strewn with the bodies of nearly 50,000 dead and wounded, equally divided between the two armies. Nearly a hundred thousand men had fallen on that little plain in six weeks and twenty villages had been wrecked, to determine which of two nations should possess distant lands that belonged to neither. Although Napoleon had been in the field three months, he had not, as in other campaigns, overwhelmed and destroyed the enemy. He was content to accept an armistice while Charles' army still bore aloft the banner of Austria. For already he was plunged into still another war, with a court older even than that of Vienna, with an empire far wider than that of the Hapsburgs. By his command, the soldiers of King Murat had entered Rome, planted the eagles of the new Cgesar on the Castle of St. Angelo and drawn up a battery before the door of the Quirinal, then the palace of Pope Pius VII. To control the ports of the Papal States against the British, Napoleon had first annexed the upper states to the kingdom of Italy. The Papacy still refusing to join the continental union against England, the Emperor next swept away entirely its temporal sovereignty. Thereupon Pius retorted with a bull excommunicating and anathematising all who took part in despoiling the Holy See. While the hosts of Napoleon and Charles were sleeping on their arms before Vienna, a commander of gendarmerie broke down the doors and stalked into the Quirinal on the night of 280 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON July 5-6, where the Pope, wearing his mozetta and stole, re- signedly awaited his fate. In the name of the Emperor, Pius was commanded to renounce his temporal sovereignty, and, upon his refusal, he was placed under arrest. He asked only for two hours in which to prepare for his departure ; but this respite was denied. Taking with him nothing but his breviary and his crucifix, the Pope emerged from the palace, and silently blessed the sleeping city. Then stepping into the coach provided for him, its doors were locked and his imprisonment had begun. When the sun rose above the Sabine Hills and gleamed on the dome of St. Peter's, the heir of the Fisherman was being hurried away in his prison van toward his captivity at Savona, the Savona from which Napoleon himself rode out one moonlight night to burst into fame on the heights of Montenotte. Now it was to become a station on his path to St. Helena. Although the Emperor pointed to the arrest of Pope Boni- face and Pope Clement VII by Philippe le Bel and Charles V as his warrant, the Christian world, regardless of sect, viewed his carrying off of Pius as the most unwarranted of his acts. The Papal States, it is true, were like a wedge in his empire, cutting off the kingdom of Naples from the kingdom of Italy. But he had already annexed those states of the church, and his arrest of the aged Pontiff could not be justified on the lowest grounds of policy. It was another deed that merited the cynic 's censure as something worse than a crime — it was a blunder. Napoleon's negotiations meanwhile with the Emperor Fran- cis dragged their slow pace through the summer. He had struck off a spurious issue of Austrian bank notes amounting to $60,000,000, and was prepared to flood and bankrupt the country with them when, in October, Francis tardily yielded to his terms. To ransom his capital, the Austrian Emperor gave up territories having a population of 3,500,000 and paid a war indemnity of $16,000,000, besides agreeing to the hu- miliating condition that he should disband half his army. By this latest cession, a part of Austrian Poland was transferred to the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, which was under the sov- HIS LAST VICTORY 281 ereignty of the King of Saxony, and the frontiers of the kingdoms of Bavaria and Italy were moved closer to Vienna. The day after the agreement was made a mighty explosion shook Vienna like an earthquake and left its walls in ruins. Not satisfied with the reduction of the Austrian army, Na- poleon had ordered that the Austrian capital be dismantled. The Viennese were greatly outraged by the blowing up of their ramparts, but time and art have healed the wound. For where the ugly bastions once rose and encircled the town, the Ring, that unique and beautiful promenade, now winds its noble way, and is become the proudest boast of the present-day Vienna. As Napoleon was levelling the old wall of Vienna, a new wall was being raised in France. Orders had come from him while he was at Schonbrunn that the private passage between his apartments and the Empress' in the palace of Fontaine- bleau should be closed. The hammers of the workmen on that partition really knelled the doom of Josephine. The conquest of Europe having been completed, the con- queror had determined at last to divorce his wife and seek in a new union an heir to perpetuate his empire. The walls of Vienna still lay in a heap four months after Napoleon 's depar- ture from the city, when Berthier, Prince of Wagram, climbed over them to demand from the Emperor Francis another prize of victory, the hand of his daughter, the Archduchess Marie Louise, in marriage with Napoleon. CHAPTER XXXIV THE UNCONQUERED SEX SOME one has made the discovery that Shakespeare, al- though he had 15,000 words in his vocabulary, had to repeat the term love 1500 times in the course of his matchless story of the human race. Yet that magic little word has no place in the biography of Napoleon. In the most crowded life that ever was lived, one chapter was left blank. Not that the Great Captain was a misogynist. It is really amazing to contemplate the time and attention bestowed upon womankind by this busiest man the world ever saw. It is hardly necessary to hark back to those naming messages to Josephine from that first Italian campaign, when the Little Corporal's pulse beat higher for love than for glory. The flames subsided, it is true, but not because the fire burnt out ; it was only smothered. When the bitter cynic, Marmont, tells us that "never did a purer, truer or more exclusive love fill a man's heart or the heart of so extraordinary a man," we cannot ask for a more credible witness. No woman seems to have touched that heart without leaving upon it an ineffaceable impression. Mile. Colombier, the little girl who picked cherries with the sublieutenant at Valence, needed only to address the Emperor to have him open wide his cornucopia above her no longer youthful or comely head and shower upon her a post of honour as lady in waiting at the court of Mme. Mere and upon her husband a barony, with comfortable emoluments. Another maid of Valence, whose smile had cast a faint ray upon his melancholy path by the Rhone, found herself elevated to the station of lady in waiting to the Empress, and her husband, M. de Montalivet, appointed a member of the ministry and a count of the Empire. He bore everything from and did everything for his most 282 THE UNCONQUERED SEX 283 faithless and useless marshal because he was the husband of Desiree Clary, a sweetheart of his own young manhood, saying, "Bernadotte may thank his marriage for his baton, his prin- cipality of Pontecorvo and the crown of Sweden." Although his own sisters looked upon the eagle, which freakish nature had smuggled into their barnyard brood, as only a bird to be plucked, Pauline alone among them having the slightest emotion for him, he lavished fondness upon his stepdaughter, his sister-in-law and upon the Beauharnais nieces and cousins. ' ' Hortense, " he said, in his admiration of Josephine's daughter, "forces me to believe in virtue." "When Princess Catherine of Wurtemberg came to Paris to marry Jerome, and knelt terrified at the Emperor's feet, he picked her up, gathered the awkward young German girl in his arms, kissed her, and with his gentleness did more than any of the women of the court to place her at ease. In the Prin- cess Augusta of Bavaria, wife of Prince Eugene, he inspired the fealty of a daughter. His letter of instructions to the young husband discloses a sensible domestic code : ' ' You need more gaiety in your house ; it is necessary for your wife 's happiness and for your health. I lead the life that you lead, but I have an old wife who can amuse herself without me, and besides I have more to do." The Emperor's indulgence toward Stephanie, Aunt Fanny Beauharnais' granddaughter, whom he adopted as his own daughter and married to the Prince of Baden, made that young lady the spoiled child of the Empire. When Josephine brought a little cousin from Martinique, he promptly married her to the Prince d 'Arenberg. The marriage was an unhappy one and the bride ran away from her groom, whereupon the Emperor gave her a liberal allowance that enabled her to dis- pense with an unpleasant husband. "Kind, gentle, persuasive women" were his choice, and such as they could go far with him. He would brook no self asser- tion from them on any point. He believed in training wives in the way they should walk. To the Duchess of Dalmatia, wife of Marshal Soult, he said : ' ' Madam, recollect I am not your husband. If I were, you would behave very differently. " 284 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON He would have no sex equality. "Women, he insisted, should not be regarded as "men's equals, for after all they are only the machinery for turning out children." He would have thanked a twentieth century emperor for his alliterative epi- gram on the limitation of women to "children, church, and cooking." In his scheme of education for girls there were to be no blue stockings. "Make them believers, not rea- soners," he instructed the educators. An amusing dread and jealousy of the influence and inde- pendence of the sex are betrayed in a hundred of his sayings. He really placed women on a level with the English, the Aus- trians, and the Russians as a peril to his mastery, seeming to look upon woman as a competing sovereignty seated upon a rival throne and disputing with him for the dictatorship of the earth. "A minister of state," he declared, "should never allow a woman to approach his cabinet." He would establish a quarantine against this insidious enemy and make the Em- pire exclusively masculine. Such a segregation of the sexes as he proposed is nowhere more absurdly impossible than in France, where the great ladies of the salons, sharing in the discussions, the intrigues, and the ambitions of philosophers and statesmen, only reflect the fashions of the women of the peasantry, who have an equal part with the men in the counsels of the cottage. Even war is not suffered to interrupt the comradeship of the sexes in France. The vivandiere, or cantine woman, dressed in the finery and mounted on the horse stolen for her by the soldiers, with her keg of brandy in front and her bologna sausage and cheese all around her, was at first the daughter and next the sister before she mellowed into the mother of the regiment, unless indeed she married in the meantime and be- came a duchess, like Mme. Sans Gene, or a baroness or a countess, like many others of her calling. Her tent was the club, and her purse the bank for officers and soldiers alike, while she braved wounds and death in battle by carrying re- freshments to the thirsty and famishing firing line. In all the campaigns of Napoleon, his army was followed by its "love escort." Such a band of wives and children, ac- THE UNCONQUERED SEX 285 tresses, dancers, and thousands of adventurous women as never attended any other than a French military organisation, brought up the rear of the Grand Army in all manner of wagons and carts, on donkey back and afoot. With the fortitude of grenadiers, they endured the heat of Spain and the snows of Russia, and, pausing at the foot of a tree to receive a call from the stork, the hardy mothers, with their babes in their arms, quickly overtook the advancing columns. In his earlier campaigns, Napoleon tried hard to shake off this "love escort." But, although he threatened to smudge the faces of the women, they defied him, and there is no record of such a cruel punishment of their vanity. He took all pos- sible precautions against any woman accompanying his army to Egypt, but many slipped aboard his ship as stowaways or in soldiers' uniforms. The eternal feminine was with him still in his retreat from Moscow, where women who had grown families in his camps and kept step with his legions for sixteen years, followed his footprints in the snow. Notwithstanding he had failed in his efforts to keep them out of his camp, he declared that "Women shall have no in- fluence at my court." Affecting a brave air, he exclaimed, "What do I care for the tittle-tattle of the drawing rooms? All I care for is the opinion of decent peasants." Yet he made a detective a duke to reward Fouche 's diligence and skill in providing ears for the walls of the salons of Paris. It was a pity the eagle could not soar above the idle gossip in the boudoirs of the old nobility. He never lost his sensitive- ness to their snubs. Mme. de Narbonne, although the Em- peror honoured her son with important missions, could not be brought to demean herself with more than two or three very perfunctory appearances at court each year. The son, how- ever, proved himself a clever diplomat in his apologies, when the Emperor said in a grieved tone, "I fear your mother does not like me." "Sire," the young count replied, "my mother has not yet advanced beyond the stage of admiration." Napoleon recognised the queenship of women, but he wished them to be like his fellow sovereigns of the male species, satel- 286 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON lites revolving around his own planetary body. He always stood ready to be their protector if only they would be his allies. His fatherly care over the "weaker sex" knew almost no bounds. He required every subprefect in France to make a list of the daughters of the most notable families within his jurisdiction, and an estimate of the probable inheritance of each girl. At that time he contemplated a sort of card index system, under which he would betroth to his poor but deserving civil and military officers all the heiresses in the country hav- ing yearly incomes of $10,000 or more. Ever eager to lend a helping hand to cupid, he married one of Josephine's maids to Constant, his valet, and giving the Duke of Gaeta, his minister of finance, two years in which to marry, he thoughtfully added, "If you wish, I will arrange it for you." In his ambition to dazzle the world with their brilliance and beauty, he surrounded his throne with women. They were, however, to be merely a studiously arranged tableau, and he succeeded in making his court the most splendid and the most stupid in Europe. The fashions and customs of women not only interested him personally but politically as well, for he saw their possible usefulness to him in his trade war with England. His court was commanded to give up the use of imported tea and sugar and all manner of British fabrics. "It is a contest of life and death between France and England," he said, "and every French teapot and sugar basin and work basket must be em- ployed as weapons in the war." Calling fashion to his side as an ally, he promoted the return to the silks of Lyons in the styles of the Empire for men as well as women, and laid a ban on the simpler and soberer republican garb that had come into favour at the Revolution. He led Parisian dress- makers away from their preference for goods made of cotton, which had to come by the blockaded sea, to linens and lawn woven of flax, and the merino sheep of Spain, no longer yield- ing their fleece to the woollen manufacturers of England, gave the mills of the continent a monopoly of the finest wool in the world. Women of the Imperial Family 1, Betsy Paterson Bonaparte, 2, Queen Caroline of Naples, 3, Prin- cess Pauline, 4, Queen Hortense of Holland, 5, Mine. Mere, 6, Grand Duchess Elisa of Tuscany THE UNCONQUERED SEX 287 Not by the Emperor's direction, but in his honour, the fashion makers brought out Oriental ideas that recalled his campaign in the east. One momentous departure was made without any apparent relation to him. That was the introduc- tion of corsets in the winter of 1809. Napoleon's weakness for the sex really was unmistakably betrayed in his inordinate interest in the dress and toilet of women, which he criticised as if he were inspecting his soldiers' uniforms. ' ' Go and put on some rouge, madam, you look like a corpse!" "How red your elbows are!" "Good God! They told me you were pretty!" "That is a fine mantle of yours; I must have seen it twenty times!" "Heavens, but isn't your hair red!" — these are among the reported ejacula- tions at which the women of the court circle trembled as His Imperial Majesty made his rounds. He never planned more closely the operations of his army in the field than he planned the amusements of his court. He gave great theatrical performances, but people were afraid to applaud. Young girls yawned and fell asleep in the heavy atmosphere of the Tuileries. It palled upon even the Em- peror himself, and in his weariness with the functions of his own devising, he fidgeted about on the throne at the splendid ceremonials. Paris had grown dizzy in the waltz, which Napoleon's sol- diers had discovered — or rediscovered — in the Jena campaign, when the conquering army saw the Germans forgetting their national woes in its dreamy whirl. Although Napoleon's old dancing teacher in Valence had put in an appearance and an application, saying, "Sire, it is I who once guided your steps," the pupil never was a credit to his instructor. "When the Em- peror tried his awkward feet in a gavotte at Warsaw, he asked the Countess Potocka how he danced. The Countess* reply is a model : ' ' Sire, for a great man, you dance perfectly ! ' ' The great man, however, was not so great a fool and he knew better. Good people in France were sorely outraged by the strange dance from Germany. Although it invaded even the frigid precincts of the Tuileries, the Emperor did not shock the 288 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON prudes by taking it up, for whenever he tried to waltz, that marvellous head of his grew dizzy and lost its balance. To give his people a change of scene, Napoleon at stated times transferred his court to country palaces, preferably Fon- tainebleau, which Josephine detested. On those occasions, the vast pile was crowded with a population equal to that of a town, requiring as many as 1100 beds to be made in the chateau and as many as 3000 covers laid at dinner. The apartments were assigned to the guests as in a big hotel, while the duties of entertaining were divided among the members of the im- perial family. If the Emperor gave a reception this evening, another evening was marked by a card party under the hos- pitality of the Empress, while on other evenings there were plays or musicales, followed by balls under the patronage of the princesses. The princes, the ministers, the grand marshal, and the ladies of honour, each with a dining table in his or her apartment — once there were fifty-two tables to be served — gave all the dinners, and thus left the Emperor at liberty to take refuge from the jaded mob of courtiers in a private dinner with the Empress and whomsoever else he chose. The social evolutions of each day were scheduled as in a military training camp. Breakfast over at eleven o'clock, the ladies turned to tapestry work ; at two the men went hunting, returning at eight or nine, whereupon the Emperor was likely to tap his watch and say, "I give the ladies ten minutes to dress for dinner." Sometimes a great levee was scheduled for Sunday morning, which obliged all those from Paris to travel most of the night, merely to stand in silence against the wall of a corridor at Fontainebleau while the Emperor passed as in a review of the Guard, perhaps without a word or a look, after which the long return journey to the city began. Spite of his tireless efforts to give his court a good time, the Emperor grieved: "Is it not strange! I brought all these people out to Fontainebleau ; I wished them to be amused and I arranged every sort of pleasure. Yet here they are, with long faces, all looking bored and tired." Talleyrand explained, with the candour which the Emperor permitted him in the privacy of the cabinet, ' ' Sire, that is be- THE UNCONQUERED SEX 289 cause pleasure cannot be summoned at the tap of a drum. Your Majesty always seems to say to us, 'Come, ladies and gentlemen, forward, march ! ' " One night at Fontainebleau, as the imperial party was com- ing from a production of the ' ' Marriage of Figaro, ' ' the wife of Marshal Lannes, the Duchess of Montebello, sighed: "To think that once I let myself be almost trampled and smothered to see that play, and now I find nothing amusing in it ! " Na- poleon replied, ' ' That is because then you were in the pit, and now you are in a box ! ' ' Dreary as the court of the Empire must have been, it had the then rare merit of apparent cleanliness, at least. It is true that Napoleon, when he assumed the crown assumed at the same time the ancient prerogative of monarchs to be a moral law unto himself. It is true, he proclaimed, "I stand apart from other men ; I accept no one 's conditions ! ' ' Nevertheless he continued to pay virtue the tribute of not openly adopting the now incredibly low standards which generally prevailed among royalty in a time when the palaces of Europe were houses of shame, and when there was not yet a democratic public opinion to restrain princes and princesses and compel them to seem as decent as common people. It was the obscene age when that obese debauchee, George IV of England, then Prince of "Wales, typified monarchial morals and reigned as "the first gentleman of Europe." The Hohen- zollerns were as abandoned a lot as any about a throne when Louise married into the family and united her homely virtues with those of Frederick William to lift the court of Berlin out of the mire. Czar Alexander was altogether worthy of his grandmother who brought him up, the naughty Catherine. If Napoleon did not surpass the morals of his fellow- sovereigns he was not guilty of their brazen affronts to the moral sensibilities of his subjects, but furtively tread the prim- rose path at double quick. He broke no lance, like Henry II, for a Diane de Poitiers ; in the Empire, France saw no Val- liere, no Montespan, no Maintenon successively playing the political boss with a Louis XIV; saw no Pompadour wast- ing the substance of the people in riotous living with a Louis 290 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON XV ; nor a Barry throwing state papers in the fire and mocking the interests of the nation. While Napoleon was on the German campaign in the winter of 1806, his first son was borne him in Paris by Eleonore — Eleonore Revel — and through seventy-five years of a worthless, rascally life, the Count de Leon carried the certificate of his paternal origin stamped on his face, which he proudly boasted as his "glorious resemblance." The Emperor appointed his secretary, the Baron de Meneval, to be one of the child's guardians, and made liberal provisions for the boy before his final remembrance of him in his will. The other son, who was born in 1810, became, as Count Walewski, a distinguished statesman of the Second Empire, serving under Napoleon III as ambassador to London, minister of foreign affairs, minister of state, and as president of the corps legislatif until his death in 1868. The Count's mother, the only well-defined figure among the pathetic shades in the background of Napoleon, was the beautiful twenty-two-year- old wife of an old Polish noble when, in the enthusiastic emo- tion that swept her unhappy Poland at its liberation from Prussia, she smiled upon the liberator of her people at Warsaw, in the winter of 1806-07. To this day the Poles cherish her memory as one who gave her love for her country. Even her aged husband and his family appear to have been content to see the beautiful patriot gain the confidence of the master of their nation's destiny. For M. Walewski 's sisters were her chaperones when she took up her residence in Paris, where she dwelt in the deepest seclusion. It is not clearly written in history that the most brilliant man in its pages, with grace on his brow, the front of Jove and the eye of Mars, ever won the love of any woman. Yet the fault may not have been so much in the man as in his star, which forever lured him from home-felt pleasures and gentle scenes. ' ' Grand, gloomy, and peculiar, he sat upon the throne a sceptred hermit, wrapped in the solitude of his own orig- inality." Fortune shed upon him the glory of victory and power, and showered upon him sceptres and crowns, but she withheld a blessing common to men, great and small, worthy THE UNCONQUERED SEX 291 and unworthy — the pure, unselfish love of two good women, a mother and a wife. Letizia Bonaparte, with ' ' the head of a man on the shoulders of a woman," was the stern and noble mother bird of an eagle, but her virtuous and dutiful breast was no fountain of affec- tion. Nor did the eagle, after mewing his mighty youth in monasteries and barracks, receive any response to the wild throbbings in his bosom when he swooped down upon Josephine's dove cote. Thereupon he bade his heart to dismiss its distracting illu- sions, and thenceforth he omitted from his scheme of universal conquest the hemisphere of womankind. Men were intoxi- cated by his glance, and died by the thousands to win his smile. In the midst of a prostrate world, however, woman- hood stood erect and unconquered, and it is doubtful if any woman lost either her head or her heart as the Great Unloved marched on to his destiny. CHAPTER XXXV THE DIVORCE 1809 AGE 40 WHILE Napoleon dwelt in the palace of the fugitive Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria at Schon- brunn, in 1809, and occupied the room of the future King of Rome, he formed the long-deferred resolution to divorce Josephine, and, marrying a daughter of one of the ancient dynasties, provide an heir to his throne. As the victor of Wagram, in the pride of success and the responsibility of power, walked the palace halls of the Haps- burgs, his determination ripened that the inheritor of his glory and his conquests, should be at once a child of his own potent blood and the scion of a race of kings. He saw no other way to lift the imperial succession above the ugly jealousies and conspiracies that had already divided the Bona- partes and place it beyond the rivalry of the more ambitious marshals who stood ready to fight for the crown among them- selves. Like his only companions in fame, he was childless, but he would not, like Alexander, bequeath his kingdom to the strongest, or, like Caesar, adopt a nephew. All the while the same superserviceable faction which, for its own profit, had paved his way to fhe life Consulate, and then to the throne, was eagerly plotting, in season and out, to have him marry again and leave a successor to that throne by which its mem- bers lived. Wagram seems to have decided the issue, when it confirmed anew Napoleon's title to the vastest and richest estate in the world. The Empress did not miss the calamitous significance of that battle to her, nor fail to understand that in her hus- 292 THE DIVORCE 293 band's victory she had lost her fight. On his return to Paris, he found Josephine's creditors, alarmed by her sink- ing fortunes, clamouring for money, and he was amazed to learn that again she was floundering in debt. Extravagance appears to have been Josephine's one fault under the Empire. It is doubtful if she had given the Em- peror any other grievance since she took her place beside him on the throne. Once he cast her milliner in prison for sev- eral hours to frighten her out of her habit of extortion. Life imprisonment would not have corrected the reckless ex- penditures of the Empress, with her 500 chemises, her new pair of stockings for each dressing, her 300 or 400 cashmere shawls, some costing nearly $2500, and her robes of lace for which she paid as high as $20,000 each. Mme. de Remusat never entered a dressmaker's or a milliner's, go when she would, that she did not find something in the making for the Empress. Her annual allowance for dress rose as high as $90,000, but her credit being good, she spent as much as $220,000 in a year. Out of her yearly expenditures, how- ever, she accumulated most of her jewellery, which repre- sented at the time of the divorce an investment of nearly $1,000,000. Whenever creditors pressed and the inevitable time of reckoning came, the Empress cried and the Emperor raged, but not at her so much as at the tradesmen. Although he arbitrarily cut down their bills 30, 40, and 50 per cent., they were well enough satisfied with the profit still remaining to start at once a new campaign of temptation and a new ac- count with the Empress. Even in her weakness, however, there is to be found the source of Josephine's strength. Her Creole love of beauty and luxury, costly as it was, had framed a fitting background for Napoleon's imperial pretensions and made his court the foremost in the world when, had he been left to his own de- vices, it would have been nothing more than a military camp and the butt of scornful Europe. With a simple and genuine fondness for people, and with a native dignity free from the stiff hauteur, the icy arti- 294 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON ficiality of women bred in royal palaces, the supple little is- lander from, the sugar loft of Martinique deftly blended a motley array of ex-sergeants and their garrison wives with the old nobility. Under her dainty touch, the Tuileries be- came the mould of form and the looking glass of fashion for all the ancient and frumpy courts of the continent. Even the English, although they blockaded Napoleon relentlessly, were eager enough to smuggle across to London the latest models from Josephine's dressmakers. While the Emperor was waging his military campaigns, it was no less her duty to conduct the Empress' social campaigns, and a censorious world could find no fault in her strategy. Her continual journey ings from palace to palace, from coun- try to country in tortuous coaches over racking roads weary and stagger the understanding. She lived wholly for Napoleon and his interests. Having no great ambitions of her own, no desire for power or grandeur, she did not meddle in politics, but in the spirit of a grocer's or banker's wife, she made it her main purpose in life to please her husband, look after his home and promote his success by being agreeable to his associates. Because she was the wife of an Emperor, whose home was a palace, whose business was ruling the world and whose associates were kings, princes and dukes, her duties were no lighter and no less difficult. "How this wearies me," she once exclaimed. "I have not a moment to myself. It would be better for me were I the wife of a labourer." Although diamond crowns and gilded salons cast their illusion over the scene of her splendid drudgery, Josephine could not have toiled harder had she been a labourer's wife. For three hours each day she slaved over her morning toilet, and thrice daily she changed her linen throughout. A mob of servitors and courtiers sur- rounded her morning, noon, and night. She breakfasted, lunched, and dined with them, and the repetition of some dreary function was scheduled for each waking hour. "Be gay! Be gay!" That was the imperial command always. However borne down under the burden of a crown, how- THE DIVORCE 295 ever ill she might be, and she was not physically strong, how- ever hard her head ached, never did Josephine on her unend- ing round of petty tasks, disappoint the Emperor with a mis- step, a wrong word or a lacking smile. There never was an indiscreet remark, an intrigue, an act of favouritism on her part to embarrass her husband for a moment. He, who above all men valued every tick of the clock, never had to complain that she kept him waiting a minute. And when he was worn out by the cares of a crowded day, she, who never opened a book for her own enjoyment, lay across the foot of his bed and read him to sleep in that voice whose tones unfailingly entranced him. No man, monarch or peasant, could ask for a truer help- meet. But the lord of the earth was without an heir. The long dreaded hour struck for Josephine at the end of November, 1809, when Paris was in the midst of preparations for the celebration of the fifth anniversary of the coronation and from all the federated nations of the Empire, kings and queens, princes and princesses were thronging into the city. After a silent, mournful dinner in the Tuileries, the Emperor and Empress retired to his apartments, where, while she was holding the cup of coffee which he had just passed to her, he spoke the words that for many days had been struggling for expression. The historian of the tragic scene, in the person of the prefect of the palace, sitting in a chair tilted against the wall of the corridor outside the door, suddenly heard loud shrieks from the Emperor's room. An usher, who also heard them, would have opened the door had not his chief told him that the Emperor would call for assistance if he needed it. The prefect was right. In a moment the door opened and the Emperor stood before him, his eyes full of tears and his voice choking in his extreme agitation. The functionary entered the room, to find Josephine lying on the floor and uttering piercing cries : "I shall not survive it ! I shall not survive it ! " The Emperor asked the prefect to carry the stricken Empress down to her own apartments, on the floor below, and he took a candle off a table to light the way. The 296 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON private stairs, however, proving too narrow for her to be car- ried down in one pair of arms, the Emperor gave the candle to the usher and helped the prefect bear her to her room. Having played the woman that brief while, Josephine quickly and bravely resumed the part of Empress. Nothing in her brilliant reign became her more than her farewell to her greatness. The fetes went on and, although she could not keep back the tears and summon the vanished smile, she faith- fully met all her duties in the mocking ceremonials. Queen Hortense, perked up in a glistering grief for her eldest son and wearing a golden sorrow in her loveless wed- lock, was unhappiness enthroned and could not understand why her mother should dread the loss of a crown. Josephine was a daughter of the sun, and, while she cared nothing for power, she was naturally proud of the success with which she had sat the highest throne of earth and retained the affection and merited the admiration of the foremost man of the world. If her early indifference had not really warmed into love for Napoleon, she had at least become, in their nearly fourteen years of married life, a fond and devoted wife, capable of feel- ing the pangs of jealousy. With the arrival of Eugene, the formal arrangements for his mother's divorce were entered upon. The son had anticipated the situation, and had written to her a month before that if the Emperor believed his happiness and the interests of France required him to have children, no consideration should be permitted to oppose him, and he invited Josephine, in event of divorce, to live with him in Italy. Finally, it fell to Eugene to make the first public announcement of the matter. "It is necessary for the happiness of France that the founder of this fourth dynasty should grow old, surrounded by his direct descendants as a guarantee to us all, ' ' he told the senate. "The tears that his resolution has drawn from the Emperor suffice for my mother's glory." Neither the Empress nor her children could have asked for more generous terms than Napoleon volunteered. He pro- posed that she should retain her imperial rank as crowned Empress, have the Elysee palace in Paris, as well as her cher- THE DIVORCE 297 islied abode at Malmaison and the chateau of Navarre for her residences, and receive an allowance of $600,000 a year. It was agreed that the divorce should be lawfully pro- nounced by mutual consent in a family council in strict ac- cordance with the provisions of the Code Napoleon. At nine in the evening of December 15, Josephine entered the throne room to take part in her last function at the Tuileries. The act of divorce was read, and the Empress, drying her eyes, rose to read her speech in a voice surprisingly composed. She began bravely enough: With the permission of our august and dear spouse, I declare that, since I have no hope of bearing children who can satisfy the requirements of his policy and the interests of France, it is my pleasure to give him the greatest proof of attachment and devotion which ever was given on earth. Now her voice trembled and utterly failed her. As she sank weeping into her chair, she handed the paper to a gentle- man of the court and dumbly appealed to him to finish the speech, which continued: I owe all to his bounty. It was his hand which crowned me and, seated on his throne, I have received nothing but proofs of affec- tion and devotion from the French people. The dissolution of my marriage will make no change in the sentiments of my heart. The Emperor will always have in me his best friend. I know how much this act, which is made necessary by his policy and by such great interests, has wounded his heart, but we shall win glory, both of us, for the sacrifices we have made for our country. After a few minutes the Emperor and Empress met again to mingle their tears in a private leave taking, when Josephine covered his face with kisses and for the last time he embraced the bride of his youth and his glory. Napoleon at once en- tered a waiting carriage and drove alone in his gloom through the black night to Versailles, there to pass a few days in soli- tude at the palace of the Grand Trianon. Josephine's departure was deferred until the next after- noon. A few courtiers presented themselves in the morning to take formal leave of her, but when attended by two mem- 298 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON bers of the court she entered her carriage for the drive to Malmaison, no one came to say good-bye, and she saw not a friendly or grateful face as, in a cold and dismal rain, she drove away from the Tuileries forever. The palace crowd were saving their supple hinges and their fawnings for her successor. The Emperor rode over to Malmaison the next day to call. There he strolled, with Josephine, in the familiar paths of the chateau park, but there were no more embraces. When he had returned to Versailles he at once sat down and wrote her a letter breathing the tenderest anxiety and hastened to despatch it by courier in time to reach the Empress before she retired for the night. The callers at Malmaison all came away with tales of Josephine's tears, and, at each distressing report, the Em- peror sped a courier to her with a letter appealing to her forti- tude. He called again in person on Christmas eve to invite her to a Christmas dinner with him at Versailles, and she went with Hortense and Eugene. Napoleon returned to the Tuileries the day after Christmas. He had been away a fortnight and now he was plainly moved by the memories the place evoked and shocked to find it so desolate without its graceful mistress. "The great palace seemed very empty to me," he confessed in his daily letter to Josephine. Once more he paid her debts and he appealed to her to try to live on $300,000 a year, saving the rest of her income for her grandchildren. The completion of his policy inaugurated by the divorce now occupied Napoleon's attention and he at once pressed his plans for a matrimonial alliance with some great reign- ing house. A list of the available princesses of Europe lay before him like a military map. The widowerhood of the most celebrated and powerful man of his time, with the loftiest throne in the world at his bestowal, aroused more fear, how- ever, than ambition in the bosoms of some of the eligibles. Queen Louise, who had only lately returned to Berlin from her long exile, thanked God in her maternal heart that her first born daughter was dead and safe from the possibility of THE DIVORCE 299 being sacrificed to the conqueror. And the Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria wrote to reassure an anxious friend that she was in no peril, as her father was too good to think of offering her up to the minotaur ! Napoleon's own preference was to bind together the two empires of France and Russia in a marriage between himself and a Romanoff. Alexander, however, was childless, like him- self, and had only sisters to be considered. And their mother hated the French Emperor. The Czar, caught between his importunate ally on one hand and his mother and the entire Russian aristocracy on the other, parleyed for time. For two months he put off a decisive answer. At last the imperial and imperious widower sent an ultimatum, giving the Rus- sian court forty-eight hours to say yes or no. Still Alexander continued to palter. Already the Emperor Francis of Austria had frankly en- tered his daughter, Marie Louise, as an open candidate for the vacant throne. Metternich, the Austrian foreign minister, had been camping on the trail of the divorce for two years and now that it had come, he prepared to take advantage of it. Metternich and the crafty politicians in Vienna had no doubt that Napoleon was riding for a fall. They shrewdly calculated, however, that the inevitable day of reckoning prob- ably was four years off. Meanwhile Austria must keep in his good graces until the time came to snatch back the provinces he had taken from her. A marriage alliance with him surely would stay his hand and at the same time weaken his political alliance with Russia, thus hastening his downfall. It was a clever, well-thought-out scheme on the part of the Austrian court — and it would cost only an eighteen-year-old girl ! Weary and exasperated with the Czar's shifty conduct, Na- poleon suddenly turned to take up the hint which the Austrian government had dropped. For the task of opening the deli- cate negotiations, he wished to select the most tactful and faithful ambassador in all his Empire. And his choice fell upon none other than Josephine, herself ! The Empress, as loyal as ever, did not hesitate to accept the strange duty. Inviting the wife of Metternich to Malmaison 300 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON only two weeks after the divorce, she amazed that lady by ex- pressing her earnest wish that her divorced husband might find consolation in a marriage with Marie Louise. When at length in the course of official discussions between the two empires, it was plain that Austria was as willing as Barkis, Napoleon took a vote on the question in his council of state. Marie Louise was elected. Josephine, however, had enjoyed the rare honour of making the nomination of her suc- cessor in wedlock. CHAPTER XXXVI THE SECOND MARRIAGE 1810 AGE 40 THE world stood astounded when the betrothal of Na- poleon and the Archduchess Marie Louise was an- nounced in the middle of February, 1810. The public had assumed that the Czar's sister was to be the new wife of the divorced Emperor. Marie Louise herself, with nothing but pity in her heart for the chosen bride of the Corsican ogre of her girlish fancy, was innocently watching the Frankfurt Gazette for the news of an engagement between him and a Russian grand duchess, when toward the end of January she was surprised and alarmed to hear that her own selection was under consideration. The young Archduchess was away from home at the time, but hastened to write to her father, the Emperor Francis, imploring him to spare her. Meanwhile, Count Metternich, her father's minister of foreign affairs and the real matchmaker, was coolly flattering himself in a letter to his wife at Paris that "the Archduchess is still ignorant, as is proper, of the plans concerning her . . . Our princesses are little accustomed to choose their husbands ac- cording to their own inclinations." Austria was delighted to cut out Russia in that remarkable courtship for the hand of the conqueror of Europe. The prophetic statesmen of Vienna congratulated themselves that they had alienated Napoleon and Alexander — and opened the way to the disastrous Russian invasion two years later! At least one of Napoleon's own advisers foretold the conse- quences. Cambaceres, who insisted that the bridegroom would have to fight whichever power he disappointed in the mar- riage, favoured the choice of a Russian wife because the Em- 301 302 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON peror was " familiar with the road to Vienna but might not find the road to St. Petersburg." The people of Vienna were not more surprised and startled when Napoleon blew up their walls four months before than they were by the report that the eldest daughter of their Em- peror was to marry the man who had twice seized their city and who had lately brought Francis to his feet for the fourth time. Only ten months had passed since they saw Marie Louise flying before the vanguard of her chosen bridegroom. The path of his invading army down the valley of the Danube could still be plainly traced by the wreckage left in its wake, and across the river from the capital, the charred and bat- tered ruins of Aspern, Essling and "Wagram continued to bear grim witness to the deadly enmity between him and the Hapsburgs. Yet the Viennese, quickly recovering from their surprise, rejoiced to give the victor an Austrian bride as a hostage to peace. "If I had saved the world," Metternich felicitated himself, "I could not receive more congratulations or more homage." The Austrian national securities rose 30 per cent, in two hours after the confirmation of the rumours that Austria had bound the giant with ribbons of white. The archbishop of Vienna made some slight difficulty about a marriage with a divorced person. Napoleon, however, had caused a council of French prelates to annul his religious marriage to Josephine, which had been solemnized by Cardinal Fesch just before the coronation. The annulment was made on the grounds that the priest of the parish was not present, that the required witnesses were lacking and that the bride- groom really had been married without his own consent ! According to the custom of the church, the Pope alone could decide a question concerning the validity of a sovereign 's mar- riage, but the decree of annulment by the Paris tribunal suf- ficed to quiet the conscience of the archbishop of Vienna. "When at last Metternich pretended to consult Marie Louise herself about the marriage, she only asked, "What are my father 's wishes ? ' ' From childhood the Archduchess had been taught to abhor the French Revolution, which had slain her THE SECOND MARRIAGE 303 beautiful great aunt, Marie Antoinette, the latest archduchess that Austria had given to France, and to look upon Napoleon as the incarnation of its savagery. He had always been held up before her as the outlawed foe of the human race, the usurper who had driven from their thrones her grandmother, the Queen of Naples ; her uncle, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and her stepmother's father, the Duke of Modena, and who had been the unrelenting scourge of her family since she was a child. In all her battles with toy soldiers on the nursery floor the most villainous among them had unfailingly been chosen to represent him and had received from her girlish hands the crudest assaults. Now, however, that her father bade her throw herself into the arms of the hideous hob- goblin of her girlhood, she obediently dismissed' every thought that conflicted with her duty as a daughter. While she had been well instructed in the classic and mod- ern languages and could speak French almost as well as she spoke her native German, her thinking faculties had received no more training than a well coached parrot's. Her mind had been left a clean, white blank, according to the Hapsburg rule of rearing a princess, which exalted ignorance into the virtue of innocence. Every illusion to forbidden subjects had been laboriously cut out of papers and books before the modest eyes of Marie Louise were privileged to see them. She had dogs and cats, horses and birds and all manner of pets, but they were carefully chosen from her own sex, and not a male of any species had been permitted to steal into her virginal precincts. Her whole world had been thoroughly ex- purgated. Naturally enough when this prisoner of caste suddenly found herself the betrothed of the mightiest ruler of earth and destined for the most brilliant of thrones, she began to feel a growing interest in her new fortunes as an Empress. She frankly enjoyed the humble deference of a court which hitherto had ignored her as a child, and her childish vanity was excited by the popular interest she aroused, the people standing before the palace morning after morning to see her on her way to mass. 304 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON The French ambassador to Paris reported, "I must say that during the whole hour of my interview Her Imperial Highness did not once speak of Paris fashions or theatres ! ' ' Metternich, however, thought she ought to improve her ac- quaintance with the fashions, for he wrote his wife, "When she is properly dressed and put in shape she will do very well. I have begged her to engage a dancing master as soon as she arrives in Paris and not to dance until she has learned how. ' ' The bride and groom never had met and indeed had not so much as seen each other's picture. For obvious reasons Na- poleon's likeness had not adorned the palace walls of the Haps- burgs. Prince Berthier came, however, bringing a miniature of him, surrounded by sixteen diamonds and costing $100,000. A quickly executed portrait of the bride was despatched to Paris in exchange, and as Napoleon devoured it with his eyes he exclaimed with delight, ' ' The Hapsburg lip ! The Hapsburg lip !" That thick under lip was the trade mark of the oldest im- perial race of Europe, and the charity pupil of Brienne proudly rejoiced in the vanity of its possession. As for the rest, Marie Louise's features were undistinguished and plain. The Countess Potocka speaks of her "wooden face" and "large, pale blue, porcelain eyes." Still it is agreed that her tall figure was good; some authorities say it was even beauti- ful, and her hair was light chestnut and abundant. Two old, drab churches stand neighbours on little side streets of Vienna off the Ring and near the Burg, the city palace of the Hapsburgs. In one Marie Louise was married ; in the other she was buried. They are the beginning and the end of her strange story. When, in March, 1810, she stood at the altar of the Augustin church to receive from her Uncle Charles, as Napoleon's proxy, the ring of the Emperor of the French, not a year had yet passed since she and the imperial family had knelt at that altar in anxious prayer for the vic- tory of Charles over Napoleon. When the new Empress of the French arrived at the River Inn, the frontier of the kingdom of Bavaria and of the Na- poleonic empire, her dowry of $100,000 was counted out and THE SECOND MARRIAGE 305 delivered to the French and she herself was formally checked off and transferred like any other consignment. A wooden pavilion had been erected on the boundary, and after entering it from the Austrian side, Marie Louise passed on to a second or neutral chamber in the pavilion. Beyond that room was the third or French compartment, where a company of cour- tiers from Paris waited to receive their sovereign. In their eagerness to see her, they had bored gimlet holes in the par- tition between the two rooms, and the prefect of the Tuileries, he who had helped three months before to carry the fainting Josephine to her apartments, records in his memoirs his peep at her. Soon the Austrians knocked at the door for the French to come in. They entered to find the Empress seated on a throne, and her eyes were filled with tears as she looked on her subjects for the first time. Marie Louise accompanied her new custodians to a mer- chant's house in Braunau, where, following the requirements of custom, she divested herself of every garment and adorn- ment from her own country, as a symbol of her purpose to leave behind her all that was Austrian. An elaborate trousseau, including sixty-four dresses, had been made for her in Paris at a cost of $80,000, and Napoleon had personally inspected it down to its sixty pairs of shoes. After two hours' steady work, the Empress was duly ar- rayed in the fashions of Paris. The next thing she did was to sit down and write her father. Although she protested that she was inconsolable except for the reflection that she was sacrificing herself for him, she playfully added, "I assure you I am already as much perfumed as the French women." At Munich the girl bride received a heavy blow. Napoleon had ordered that no member of her Austrian suite should enter France with her and the one friend who had been per- mitted to continue in her company after the parting on the Bavarian frontier was now sent back. She was left utterly forlorn among strangers, but submitted in silent grief. As the Emperor watched for her coming, the cares of em- pire were forgotten and he went to the palace of Compiegne because it was fifty miles out on the road. The old chateau 306 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON that sits on its terrace above the valley of the Oise was swiftly refurnished and redecorated. Napoleon ordered the installa- tion of a system of water works, set up statues in the park and began the construction of a broad iron-trellised walk three quarters of a mile long in imitation of Marie Louise 's favourite arbour at Schonbrunn. He also thoughtfully instructed his representatives at Vienna to forward the most cherished of her personal belongings. They complied by sending her little dog, her bird, and a piece of tapestry which she had left be- hind unfinished, and he fondly planned to surprise her with them on her arrival. At the thought of waiting another day for his affianced bride, he burst the bounds of restraint and suddenly shouted, "0, ho! O, ho! Constant! Order a carriage without livery and come dress me!" Taking with him only King Murat, he impulsively dashed off in a March downpour. When the postillions of the Empress' coach, who were laboriously urging on their horses through the mud and storm, saw the Emperor standing out of the rain under the porch of a coun- try church they were struck speechless with astonishment. An equerry riding beside the coach looked in the direction of their startled gaze, and as he saw the drenched monarch run- ning toward him he cried, "L'Einpereur !" The coach step was quickly lowered and in another moment the Emperor had his arms around the neck of Marie Louise. Then he made the highly important statement, "You are surely not afraid of mud!" Marie Louise made the far more significant observation, "Why, you are much better looking than your picture!" Late in a stormy evening the soaking postillions and much bespattered coach drew up at the foot of the steps of the palace of Compiegne. After getting rid of the inevitable ceremonies there in short order, the Empress retired to her apartments, where she was soon joined by the Emperor. He had intended to lodge under another roof, but on consulting both legal and religious advisers, he received the welcome assurance that the marriage by proxy was a marriage in fact, as had been de- termined in the instance of Henry IV and Marie de Medici. THE SECOND MARRIAGE 307 In the Gallery of Apollo at St. Cloud, where Napoleon first seized the reins of power and where he was first acclaimed Emperor, his union with the daughter of the Hapsburgs was confirmed by a civil marriage, after which a grand entry into Paris w T as made for the purpose of another religious mar- riage, but this time not by proxy. The Emperor and the Empress entered the city under the unfinished Arc de Triomphe de l'Etoile, to which 5000 work- men had hastily given the appearance of completion by the use of wood and canvas. Marie Louise sat in the gilded cor- onation coach where Josephine had sat only a little more than five years before, and wore the crown of diamonds that had sparkled on the brow of her Creole predecessor. But a more disquieting suggestion than that was presented as she drove across the Place de la Concorde, where her great-aunt, Marie Antoinette, had died on the scaffold sixteen years before, a suggestion that might have awakened bitter memories in a person having a livelier imagination. The beautiful Salon Carre of the Louvre, from whose walls Mona Lisa smiles her inscrutable smile and the immortal creations of Raphael, Titian and the masters look down upon the wondering visitors, had been converted into a chapel for the third marriage ceremony. On velvet cushioned benches the full length of the Grand Gallery opening out of that im- provised chapel, 4000 women sat, and behind them in double rows stood 4000 men, while Napoleon enthroned his young bride beside him and the nuptial benediction was pronounced by the Cardinal Grand Almoner of France — Uncle Fesch ! The dethroned Josephine viewed from her melancholy re- treat the Emperor's new domestic relations. Although she was as near as Malmaison, she wrote assuring him, I shall live here as if I were 1000 leagues from Paris. I have made a great sacrifice, Sire, and every day I feel more and more the full extent of it. . . . It will be a complete one as far as I am concerned. Your Majesty shall not be troubled in your happiness by any expression of my regret. I shall pray incessantly that Your Majesty may be happy, perhaps I may even pray that I may see you again. But let Your Majesty be assured I shall always respect 308 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON the new situation in which Your Majesty finds yourself, and respect it in silence. It was indeed a strange and difficult part the divorced Em- press was called upon to play, but she effaced herself as suc- cessfully as in other days she had borne the fierce and search- ing light that beats upon a throne. Neither Josephine nor Napoleon in their separation ever gave the least occasion for evil gossip, although the first recorded tears of Marie Louise in France were shed one day when the Emperor had gone to call on her predecessor. Those tears only signify, however, that she had come to care enough for her husband to cry over him. Marie Louise was not troubled to find that in her marriage she had only exchanged palace prisons and that a husband instead of her father had become her warder. Asleep or awake, she was hemmed in by a guard of ladies in waiting and women attendants and never was permitted to be alone in the presence of a man. The Emperor paraded his captive in imperial progresses to various parts of France and she insisted on going with him everywhere. After the marriage formalities in Paris they had returned to Compiegne, and that palace remains the most distinct souvenir of Marie Louise. No confusing recollections of Josephine cling to its leafy park and stately halls, for she seldom if ever stayed there. On the visitors' register French citizens of many minds have scrawled their expressions of the emotions aroused by the place: "Vive l'Empereur!" "Vive le Roi de Rome!" "Vive le Prince Victor et la Princesse Clementine!" "Marie Louise, in- grate, who could not comprehend an incomparable genius ! ' ' "Poor little harp of l'Aiglon!" "Vive la Republique— Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite!" "How times have changed!" As the official shepherd herds his tourist flock over the foot- wearying parquetry of the palace, his mumbled story is of the bridal chamber of Marie Louise and her now tubless bath- room; of her music room, the piano Napoleon gave her; the diminutive harp of the King of Rome, and his childish chair sitting pathetically before it as if the little boy purple had THE SECOND MARRIAGE 309 only just run out to romp on the grassy bank of the lake. The camp dining table of Napoleon is also among the exhibits, an ingenious contrivance which might accommodate a large company of guests when spread, but which when folded half a dozen times could almost be carried under the arm. The bed on which Marie Antoinette slept the first night she passed under a Bourbon roof, and the bed of the Empress Eugenie link those unfortunate sovereigns with Marie Louise, while the statue of Joan of Arc down in the village square recalls that it was there the maid was arrested. Compiegne thus presents a strange, sad quartet of women. In the garden of the palace is a stone seat, which is known as Napoleon 's bench, since there the eagle often perched in the rapturous days of his wedded joys and the full meridian of his glory. Yet only four years after those April dreams and April hopes on the garden bench at Compiegne, alien troops burst into that very park and the terrace ran with the blood of Frenchmen defending the honeymoon chateau of Napoleon and Marie Louise from the assaults of Russia, Austria, and all Europe banded against the son-in-law of the Hapsburgs. CHAPTER XXXVII THE KING OF ROME 1811 AGE 41 THE world paused to listen as the stork hovered above the palace home of Napoleon and Marie Louise in the early spring of 1811. If it should be only a girl, twenty-one guns were to be fired, but if a boy, 101 thunderous salvos were to proclaim the birth of an heir to the sovereignty of the earth. In the Tuileries, two gorgeous little cribs stood side by side, one pink, the other blue. Nearby them rose the gift of the city of Paris, a magnificent cradle, designed by the famous artist, Prudhon. It was inlaid with mother of pearl and golden bees, and at its head a winged figure of Glory held a crown high above the pillow, while a young eagle perched at the foot with wings outspread ready for flight. A great heap of lacy, tiny garments had been made at a cost of $60,000, and a governess from the highest nobility was in readiness to take her appointed place of honour in the imperial nursery. When a year had passed since Marie Louise made her entry into the Empire, the monstrous clapper of the great bell in the south tower of Notre Dame sounded a summons to the devout, which was chimed by all the church bells of Paris, calling upon the people to give the night over to prayer for the Empress. Early in the morning while the Emperor was resorting to his customary remedy for strained nerves in a steaming bath, Dr. Dubois, the foremost maternity specialist of Paris, excitedly burst in upon him to say that the event was at hand, and that he feared either the mother or the child must be sacrificed. Napoleon always was true in his simpler moments. In the 310 THE KING OF ROME 311 presence of the problem presented to him by the physician, the monarch and his dynastic ambitions gave way to the man and the husband. "Come! Come! M. Dubois!" he ex- claimed. "Do not lose your head! AVhat would you do in the same circumstances if you were attending the wife of a citizen ? Do just as you would if you were in the house of a tradesman in the Rue St. Denis. Be careful of the mother and the child, but if you cannot save both, save the mother for me. "Whatever happens consider her first." It was not far from nine o'clock in the morning when a nine pound child entered the world which was to be his birth- right. But the little eagle was silent, blue, and apparently lifeless and Napoleon no more than glanced at the tiny figure as it lay neglected on the floor. Only when the Empress had rallied, did the governess turn to the all-but-forgotten and supposedly dead child. Forcing between its dumb lips a drop of brandy, she slapped its still body and wrapped it in hot cloths. It was seven minutes after the birth when a faint cry startled the company. At that feeble wail, a wild joy leaped into the heart of Napoleon, and he bent over the inheritor of his throne, the perpetuator of his dynasty, the King of Rome ! Paris and France and all the subject nations still waited and watched for the news until the signal battery of the Hotel des Invalides began to boom. The city stopped and hearkened ; the people in the streets stood still ; the trades- men in the shops came to their doors ; the women in the homes opened their windows. When they had counted twenty-one, it seemed as if the salute had ceased, so tense was the curiosity, so impatient were the counters with the pause. As another salvo rolled over the city, however, the roar of the guns was drowned in the cheers of the people. Mine. Blanchard sailed away in a balloon to scatter printed bulletins in her path and carry the tidings beyond the rever- berations of the cannon. The semaphore telegraph flashed the message through the sunshine that suffused the natal day, and by noon the cheers were rolling over the Empire from Lyons to Antwerp, from Brest to Strasburg. 312 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON A courier raced to Vienna with a jubilant note from the father to the grandfather, and another sped to the chateau of Navarre, where the next day the door of Josephine's apart- ment was noisily thrown open by an usher, who cried, "A message from the Emperor!" The divorced Empress read: "My son is a big, healthy boy. He has my chest, my mouth, my eyes. I hope he will fulfil his destiny. ' ' Josephine disclosed no twinge of envy, but said to a friend in simple sincerity, "I am happy to see that the sacrifice I have made for France has been of use, and that the country's future is assured. How happy the Emperor must be ! " Alas, the gift her intuition had chosen was a pin for a girl baby ! One day she was to receive a clandestine visit from the child in the little chateau of Bagatelle, at the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, and press to her bosom the son of Na- poleon. Marie Louise enjoyed a speedy convalescence, leaving her bed when the baby was but seventeen days old, and appearing before the public on the terrace in the garden ten days later. The infant was nursed for fourteen months at the breast of the wife of a palace mechanic, and the maternal instinct seems never to have been very deeply aroused in the girl mother. Probably the little fellow w r as oftener in the arms of his father than of his mother. The Emperor proudly took him to the palace windows to show him to the people, and he pre- sented him before the imperial guard to receive his first salute. The baptism took place at Notre Dame in June, when the father carried his child from the font to the porch of the great cathedral and held him up before the thousands who crowded the open space. It was the last time that Napoleon and Paris were to rejoice together. Feasts were spread in the squares and the beautiful capital gleamed at night like a gem-studded crown. Princes of the Empire swarmed the city and deputations came from all Europe to see the heir of the master of mankind christened Napoleon Francis Joseph Charles and formally in- vested with the proudest of titles, the King of Rome. In the Eternal City itself, the capitol and the coliseum, the ancient THE KING OF ROME 313 arches and columns, the dome of St. Peter's and the castle of St. Angelo blazed with illuminations that lit up the seven hills, and Napoleon decreed that the successors to his throne should always be twice crowned, at a Roman as well as a Parisian coronation. The Emperor followed the pompous ceremony at Notre Dame with a great fete for the populace at St. Cloud. Three hundred thousand people feasted and sported in the lovely park of that chateau, where, in the evening, the noble outlines of the palace of the King of Rome at Chaillot, which the architects already had designed, were traced in fire, while the flaming crown of the child floated in the sky, where it had been discharged from a great balloon. Alas, that palace at Chaillot was no more than a castle in the air, for neither crowns nor palaces was the King of Rome to possess. A favourite playtime, when the infant king had passed into childhood, was at the Emperor's breakfast, when he liked to hold his boy on his knee, perhaps dipping his own fingers into some sauce and smearing the little face with it. In another scene that grew familiar to the court, the Emperor seated on his sofa, studied state papers with the child beside him, or, holding him in his lap, he sat at his desk scratching his signature on orders and decrees for Europe to obey. When his infantile majesty tore to pieces a guardsman's plume one day while the veteran was holding him, Duroc told the soldier to let the Prince have his fun and he gave him an order for two plumes to take its place. The governess, Mine, de Montesquieu — ' ' Mamma Que ' ' — did not humour the King in his naughtiness. When she thought he was old enough to know better, she found a way to bring him out of a spasm of screaming rage. She simply closed all the windows, and as the yelling urchin lying on the floor saw her closing them, his curiosity was aroused. "I did it," the governess soberly explained, "so that the people would not hear you. For the French never would have a king who be- haved so badly as you have been behaving." The governess, however, was alarmed many times by the seemingly careless and sometimes rough manner in which the 314 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON eagle played with his tender fledgeling. He tossed him about, boisterously rolled on the floor with him, weighted him down with a big sword strapped around him, gave him things to eat that upset his stomach, and as the decorous daughter of the Hapsburgs wrote her father, was "very childish about him." If the child cried when he made awful faces at him, the Emperor rebuked him. "What! A king and crying! Fie ! Fie ! ' ' Once at least he spanked him in the presence of Talma, the tragedian, but only for the "fun of spanking a king. ' ' As the Russian war clouds lowered, the Emperor had wooden blocks of many kinds and colours made, representing the units of an army, and these he carefully arranged and moved about in various experimental operations. If the boy chanced to see his father lying on the floor apparently playing with those pretty toys he naturally insisted on taking a hand in the game. Although he inevitably brought confusion upon the thought- fully projected manoeuvres in which the Great Captain was en- gaged, he never was reprimanded or incurred the penalty of a frown. Out at Rambouillet there stands, on the border of the chateau park, the only palace the fond father before hastening to his fall erected for his son, and it is still known as "le Palais du Roi de Rome." Although the structure is the size of a comfortable three-story dwelling, it was meant only as a playhouse for the little King, where from a mimic throne he could hold his childish court and amuse himself with re- hearsals of the part for which his father had cast him in the drama of life when he should be the lord of the palaces of Europe. In the shady depths of the park at Rambouillet lies the very rock on which all the hopes of father and son were wrecked. For on that smooth-topped stone under the trees, Napoleon spread his maps in May of 1811, and planned the fatal Rus- sian campaign of the following year. And alongside the wall of the park ran and runs the highway to Chartres, to Roche- fort and on to St. Helena ! It well may have been then and there, by that rock in the THE KING OF ROME 315 forest of Rambouillet, as he looked up from his map to see the two months' old King reclining in his baby carriage, that Napoleon gave the sigh echoed by history, "Poor child! "What a snarl I shall leave to you!" But fortune held the skein and the great fatalist was helpless to unravel her tangled web. That the birth of the King of Rome, and the realisation of his father's longing for a successor to perpetuate his dynasty, should definitely mark the beginning of the end of the Em- pire is among the ironies and paradoxes of history. But it all nicely fits into the logic of events. For with the com- ing of the baby, Napoleon viewed the completion of his plan of disconnecting his Empire from its orginal source of power, the democracy, and of connecting it with another source, the old principle of legitimacy and rule by right divine. The French looked on, without enthusiasm and with many chilling misgivings, at each successive step he had taken away from them and back toward the institutions overthrown in the Revolution. When he put away his wife, a daughter of France, he wounded the domestic sentiment of the nation and weakened the chain that bound the people to his monarchy. In his alliance with the Hapsburgs at his marriage with Marie Louise, the people saw the dissolution of his alliance with them and they awakened to the regret that he had not only di- vorced himself from Josephine, but from them as well. The Emperor remained constant to the Republic only in his apparel. Although he had abolished its name and covered the French people with the gold braid of his imperial livery, he reserved for himself the privilege of dressing in the re- publican simplicity of the Revolution. He had only two styles of clothing, a blue coat for Sundays, and for every-day wear a green coat with a single row of white buttons, a white waistcoat, and a fresh pair of white knee breeches daily — be- cause he would wipe his quill on them — and silk stockings with gold buckles on his shoes. On his shoulders, he wore the modest epaulets of a mere colonel, and on his breast a silver decoration of the Legion of Honour, with the grand cordon of the order beneath his coat. His cravat was always black. 316 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON When he was complaining, "I have more crowns than I know what to do with," he still wore no other hat than the black three-cornered chapeau of revolutionary days with its tricolour cockade. Sober as that headgear was, he was par- ticular about its condition and quality, buying as many as a score of hats in a year — they are scattered throughout the museums of Europe — and paying $12 each for them. More- over, Constant always had to break them in by wearing them for several days before they adorned the imperial head. Enamelled snuff boxes were another of Napoleon's few ex- travagances. He never smoked, and he took snuff rather as a nervous habit than to satisfy any craving for nicotine, shak- ing far more of the powder on the floor or ground than he ever inhaled. Cologne was still another of his indulgences. His handkerchief was saturated with it. His hair reeked with it. He bathed in it and a bottle of it was poured over his shoulders every morning. The man was not a despot from vanity so much as from a redundance of the power of mastery, with which his nature was endowed. He protested in all good faith that he was not over-ambitious. He was like a giant forest king which, with its far-running roots and wide-spreading branches, dwarfs its companions. Every franc spent in France, in Italy, in Belgium, and in his widely scattered possessions must have the Emperor's own approval. "I keep the key of the treasury always in my pocket," he said. He trusted no subordinates. Every movement of a regiment among his million troops, every appointment of a second-class clerk must have his sanc- tion, and he took unto himself the choice of all the municipal councillors of France. As Taine said, ' ' My armies, my fleets, my councils, my senate, my populations, my Empire," had come to be Napoleon's proprietary tone. For awhile he kept the name of the Republic in the Empire, but since 1807 he had boldly proclaimed himself "Napoleon by the grace of God and the constitution, Emperor of the French, King of Italy and Protector of the Confederation of the Rhine." Duroc impatiently chided Dumas, "You always commit the THE KING OF ROME 317 same fault; you will answer the Emperor." Yet Gohier says, ' ' It was the one who had vexed him most in a debate whom he generally asked to dinner." And Caulaincourt, whose candour the Emperor admired, and trusted, testified: "Once the first irritation was past, he generously forgave offences." General Rapp, the blunt Alsatian, never ceased to speak his mind to the Emperor or to command his regard. "How do your Germans like these little napoleons?" the Emperor asked one day, as he was examining a new vintage of twenty franc gold pieces. "Better than the great one, sire," the soldier frankly replied. The Emperor brooked the most gross insult from Talley- rand. He came back from Spain to learn of more plotting on the part of his grand chamberlain, and he fell upon him furiously. When the imperial storm had spent itself, Talley- rand turned to the watching courtiers and coldly observed, "Is it not a pity that so great a man should have been so poorly brought up ! " In the nature of things, a despotism never relaxes, but al- ways tends to become more and more astringent, since it de- stroys independence and initiative. In camp and court alike, the servitors of Napoleon ceased to argue with him, correct his mistakes or even to address him, except to reply to his questions. The nations stood hushed in the presence of his towering might. As many as thirty persons were forbidden to assemble anywhere in France without a license, and no book was per- mitted to be put on sale until it had been in the hands of the police seven days. Although the Emperor had suppressed all but eight news- papers in Paris, whose combined circulation was only 18,632 copies, the few survivors continued to annoy him. Even while he revised them with his sword, he complained that "the newspapers are extremely badly edited." He scorn- fully held the journalist to be "a grumbler, a censurer, a giver of advice, a regent of sovereigns, a tutor of nations. Four newspapers are more dangerous than 100,000 soldiers in arms." 318 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON Already the Emperor, who had left home at nine and been a man ever since, was yawning, ' ' The world is very old, ' ' and was vetoing experiments. ' ' Old practices are worth more than new theories," he said. Yet it was only a dozen years since he burst upon Europe and overwhelmed her with the power of a new idea. In an autocracy the state ages with the autocrat. Napoleon and his marshals and ministers were aging fast. By reason of the pace they had gone they were prematurely old. The Emperor, calculating that they would all be fifty at the same time, lamented to his council of state that younger men could never fill their shoes. "Tiny were all children of the Revolu- tion," he said, "tempered in its waters, and they rose from them with a vigour that will not be repeated." The lean and hungry Little Corporal, with his wagon hitched to his star and dashing forth to meet victory, had now left the stage to the sated and corpulent Emperor, who was only fully aroused at the approach of adversity. His ar- teries were the Empire's as well, and they hardened to- gether. "The luxuries of royalty," he confessed, "proved a heavy charge." As his paunch developed, the body politic became obese and his increasing sluggishness was communi- cated to the extremities of his realm. His work was done or as nearly so as he could do it. He had carried the Revolution to the borders of Russia. He had swept aside the rubbish of the Middle Ages and opened the way for a new era. He had struck feudalism dead beyond resurrection and crippled class privilege beyond repair. Even in setting up a throne for himself, he had disclosed, as he said, that thrones are "only a few deal planks" and thus he had stripped kingcraft of its divinity forever. The man was the victim of his own success, the sport of his genius. Each triumph of his arms was but a temptation to seek another. The birth of an heir only inflamed his ambition to enlarge the child 's heritage. His estate already stretched northward from the Medi- terranean to the Baltic, and eastward from the Bay of Bis- cay to the Ionian Sea, with vassal kings and allied sovereigns THE KING OF ROME 319 standing like sentries at the outposts of his broad dominions. Every sword, every musket between Madrid and Warsaw was at his command. He had eclipsed the mighty empires of the Assyrians, the Babylonians and the Persians, of Alexander, Caesar and Charlemagne. Now at last he had the happy promise that his sceptre should pass to no unlineal hand. His blood, min- gled with that of the Caesars, should inherit a wider rule than ever was bequeathed before. Still he was not without a warn- ing premonition. "It will last as long as I last," he said. "After that, my son may deem himself fortunate if he has $8000 a year." Yet he could not stop. "I must always be going," he said. He must ever go on building higher and higher on the ever narrowing foundation of his own personal despotism. CHAPTER XXXVIII A WORLD AT WAR 1809-1812 AGE 39-42 ON the eve of Napoleon's disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812, John Quincy Adams, the American minister at Petrograd, was discussing the impending conflict, when a high official at the court of the Czar charged it to " Women, women, women!" They were responsible, the American minister was assured, for all the recent wars that had convulsed Europe. Queen Louise had fanned the flames of the Franco-Prussian War in 1806. The Empress Marie of Austria had stirred up the strife that led to the Wagram campaign in 1S09. Now a Russian Grand Duchess had brought Russia and France to swords' points. While the Europe of 1812 was no garden of Eden into which it remained for a daughter of Eve to introduce the serpent of strife, there was enough truth in the remark, which Adams quotes in his diary, to lend a faint colour to its ex- aggeration and to make the sister of the Czar Alexander a figure in the story of that tragic year. She was the wife of the Duke of Oldenburg, and Napoleon having found the dreary dunes of the tiny duchy of Oldenburg in his way, had annexed to his empire that mere handful of German sand by the North Sea. The Duchess thereupon returned to Rus- sia, carrying her bitter grievance with her, and the Dowager Czarina and the Czar took up her quarrel. No one knew better than John Quincy Adams, however, that the fleets of Yankee schooners which haunted the fogs of the Baltic, bidding defiance to the British blockade of the sea and the French blockade of the land, were a more serious cause of estrangement between Napoleon and Alexander than the 320 A WORLD AT AVAR 321 annexation of Oldenburg. Xo doubt an immense amount of British freight was being dumped at Russian ports, mostly by American ships, to be distributed thence over Europe. But while Alexander continued to exclude British vessels, he declined to shut out those from the United States and other neutral nations. The Czar not only refused to comply with the commands of the French Emperor, but he also boldly challenged him by prohibiting the entry into Russia of mam- French manufactures, on the ground that the wealth of his empire was being drained to pay for Parisian luxuries. And as he defied him, he marshalled his military forces near the frontier. The sharp bowsprit of the Xew England schooner thus was the entering wedge that pried apart the Emperor of the east and the Emperor of the west, and the young Republic of the New World was a factor in bringing to an end the great trade war between France and England, which began with Napo- leon's secret purchase and then his hasty sacrifice of Louisiana. For nine years the ruler of the land had striven with the ruler of the sea, England struggling to shut the highways of the ocean and Napoleon the gateways of the European con- tinent. First and last both had been baffled by the daring and enterprising Yankee skipper more than by any other element in their problem. To shut out the wares of British manufacturers and the products of British colonies, Napoleon had marched his army from the harbour of Lisbon to the banks of the Niemen. He had gathered all the nations of the continent beneath his sword in a continental union against his island foe, and had erected a wall of China around Europe. Even the bayonets of a million soldiers, however, could not close the immemorial avenues of trade, nor could Napoleon's big broom sweep back the natural currents of commerce. The war between England and France prostrated the honest busi- ness of the continent and of the British Isles and brought on an epidemic of bankruptcy, but the ruined merchants were replaced by 100,000 smugglers, who matched their wits against an army of customs officials. 322 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON When at last the Emperor found he could not stop smug- gling, he adopted a system of licensing it and sharing in its profits by taking 50 per cent, of the value of certain kinds of imports offered for sale. All other smuggled goods were confiscated and sold at great auctions. But he excepted from the auction the British woollen and cottons that his agents had seized. These were piled in heaps and destroyed in huge bonfires that lit up the Empire. All letters written in Eng- lish or captured in transit between the continent and the British Isles also were burned, as many as 100,000 being con- signed to the flames on an appointed day. Every nation, and indeed every household, felt the burden of the continental system. It set the Empire at war with the church itself, although the Petrograd official well might have blamed a woman for that quarrel, and an American woman. For Betsy Paterson really was at the bottom of the unhappy conflict between Rome and its eldest daughter. It was not until the Emperor asked that Jerome Bona- parte's American marriage be annulled that the first open breach occurred. The ecclesiastical authorities found, on in- vestigation, that the ceremony had not been performed in strict conformity with a decree of the Council of Trent, but it was also found that this latter decree never had been pub- lished at Baltimore and consequently had no force in that diocese. Pope Pius VII replied to the Emperor, therefore, that the marriage was valid and that he was powerless to gratify his wish. It may easily be imagined with how little patience Napoleon saw his purpose balked. Thenceforth his relations with the Pope rapidly went from bad to worse. At last he locked up Pius VII, a mild, unaggressive man who was sixty-seven when his captivity began, cut him off from his cardinals and coun- sellors, from theological books and papers, and from all com- munication with the church. The captive 's isolation was com- pleted by the silence of the press, which was forbidden to allude to his arrest or his whereabouts. The Pontiff bore his immurement with becoming resignation. "When, however, he was required to surrender even the ring A WORLD AT WAR 323 of the Fisherman, he had the spirit to break it in two before handing it to the imperial official. Moreover, he established a continental blockade of his own against Napoleon. By his refusal to confirm bishops for the Empire, many sees became vacant, and the machinery of the church throughout the im- perial dominions was thrown into a vexatious confusion. For even though he was in prison, he still was the "Keeper of the Keys." Traditionally and instinctively Napoleon was a Catholic. For instance, in the presence of danger or upon the discovery of some important fact, it was his habit to make the sign of the cross ; but his imperious will refused to submit itself to the authority of the church and he persistently declined to go to communion. When Marie Louise came to Paris, she asked the archbishop if it would be proper for her to receive that sacrament. The prelate excused her since her presence at communion might only emphasise her husband's absence and occasion unpleasant remarks. Neither woman nor religion really was responsible for the bitter struggle between the Emperor and the Pope. Its true underlying causes were cotton and calicoes, coffee and sugar, rice, tobacco and indigo. Even Napoleon's own brother, the King of Holland, rebelled against the blockade. At last, when 20,000 imperial troops were marching on Amsterdam for the purpose of more effectually closing the ports of the coun- try, Louis flung away his crown and fled to Bohemia. The Emperor thereupon annexed Holland to France. With Oldenburg and Bremen, Hamburg and the shore beyond, the Empire now stretched to the boundary of Denmark. If a brother was the first, a marshal of Napoleon's was the second ally to desert him. The King of Sweden being without an heir, some Swedes proposed that Marshal Berna- dotte should be adopted as the successor to their throne. Bernadotte was a brother-in-law of Joseph Bonaparte; his son Oscar was the god-son of Napoleon, and the Swedish au- thorities innocently supposed that the selection would be highly pleasing to the Emperor. The proposal placed Napoleon in a predicament. He had 324 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON every reason to distrust the loyalty of Bernadotte. Still if he consented to his elevation, the marshal's wife, Desiree Clary, would get a crown at last. Wherefore, he said to the candidate, "Go, and let our destinies be accomplished." The ex-sergeant of marines went forth, therefore, with the Emperor's blessing and a large gift of money besides, to found a royal house which should long outlast that of the Bonapartes. Russia having lately taken Finland from Sweden, the new crown prince began a campaign to repair that loss. He proposed to take Norway from the crown of Denmark, but Napoleon would not consent to any attack on his Danish ally. He suggested instead that if Sweden joined him against Russia he would help her to recover Finland. The Emperor, how- ever, in his purpose to close tighter the ports of the Baltic to British goods, took Swedish Pomerania, thereby giving mortal offence to the Swedes and their crown prince. The continental system had now openly embroiled Napoleon with the Pope, the Czar, the Swedes and with his brother Louis, while it had done more than all else to embitter the various peoples of Europe against him. Its entire structure, which for years he had been laboriously rearing, was rocking on its foundations and threatening to bury him and his throne beneath its wreckage. The Empire was not menaced at home, but from abroad. The people within its wide-flung borders dwelt in peace if not in prosperity. They never gave the Emperor a moment of uneasiness while he sat on the throne and they never for- sook him as long as he held aloft a standard. For fifteen years his great realm remained as tranquil within as England or the United States. Nor did he hold his people in subjection with his sword. Under the orders of the incompetent and corrupt Directory he had turned his guns on a rebellious population at the steps of the Church of St. Roch, in 1795, but from the day of his own rise to power to the day of his downfall he never pointed a cannon except at alien foes. He ruled by the force of jus- tice and wisdom and the vanity of glory. Victor Hugo once A WORLD AT WAR 325 said that the two greatest things of the nineteenth century were Napoleon and liberty. As long as France had the former it was content without the latter. While the lands incorporated in the Empire remained quiet, discontent rose and spread among the people of the allied states, which Napoleon had subjugated without annexing. In the days when kings and grand dukes were taking orders like field hands from their overseer at Paris, when the Prus- sian monarch was limiting his army to the number specified and dismissing patriot ministers, when the Austrian Emperor was giving his daughter in marriage to the conqueror, book- sellers like John Palm, gooseherds like Gneisenau, cowherds like Scharnhorst, tavern keepers like Andreas Hofer, simple souls like the maid of Saragossa w r ere lifting from the dust the standards of their countries. In the course of the long struggle Napoleon had changed his base. He was not fighting for a republic now but for a crown. He was not pulling down thrones but setting them up. Kings had become his allies and the people had fallen away from him. He was fighting for the past, not for the future. He was looking backward, not forward, and his moral retreat began before his military retreat. He himself once computed that the moral force in war is as three to one in comparison with the physical. Thus did he mathematically verify Shakespeare's line, Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just. By that measure, Napoleon lost two-thirds of his strength when he ceased to be the champion of freedom and progress, and became an invader and conqueror. As the moral force passed from his ranks into the ranks of the enemy, he sub- stituted batteries for it, his infantry having lost its old-time dash. His soldiers had taken Italy with their bare hands, but Wagram was distinctly an artillery success. ' ' The poorer the troops," he said, "the more artillery they need." Now he must win with lead where once he won with hearts and must hurl cannon balls at the lines of the foe which in other times he had pierced with bayonets. 326 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON As his army lost its patriotic fervor, his princely and ducal generals lost their martial ardour. They had won their batons and their glory fighting for France. They were chary of risking their laurels with degenerate troops in campaigns that did not awaken any national enthusiasm. In their ple- beian youth, moreover, they had no other roof for their heads than where they nightly pitched their tents and no other place to go than war. But now they sighed for their ducal parks and marble halls with trains attendant. The generous rivalry of young hopes and ambitions had given way to the arrogant pride and bitter jealousies of rank and wealth. The army, the aristocracy, the whole Empire had lost the inspiring illusions of youth. They had all gone stale when the Emperor accepted the challenge of the Czar and, like an- other Titanic rushing upon an iceberg, hurled himself against the Russian Empire. His independent and honest counsellors were powerless to arrest him. In vain the economists argued that Russia had nothing for France to take. In vain the financiers pleaded that the finances of the Empire needed peace. With the Spanish revolution unsubdued and all the peoples about his Empire ready to emulate the Spaniards, he yet held to his course. He himself had already foretold his fate when he said, "I shall see the gulf open before me some day, but I shall not be able to stop myself. I shall climb so high that I shall turn giddy." No longer could a warning voice make itself heard. His reasoning often was darkly mystical and fatalistic. He spoke in 1811 of an ''impulsion" which was driving France and Russia into war. "I feel myself impelled toward a goal with which I am unacquainted," he said as if in a trance. "When I shall have reached it, when I shall be no longer needed for it, an atom will suffice to overthrow me, but until that moment, all efforts will be powerless against me." Cardinal Fesch implored him not to fly in the face of men, the elements, religion, earth, and Heaven or he would sink under the combined weight of their enmity. His only reply was to lead his uncle to a window and point to a star of A WORLD AT WAR 327 destiny, visible only to his own eyes. One of his ministers shook his head and sighed, ' ' The Emperor is mad, completely mad, and will destroy us all. This will all end in a terrible crash ! ' ' Still the reasons for the war were not by any means wholly occult. Napoleon had been trying for nearly a decade to conquer the power of England on the sea by closing against her trade the harbours of Europe. If one remained open none would remain closed. If Russia were permitted to break the blockade, no other nation could be asked to maintain it and it would be only a matter of months until the Czar would be able to form a new coalition against France. Two inveterate enemies of Napoleon had entered the coun- sels of the Czar and were industriously strengthening his arm against the French Emperor. One of them was Stein, the Prussian cabinet minister, whom the Emperor had ordered the King of Prussia to dismiss. The other was that Corsican rival of Napoleon's youth, Pozzo di Borgo. Napoleon and Pozzo had left Ajaccio together, the one to conquer Europe, the other to wander from capital to capital in his bitter, unceasing efforts to thwart him. For twenty years the two Corsicans carried on their relentless vendetta, with a continent for their battle ground. Pozzo was at the elbow of the British ministry when the Peace of Amiens was broken and the twelve-year duel between England and France began. Next he went to Russia, and was with the Czar in the years he was warring on Napoleon. When Napoleon demanded his dismissal at Tilsit, he passed over to Austria, where he fomented the war of 1809. Flee- ing from Vienna with the Austrian court as the Emperor bore down upon that capital, he escaped him only by tramping over the Balkan mountains to Turkey. From Constantinople he found his way to England once more, and finally to Petrograd. Thenceforth he dogged the downward steps of his fellow-Corsican to Waterloo, to St. Helena and to the grave. A great war somewhere was inevitable to establish or over- throw the continental system which rested on bayonets and 328 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON which had embroiled the world. For 1812 proved to be a red year in history. The flames of the French Revolution, which were kindled at the Bastille in 1789, had been spreading for twenty-three years. At last they had leaped the wide Atlan- tic, and two worlds were wrapped in an almost universal conflagration. The Americans and the British took up arms, and the In- dian with his tomahawk joined in the strife. Already Hi- dalgo had rung from his village church belfry the tocsin of revolution that was heard from the Oregon to Terra del Fuego, and Spanish America, taking advantage of the war in Spain, began its ten-year struggle for independence. The Spaniards and their English allies under Wellington, after four years of battling on the Peninsula, continued to baffle the best marshals of the Empire. Thus while an imperial army of 300,000 men was engaged in a futile effort to subdue one extremity of Europe, Napoleon was leading 600,000 more to conquer the opposite extremity of the continent. CHAPTER XXXIX ON TO MOSCOW 1812 AGE 42-43 WITH the Empress seated beside him and his trumpet- ers before him, with his court and his servants fol- lowing him in a long procession of coaches, Napo- leon left Paris as if for a fete on a beautiful May morning in the year 1812. Crossing France and the Rhine, he entered Germany, where the princes of his allied states humbly stood by the roadside and waited to make their obeisance as the King of the Kings of the earth passed by. The King of Saxony came out to greet the master from whom he had received his royal title and escort him to Dresden, where the Emperor of Austria, the King of Prussia, the King of Bavaria and the rest of the satraps of the Empire gathered to pay court to the sovereign of them all. As Napoleon had gathered the Czar and his other allies at Erfurt in 1808 to overawe Austria, he assembled the Emperor of Austria and his allies in this second congress of kings to let the Czar see that the monarchs of Europe were enlisted for the war as well as their contingents of soldiers in the great army which was already moving toward the Russian frontier. He was leaning confidently on the hope that a demonstration in force would bring Alexander to terms and that the Russian sovereign would not wait for him to invade the soil of his realm. "Alexander and I," he said in his review of the campaign, "were in the position of two boasters who, without wishing to fight, were endeavouring to frighten each other." When the Czar disappointed him by not showing any sign of flinching, no alternative remained to him but to dismiss his satellites and proceed to Poland and East Prussia to place himself at the head of his army. "The bottle is open," he 329 330 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON said, "and the wine must be drunk." How bitter its dregs were to be, no foretaste warned him as he left the beautiful city by the Elbe, into which, after seven months, he should silently steal back at night in a sleigh, his army lost, and with not even a trooper for his escort The bayonets of more than 600,000 men, drawn from twenty nations, ran like a hedge from the feet of the Car- pathian Mountains to the shores of the Baltic. Coming from the dunes by that northern sea, from the polders of the Netherlands, from the plains of Lombardy, and from the shores of Calabria, they formed the greatest army Europe ever had seen. All the races of the Caucasian world were in its ranks, and all the tongues of Christendom were heard in its camps. Perhaps no more than a third were French. Certainly more than a fourth were Germans from the Rhine states. There were 30,000 Austrians, under Prince Schwarzen- berg, and the Prussians numbered 20,000. Prince Eugene, Viceroy of Italy, brought 80,000 Italians. Prince Poniatow- ski had 60,000 Poles, and there were cohorts of Swiss, Dutch, Croatians, Spaniards and Portuguese. No ties of blood or language or nationality, no sentiment of patriotism united them. No conscious purpose animated them. They had not even been told whom they were to hate and why they were to slay. And less than ten in a hundred could read a line of print. They only knew they had been called out to fight for Napoleon. His sword had drawn them together and it alone must hold them together. The main body of the army moved over the wide level fields by the river Pregel, upon which the traveller to Petrograd in a later day looks from the car window of his Berlin train when he approaches the portals of the strange land of Muscovy. Although it is only an imaginary line, no other frontier the world round so stirs the imaginings. In a time of peace one looked in vain for visible signs of it. No great military fortifications were to be seen frowning across the chalk line that demarks the Empire of the Kaisers from the Empire of the Czars. Although the Occident visibly thinned out and tapered off ON TO MOSCOW 331 through the closing hours of the trip from Konigsberg, Inster- burg, Gumbinnen and Eydtkuhnen, the last towns in Ger- many, were as resolutely Germanic as any place between the Rhine and the Niemen. German faces and German moustaches, German caps and German breweries still boldly asserted their nationality. But the German station master at Eydtkuhnen rang the warning bell, and the train had hardly more than pulled out of that German station than a little brook was crossed — and all things changed in a twinkling. That little brook is the moat between Germany and Russia, between the Teuton and the Muscovite, between the west and the east. "While the train was crossing the brook, a lightning change of scene took place that would do credit to the mech- anism of the theatrical stage. In the brief course of a jour- ney of only a mile between the German frontier station, at Eydtkuhnen, and the Russian frontier station at Wirballen, one civilisation vanished and another replaced it. Toward the Russian frontier Napoleon's legions moved in a front of 400 miles. Thus widely spread out, the oncoming host of twenty nations bewildered the Czar and his generals. There were 250,000 armed serfs drawn up to defend the frontier but the Russian commanders dared not concentrate their forces since the point of Napoleon's invasion was un- known. The handsome Czar himself had come from Petro- grad to an outpost of his empire and made his headquarters in the town of Vilna. There he was waiting and watching when the French Emperor swept down from the Baltic. The plumes of King Murat waved at the head of a magnificent body of cavalry ; another army marched under Prince Eugene and a third under the command of King Jerome of West- phalia. Napoleon's first purpose was to push back the boundary line of Russia, which had been stealthily moving westward over prostrate Poland. But he failed, and at his downfall Russia crept still farther forward, gathering in most of the territory of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. The railway pas- senger therefore rides fifty miles into the Empire, as it now is, before he comes to the frontier that Napoleon crossed, 332 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON when he found the boundary in the middle of the Niemen at Kovno. A little way out of Kovno, there is a steep, round hill. The townspeople still call it the Hill of Napoleon, since from its crown he looked across the river one morning in the fourth week of June, 1812. He had discarded the too well known three-cornered black hat and green coat, and had disguised himself in the cap and cloak of a Polish soldier of his Guard. Standing there at the top, with his hundreds of thousands of soldiers swarming the forest behind him and with Russia ly- ing only over beyond the narrow stream, he hummed his war song while he spied out the best place for throwing his bridges. The Russians have a saying, ' ' The gates of Russia are wide to those who enter, but narrow to those who go out." That would be a fitting inscription for the pedestal of a monument which stands in the square before the Hotel de Ville at Kovno. For the Hill of Napoleon is not the only souvenir of its im- mortal but uninvited guest which the town cherishes. On that shaft in the x square, which was set up by the Czar Alex- ander, this grim tale is carved : RUSSIA, Surprised in 1812 by an Army of 700,000 Men, Only 70,000 Repassed Her Frontier. The monumental stone was yet unquarried and the Czar was at Yilna, sixty miles away, when at midnight three pon- toons being completed, the men of twenty nations began to pour out of the forest and flow in torrents upon the unde- fended Russian shore. That bank of the Niemen at Kovno, therefore, well may be called the high-water mark of the red tide of the French Revolution. It was there that the mighty force which took its rise when the French people burst the old Bourbon dam, broke and spent itself on the sandy wastes. ON TO MOSCOW 333 The Russian commanders, as Napoleon intended they should, had divided their army when they saw his multitudes flowing upon them from every direction. Thus separated, it was impossible for them to make a stand. While the two Russian armies, therefore, fell back in an effort to get together and present a solid front, Napoleon moved forward between them in an effort to keep them apart and destroy them singly. He was disappointed at the outset of the campaign, when, after making preparations to fight for a foothold on the banks of the Niemen, he was permitted to cross unmolested and was welcomed to a desolate shore. Dashing off to Vilna the next day with the Guard, he marched for three days through a terrible tempest of rain and sleet and wind, unchallenged ex- cept by roaring and flashing thunderbolts, the Russian out- posts everywhere vanishing like deer into the depths of the forests. Already the climate, with its sudden and fierce varia- tions, was collecting its toll, and 10,000 horses had perished, frozen to death in June! As Napoleon neared Vilna not a bayonet remained to de- fend it. Surprise and anger clouded the Emperor's brow when he entered the gate of that capital of Lithuania. The Napoleon of Rivoli, of Egypt, of Marengo, of Austerlitzv would have left the abandoned town of Vilna, and raced after the retreating foe. Alas, the Napoleon who sat down there for seventeen days was no longer the eagle that once flew over mountains and deserts. At Austerlitz he had foretold the change: "I shall be good for only six years more of war." Those six years and more had now rolled over his care-bur- dened head. They had left in his face "two creases, which extended from the base of the nose to the brow," and soft indulgences had turned his muscles of steel to fat, inclining him to the couch rather than the saddle. The swift Napoleonic fashion of warfare was as athletic as the sports of the ring or the diamond, and the Emperor's forty-two years weighed upon him as heavily as upon a pugil- ist or a ball-player. So the warrior, famoused for fight, tarried at Vilna almost as long as it took him to finish his Marengo, Ulm, Austerlitz or Jena campaigns. 334 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON While he lay on the floor with his head close to such maps; as he could get — for like Alexander of Macedon and Fred- erick the Great, he was near-sighted — he scolded Prince Eu- gene, Marshal Davout, and King Jerome for not rounding up the enemy. Week after week, the marshals of France ranged the Lithuanian wilderness without running down the foe, and they lost men and horses faster than they ever had seen them fall on the battlefield. Torrential downpours washed away the cart tracks which served as roads and the supply trains were stalled. With nothing to eat but green rye and the thatch torn from the roofs of the people's huts, the horses sickened and died by the thousands on every march. Already the cavalry were being dismounted. On the other hand, the Cos- sack horse of the Russian cavalry was inured to privation and had the tastes and digestion of the goat. The invading soldiers soon were on short rations, and passed in a rapid descent from wine and brandy to beer, then to the stupefying, brutalising native intoxicant, vodka, or to muddy swamp water. Foraging in a land grubbed by the retreating Russians, was miserably poor. The houses a mile apart were mostly wretched dens more fit for bears than hu- man beings. The foreigners could well starve on what suf- ficed the troops of the Czar, who drew his soldiers from the estates of the nobles, and the landlords naturally sent him their poorest serfs. The strangers could not swallow the native bread. Some grenadiers happening upon a large quantity of the very acme of Russian delicacy, were greasing their boots with it when an officer, a Parisian gourmet, rescued the caviare from such base use. The dreary, dead level monotony of Russia, with its squalid villages, its unkempt fields and melancholy forests of fir, alder,, and willow, oppresses the spirit of a traveller, who passes it in review from his car window at the rate of thirty miles an hour. It utterly overwhelmed many sensitive natures in the Grand Army as they marched and counter-marched under the blazing sun or through wild blizzards. The men dared not lay down their arms for a minute, step out of the ranks or go anywhere except in strong bands, for ON TO MOSCOW 335 the dreaded Cossacks seemed always to be lurking in the gloomy shadows. The French ceased to curse, and the Ger- mans ceased to sing. Homesickness became a well-defined and widely prevalent disease. Not a few forlorn boys leaned their heads on their muskets and chose to look in the muzzles rather than endure the anguished longings for their own fair lands. In five weeks the Grand Army made only 250 miles. That advance, although unopposed by any enemy in arms, had cost it nearly a third of its strength. One of the German divisions had lost a full half of its men. Of the 360,000 in the columns that had crossed the Niemen at Kovno, only 250,000 remained, flung out along a front of 150 miles. For fifteen days the Emperor tarried at the city of Vitebsk. He tore down houses about his headquarters in the town to give him an open space on which to review his troops, and he appealed to the imperial librarian at Paris for some "amusing books" as he had "moments of leisure not easy to fill here." After losing that precious fortnight and more of the short summer, he left the city by the Duna and crossed over the Dneiper, the great river of Muscovy, down which Odin and Rurik, with the fierce multitudes of the north, had journeyed to the Black Sea and descended upon Constan- tinople. Onward the Grand Army toiled out of Lithuania into the real Russia, into "White Russia," until it stood before the many towered brick wall of sacred Smolensk, whose white domes gleam in the sun on the heights above the Dneiper. When Napoleon learned that the Russian armies were together and united for the defence of the city, he clapped his hands and rejoiced, "At last I have them." Again, however, he lost a day before closing in upon the elusive foe, and it was noon of the following day when his batteries opened fire. All afternoon the walls of the city withstood a pelting hail of lead, though the wooden houses be- hind it repeatedly caught fire. At the late setting of the northern sun, Smolensk still defied its assailants. The fires within the walls continued to spread through the 336 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON night. They cast a glare upon Napoleon's face as he sat be- fore the door of his tent, gazing at the burning town. When the sun rose after a brief August night, its first rays disclosed the battered walls without a defender mounted upon them and the city wrapped in silence and in fiames. The quarry had escaped again, and the inhabitants had fled after the soldiers. Instead of destroying the enemy and capturing a rich city, Napoleon, at the cost of 12,000 men, had conquered another desolation as useless as the wilds of Lithuania. He was now nearly 400 miles from the frontier and still without the decisive battle that he had expected to deliver as soon as he entered the dominions of the Czar. As he had marched deeper and deeper into the vast Russian wastes, and farther and farther into the short Russian summer, he had looked upon Smolensk as the goal of his campaign. But its warehouses were burned or empty, and the invader had to bivouac on the ashes of the city. There were no supplies for the men and the animals. And a hungry army cannot stand still in the presence of starvation. Hour after hour the Emperor faced the hard choice pre- sented to him, murmuring as he paced his headquarters and debated with himself. Should he stop or turn back or go on .' The problem really had passed beyond his own decision. In supreme emergencies the will of an army always overrules the will of its commander. When the soldiers have had enough of fighting, the battle is ended, regardless of the wishes of the general. When they are starving, they can be suc- cessfully marched only in the direction of food. With nothing but starvation and disease behind him and the ruins of a burned and deserted city about him, Napoleon passed out of the gate of Smolensk in the middle of a night late in August and, on the heels of the ever-retreating Rus- sians, took the road to Moscow. Meanwhile the Czar was vowing to his British military adviser, Sir Robert Wilson, "I would sooner let my beard grow to my waist and live on potatoes in Siberia than permit any negotiation with Napoleon while an armed Frenchman remains on the soil of Russia." ON TO MOSCOW 337 After Kutusof, the Russian commander, had fallen back to within seventy-five miles of Moscow, he yielded to the pres- sure of his officers and men and of the indignant nobles of that city. Against his own instincts, he took a stand at last, and drew up his 120,000 soldiers across the road where it passes, at the village of Borodino, over a branch of the Moskva river. There he paraded before his kneeling warriors a most ven- erated image of the Holy Virgin, while the priests of the Greek church gave them absolution and the injunction to die, if they must, to save the Holy City of Russia from the sacrilegious hordes of the west. It was equally characteristic of Napoleon, on the other hand, to display to his Guard on an easel in front of his tent a large portrait of the King of Rome, which Marie Louise had sent him from Paris. The story of the battle is not a tale of strategy and sur- prises, but of stubborn ferocity on both sides and headlong plunges. Nor did Napoleon sit his white Arab as at Auster- litz, manoeuvring his forces like a switchman in his tower. On the contrary, he chose a point of observation on a hill three quarters of a mile from the front of his army. There he sat on a camp stool with his feet on a drum, sometimes ap- parently asleep. He rose from time to time to rest his tele- scope on a guardsman's shoulder, or again, in an effort to warm his feet, he paced back and forth a few minutes until the slight exertion seemed to have exhausted him. He did not mount his horse in the course of the long, hard fought day until the fighting virtually was at an end. A painful functional disorder is said to have unfitted him for the saddle, and a severe cold — Constant had neglected to give him his waterproof boots the day before — left him dull and inert and hardly able to speak. The two armies were about equal in numbers. The brutal and deadly tempest of fire and death raged from six to six, when the Russians, with nearly 40,000 of their comrades fallen about their feet, sullenly gave way. But they retired slowly and in good order only a few paces from the crim- soned field. There they chanted their Te Deums and boasted of victory in the hearing of their foes, whose own loss of al- 338 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON most thirty thousand made up an awful total that gave the battle the unhappy distinction of being the bloodiest of the nineteenth century. When, the next morning, the Russians resumed their retreat and the Grand Army its advance from Borodino, the famished invaders were spurred forward by their longing for the fat larders and the fabled riches of Moscow. It was the one hope left them and ' ' a Moscou ! a Moscou ! ' ' was the last remaining cry to stir their wasted ranks. Necessity had become the mother of Napoleon's strategy. He only obeyed the instincts of his famished soldiers in ven- turing beyond Smolensk. As he promised them in his bul- letins, "You shall see Moscow," he promised himself, "Peace waits for me at the gates of Moscow;" but Prince Eugene came away from his stepfather sighing, "Moscow will be our ruin." The bottle was open and the wine had to be drunk ! CHAPTER XL THE TORCH THAT FIRED THE WORLD 1812 AGE 43 HIGH above a graceful bend in the Moskva river, rises the most renowned of the seven hills of the Russian Rome. On that Hill of the Pilgrim, or Hill of Salu- tation, the pilgrims were wont to bow in awe and cross them- selves while they saluted "Holy Mother Moscow." There, too, the poor wretches condemned to a Siberian exile were privileged to pause and feast their sad eyes before taking up their chains for the long march to the grave of the living dead. Vulgarly the height is called Sparrow Hill, and its cafes now are the resort of the tea bibbers of the city. Close by where the samovars are enthroned to-day, Napoleon stood on a sunny afternoon in September, 1812. Looking across the wide fields of the convent in the river bed, he gazed upon the ivory white walls and gaily painted roofs, upon the forest of spires, towers, pinnacles, and minarets, upon the countless domes of gold and green and blue that form the unique and dazzling panorama of Moscow. "It is time! it is time!" he sighed as his eyes rested on the city of many and wonderful colours, where the sunbeams turned to shimmering gold the lacy chains falling like veils over the eight pointed Russian crosses, which sprang from their crescents as if to symbolise the triumph of the Christian over the Moslem. He had paid a terrible price for that sight from Sparrow Hill, but then it was one that never before had been beheld by a conqueror out of the west. Did not the tears freeze on the youthful cheeks of Charles XII of Sweden because he was de- 339 340 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON nied the joy of looking upon those clustered towers of the Kremlin ? With Moscow at his feet, all the capitals of the European continent had knelt and kissed the sword of Napoleon. Mos- cow had cost him dear, but it was the rarest in his collection. Before possessing himself of his fair captive, of this Oriental beauty that he had spent 200,000 lives to win, he wished to gratify his dramatic sense and thrill the world by making an imposing spectacle of her abject surrender and of his own magnanimity. While he waited for his vanguard to arrange a fitting cere- monial of the delivery of the keys, the city of the Czars lay as if in a languorous afternoon slumber on the banks of the Moskva. No murmur rose from behind her walls. Not a wreath of smoke floated above her chimneys. The report crept up the hill that Moscow was deserted and that even its keys were gone. The startling rumour sank to a whisper as it reached the outer circle of the group about Napoleon. When, at last, some one dared repeat it to him, he refused to believe it and despatched members of his staff into the mute city to search out the members of the nobility in their hiding places. In their Spanish pride, the people of Madrid had hid from him but they had not fled their homes and forsaken their capital. A city of 300,000 depopulated? The sacred city of the empire abandoned ? All those great palaces deserted ? The altars of those 300 churches untended? C'est impos- sible ! Even when convinced of the truth, he persisted in his desire for a ceremony. Declining to enter the city until the next day, he passed the night in the odorous squalor of an abandoned house by one of the gates. Moscow was, indeed, almost a solitude. As the Russian army, under General Kutusof, retreated from Borodino the morning after the frightful battle, Moscow had clamoured in vain for military protection. When Kutusof called a council of war, it voted to stand or fall for the salvation of the sacred town. But he ignored the decision and, with tears in his eyes, marched through Moscow, leaving it defenceless. THE TORCH THAT FIRED THE WORLD 341 The inhabitants rose, and crowded the gates in a flight on the heels of the retreating army. In the instinctive repug- nance of a primitive patriotism, they scorned to stay and breathe an atmosphere polluted by the presence of an alien conqueror. Leaving their altars and turning their backs on their homes and their churches, bearing aloft their revered ikons and singing plaintive songs, the people passed out of the city in long processions. The great nobles forsook their splendid palaces and spacious parks and drove away in their brilliant four and six-horse equipages, their thousands of serfs run- ning after them. The rich merchants left their warehouses and shops filled with unguarded wealth, and joined in the exodus. The rest of the population rushed into the coun- try, with no thought of where they should find food or shelter. The governor unlocked the gates of the prisons and the ar- senals, and, rolling barrels of vodka out of the liquor ware- houses, he left them standing open in the streets. Having thus given Moscow over to armed and drunken criminals and vagrants, he slipped out of his back door and stole away in the rear of the fugitive populace. Even while the people were still pouring out of the farther gates of Moscow, the towers of the abandoned city rose to the view of the hungry, dirty, sadly reduced army of twenty na- tions. Never suspecting the desolation that lay before them, the soldiers raised the exultant cry, ' ' Moscow ! Moscow ! Moscow ! at last ! " To them the name meant food and drink and rest, and they were as impatient and eager as a weary traveller, who, after a long journey, comes in sight of home. Murat's cavalry dashed into the city, but only to find in all the wilderness of houses and streets a few thousand people, among them the brutish jail birds who had rushed out of the open gates of their prisons. Except for these and the help- less sick and wounded in the hospitals, the great city was a desert. The candles still burned on the altars which were decorated as for a holy day. Not a woman was seen on the streets nor a face at the windows. Drunken men lay on the pavements lapping up the intoxicants that flowed in the gut- 342 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON ter, while the more sober were wildly running about among the big mansions, stealing everything they could carry away. As the hungry soldiers threw themselves upon the city, they beat off the native looters, and Moscow became the undisputed spoil of the alien invader. While the French sentries, patrolling the wall of the Krem- lin that starry night, looked out over the ghostly city and watched a comet which glared like a portent in the sky, they saw fire after fire flaming up above the roofs in many sec- tions of the town. A foe more terrible than the Cossack was rising to challenge the invaders, who were roused from their sleep to beat him back and save from destruction the only prize they had won since crossing the Niemen. When Napoleon entered the gate the next morning and went to the Kremlin, his captive city had been snatched from him by the banded demons of fire and liquor, hunger and plunder. The beautiful domes and towers he had admired from the hill were wrapped one after another in the wither- ing embrace, the church roofs of sheet iron and lead falling with loud crashes. Palaces were swept away in a scorching breath, the sculptures that adorned their fagades crashing amid the ruins. The pitiless flames would not spare the hos- pitals, where thousands, unable to drag themselves into the streets, perished in their wards. Above the roaring surges of fire, there rang out the groans of the dying, the shrieks of the plundered, the crack of the soldiers' musketry, the howl- ing of the dogs chained to the gates of the houses. On the third day, Napoleon's officers repeatedly came to warn him that the fire was roaring at the Kremlin gates and to beg him to retreat before it. But not until it was difficult for him to breathe and Berthier had come to report that he had been almost swept from the battlements in a red whirlwind, did the Emperor consent to take flight. The hill of the Kremlin rose like an island in a tossing sea of fire, and Napoleon had great difficulty in finding an avenue of escape. In street after street he was turned back by a hail of flying embers, and the hoofs of the horses were burned by the blistering paving stones. With a cloak over THE TORCH THAT FIRED THE WORLD 343 his face to protect his eyes and mouth from the stifling breath of the flames, he was wandering bewildered in the blinding atmosphere, when some soldiers, recognising the imperial party, escorted it to the Petrofsky palace, the suburban villa of the Czars. Even there, at a distance of two miles, the Em- peror could read in the light of the blazing city. As he looked down upon the inferno he exclaimed, "What a people ! They are the Scythians, indeed ! ' ' Naturally he as- sumed that the Russians had fired their capital and doomed it to ashes rather than let it be his prey. Whether Moscow really was immolated on the pyre of patriotism, the world never will surely know. When it was seen that its destruc- tion had driven out the invaders and saved the empire, the harebrained governor who at first had blamed the French for burning it, noisily avowed that he himself had ordered it burnt. And other Russians, flattered by the thought of such an heroic sacrifice, adopted his story. Yet it is possible that Moscow was not destroyed by official design any more than it was abandoned by official de- sign. For the Moscow that looked so fair when Napoleon saw it from Sparrow Hill was only a painted show and but a huge tinder box. It was easy and natural enough for its wooden houses to take fire when left to the mercy of frenzied looters, prowling over them with torches in hand, and the equinoxial winds were present to complete the havoc. The hurricane of fire swept the town for two days more until a rain quenched the flames. When Napoleon returned to the Kremlin, which had suffered no great damage, the city was a sorry sight. The big warehouses, the shops and bazars, the grand palaces of the nobility were gone. No less than 6500 of the 9000 buildings had been destroyed, and most of Moscow was but a heap of rubbish. Napoleon was marooned on an ash pile more than 2000 miles from Paris. His marauding soldiers found an over- abundance of wines and brandies. They arrayed them- selves in costly furs and rare eastern shawls and decked out the women in their "love escort" with rich gowns and blazing jewels. Neither the altars nor the graves were 344 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON spared by the pillagers. But they quickly exhausted the little food that the fleeing residents had left behind, and bread became more precious than the precious metals. Meanwhile, benumbed by the terrible blow that had fallen upon him, Napoleon sat day after day in the gloom of the oriental palace at the Kremlin. Bad news came to him from Spain, where his brother, Joseph, was being driven from his capital. Grave warnings were sounded of an uneasy spirit in Prussia and Austria. Sometimes as he wrestled alone with his black problem, hours passed without a word from the Em- peror's lips. Like a dog mortally injured, as Count Tolstoi says, the Grand Army sat down amid the ruins of Moscow to lick its wounds. Daily the sun blazed redder in the dull autumnal sky. September waned. The nights lengthened and the long Russian winter drew on. Five precious summer weeks had passed when the Russian army, resuming active operations, aroused Napoleon and compelled him to face the inevitable. He must retreat from that desert of cinders, before the long road home was barricaded with Russian bayonets or buried beneath Russian snows. October was far advanced when he turned back upon his trail of disaster. If a Russian summer had slain half his army in the advance, how many could survive a retreat in a Russian winter? As if to fire a parting shot at the Czar, the retreating Em- peror ordered his rear guard to mine and blow up the Krem- lin. The earth shivered from the mighty explosion and much damage was wrought, but that strange city within a city sur- vived the shock and stands unto this day to tell the story of how its walls baffled fire and sword in 1812. Those walls wind for more than a mile about the hill that rises from the banks of the Moskva in the midst of a city with a present population of a million and a quarter. For the Kremlin is as much in the centre of Moscow as Westminster is in London, the Palais Royal in Paris, the Quirinal in Rome, the Schloss in Berlin, the White House in Washington, the City Hall in New York or the Common in Boston. THE TORCH THAT FIRED THE WORLD 345 Not that the most melancholy of Napoleon 's abodes this side of St. Helena really is to be compared with any of those places. The Kremlin is peculiar to itself. At once a fortress and a shrine, it is rather the Muscovite Alhambra, where in other times a numerous court dwelt and frolicked and worshipped. It is the village which expanded into an empire. It is the natal den of the Russian bear, whence he stole forth to plant his paw upon a full seventh of the earth's surface. Behind those walls, the dukes of Moscow shielded themselves from the arrows of the Golden Horde ; there Ivan the Terrible held his savage court; there a sixteen-year-old boy founded the dynasty of the Romanoffs; there was born the epileptic, hairless Peter the Great. In his envy of his bewhiskered subjects, Peter laid a fine of 100 roubles on every beard passing through the Redeemer Gate and cruelly filled the Kremlin with unimaginable hor- rors. When at last he grew weary of cutting perverse heads off stubborn necks, he abandoned Moscow entirely to set up his throne and erect a new capital on the wild and dreary marshes of the Neva. The Kremlin ceased thenceforth to be the seat of imperial power, although it still pretended to be a military strong- hold when Napoleon ordered its destruction. Its old walls, even though they are from thirty to seventy feet high and from fourteen to twenty feet thick, are now only a harmless relic of a bygone age of warfare, and water no longer flows in the moat, where in the green shade the children play and lovers sigh. Notwithstanding the Czars have reigned at Petrograd for more than 200 years, each in turn has faithfully come back to be anointed and crowned at the ancient altar of the cathedral in the Kremlin. Thither Nicholas II came a pilgrim in the midsummer of 1914, to invoke the favour of Heaven for Russian arms in the War of the Nations. The city that Peter built on the Neva is only a thing of brick and stone and mortar. Moscow remains to the Rus- sians the holy city and the Kremlin hill is its Mt. Moriah, the sanctuary of the holy of holies. 346 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON While the Kremlin celebrates the glories of the Empire of the Czars, it commemorates as well the defeat of Napoleon, whose empire, like a great ship on a rock, was beaten to pieces against its walls. It is indeed a colossal monument of a most colossal failure. At its very portal the visitor is confronted with a reminder of the extraordinary disaster of 1812. It is the grey stone gate of St. Nicholas, where Poles and Tartars and Muscovites have fought and bled these hundreds of years. Above the gate rises a bell tower, with its miraculous image or ikon of St. Nicholas. Although the French laid a mine under the gate and blew its tower to fragments, as a memorial tablet records, the ikon "by the wonderful power of God" was unharmed and even the pane of glass over it and the lan- tern and candle belonging to it were not broken. Wherefore, the tablet triumphantly inquires, "Who is greater than God, our God, the marvellous God who doest miracles by his saints?" Another of the sixteen gates that pierce the Kremlin wall is even more venerated and with a still more miraculous ikon, which centuries ago confounded and dispersed the besieging Tartars. Through this gate the Czars all go to their corona- tions. No one, not even the most hurrying drosky driver, passes in or out of it with covered head. And anybody in the genuflecting throng that daily pours through it could tell the stranger that Napoleon paid dear for refusing to uncover at that Gate of the Redeemer! Entering the gate, the unwarned stranger is startled by a mob of towers and domes and a riot of colour and architec- ture. Possibly he may be surprised to see before him not one great palaee or castle, but a city of palaces and gardens, of churches, shrines, and convents, of museums, courts and bar- racks, of streets and open squares. For the Kremlin really is a city in itself. It has no less than ten churches and as many as three dozen big bells, in- cluding the Napoleon bell, so called because it was cast from metal dug out of the fire ruins. Each of the Kremlin churches has its own bitter memory of the Napoleonic invasion, but the bitterest of all lurks in THE TORCH THAT FIRED THE WORLD 347 the dusk of the special church of the Czars. There on the very altar before which the Romanoffs kneel to receive the oil of consecration, the alien soldiers squatted and gambled with cards, while they stabled their horses in its nave and chapels, even as they had desecrated the great mosque of el Ahzar at Cairo. The church, however, has its triumph to offset its shame, for its present chandeliers were cast from 900 pounds of stolen silver that the Cossacks recaptured from the retreat- ing Grand Army. On everything that glistened in the churches of the Krem- lin the soldiers laid their pillaging hands. Not only were the gold and silver ikons and vessels dumped into the melting pot, but even the gold leaf was stripped from the images and decorations. The most conspicuous of the towers, that of Ivan or John, recalls the day when the Emperor stood before it personally superintending the removal of its enormous cross. And for what purpose? To send it to Paris and place it above the dome of the Hotel des Invalides. But the immense thing tumbled and crashed, nearly killing its impious assailants. Only by that lucky mischance was Napoleon spared the igno- miny of finding his grave beneath a stolen cross. The palace of Napoleon, or that part of it which he occupied, in the Kremlin, was torn down long ago. In place of it, the Czars have the most palatial of all the palaces in Europe, with great halls of glistening marble and gleaming gold, hung in red and blue, with noble columns of rarest stones and thou- sands upon thousands of electric lights glowing in its chande- liers. The faithful in their pilgrimage to the Kremlin meet with many mementoes of its invasion to tempt them away from the Christian principle of forgiveness. The Russian, how- ever, seems to be innocent of any petty spite toward Na- poleon's memory. Try to imagine the Americans setting up in their capital a statue of the British general who burned Washington in 1814 ! Yet almost the first object that rises to the view of the visitor to the treasury or the museum of the Kremlin is a great marble statue of the Emperor of the 348 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON French. His gift of a service of Sevres, which he made to the Czar in the days of their fraternizing, is also cherished there among the precious keepsakes of the nation. Apparently Alexander did not send his presents back when they quar- relled ! Napoleon's sleigh is there, brought in by the Cossacks, who captured it, and even his bed, which was picked up on the banks of the Beresina after his flight over the river, stands beside the bed of Peter the Great and the enormous boots of that giant monarch. A large portrait of him which the Cos- sacks brought back from the Waterloo campaign completes the story of how Russia avenged herself by chasing the in- vader clear across the European continent. A still more con- clusive exhibit is formed by a row of 879 cannon captured from the retreating army of twenty nations, and which stretches the full length of the arsenal wall in the Kremlin. The greatest monument of all the memorials of Napoleon's repulse from Moscow, however, stands just outside the Krem- lin wall. It is the magnificent Church of Our Saviour, which Alexander intended to erect on Sparrow Hill, where it would have mocked the memory of Napoleon's fleeting moment of triumph there. After an immense amount of money had been spent in a vain effort to find a firm foundation on the hill, the plan was changed and the church was set up in front of the very gate through which the invading Emperor passed into the Kremlin. There, on the bank of the Moskva, rises this grandest and costliest of all the war monuments in the world. There, by the Kremlin gate, the nation sends up in purest white marble its prayer of thanksgiving, its Te Deum, while within its walls there rises at high mass a burst of song that ravishes the soul. From a lofty gallery, the visitor looks down upon the lacy marble of the snowy altar, with its priests in their rich vest- ments of gold, and upon a multitude of worshippers, some- times as many as 15,000 standing on a floor of jasper. The beautiful baritone of the priestly chant mounts higher and higher until it seems like the crescendo of a great pipe organ. Then a famous choir marches down a lane made by THE TORCH THAT FIRED THE WORLD 349 the soldiers, who have pushed the people back, and takes its stand in the centre of the church. From the hundreds of throats of those well-drilled choristers, unaccompanied by any instruments, the choirmaster draws a wonderful variety of tones, high and low, a glorious symphony that is more like the music of a great orchestra than of the voices of young peasants whose parents were born into Russian serfdom. This church is the most imposing, the most interesting, the most significant of all the souvenirs of Napoleon's capture and abandonment of Moscow. There is something thoroughly characteristic of Russia, something peculiar to the Russian nature, something very expressive of a nation whose patriot- ism and religion are one and the same thing in this religious edifice built to celebrate the deliverance of Moscow from a military invasion. Other Christian people rear temples and columns and arches in imitation of the classic pagans. They are either monuments of revenge or of self glorification. Even the medals that Alexander I struck and gave all his soldiers who pursued Na- poleon from the Moskva to the Seine, did not glorify arms, but God. On the medals the eye in the triangle was engraved as a symbol of God's providence, and they were inscribed "Not unto us, not unto us, but unto Thy name!" It was in that spirit of gratefulness to the Divine Power that Russia chose to make her great war memorial a votive offering. It was in that spirit that she dedicated to "Christ, Our Saviour," the noble church whose dome, the loftiest and most golden of the domes of a new Moscow risen from the ashes, would be the first to draw his gaze could Napoleon re- treat from the realms of shade to revisit the glimpses of the moon and walk again on Sparrow Hill. CHAPTER XLI THE GREAT TRAGEDY 1812-1813 AGE 43 HAVING seen at last that he must "abandon that pile of rubbish," Napoleon marched his army out of the still smoking ruins of Moscow on an October morning in 1812 and began his long retreat from Russia. The retreating mass had hardly crowded past the gates of the city, when its wagons began to stall and its sumptuous carriages which had been stolen from the stables of the no- bility began to break down. As the Emperor overtook it and pushed his way through, it was already a disorganised rabble. He no longer commanded a Grand Army, but was swept along helplessly in the midst of the strangest horde that Europe had seen since the Goths poured out of the German forests. Cursing and shouting in a babel of languages, the confused and motley procession stretched its length for miles and miles as it wound its way over the illimitable Russian steppes. If the men under arms numbered 100,000, and no one knows how many there really were, they were followed by half as many more noncombatants, who clung to the legs of the toil- ing army and held it back. Some of these were prisoners, some were servants ; many were mere hangers on. Beside the cantine women and other hardy members of the "love escort" who had survived the advance, there were French and other foreign women residents of Moscow, who were fleeing from the wrath of the Muscovites. There were 2000 army wagons and 570 cannons to be dragged over the long weary road ahead and all manner of other vehicles loaded down with the spoils of Moscow. Some foolish looters had piled their booty on wheelbarrows, and were starting to push it 2000 miles across Europe. 350 THE GREAT TRAGEDY 351 No army ever was so heavily encumbered with baggage. It was plunder poor at the outset. Count Tolstoi has likened it to a monkey whose hand is caught in the narrow neck of a jar of nuts but who refuses to open his fist and draw it out for fear of dropping his loot. Weighted down with gold and silver, with rich stores of rare wines and liquors, with great stocks of beautiful gowns and gold laced coats, the mob began a march of many hundreds! of miles and many weeks through a barren wilderness in a Russian winter — with worn-out boots and summer uniforms and food enough for only ten days! Napoleon had hoped to throw the enemy off the scent. When Kutusof overtook him, however, he was only five days from Moscow. Thenceforth he had to back out of Russia, with his pursuer pressing upon him at every step. Night and day his soldiers were forever beset by Cossack cavalry. They had to fight not only for roads and bridges, but also take turns in warding off the swarming pests while their comrades slept or stopped to cook a meal. After passing by the field of Borodino, on which 40,000 of the battle slain lay unburied where they had fallen seven weeks before, another enemy more grim than any foe in arms closed in upon the retreating band. Hunger now pitilessly assailed and swiftly thinned its ranks. There was hardly a grain of wheat within twenty miles of the road on either side. For the two rival armies while passing through the country in August and September had eaten it bare and burned the villages. The poor peasantry had received an impressive illustration of the expressive Russian saying : ' ' When wolves fight, the sheep lose their wool." In the presence of starvation, the gaudy and useless spoils of Moscow were cast aside in disgust. The Russians, as they followed along, found the highway strewn with discarded treasures and abandoned wagons and cannons. Comrades and messmates began to hide from one another their flour, rice, or potatoes as something too precious to be shared. Un- fed horses sank in their traces, only to be seized upon as food, while a black cloud of vultures hovered in the rear like gulls 352 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON in the wake of a ship at sea, and packs of howling wolves also took up the chase. Nearly half the army was lost in the first two weeks of the retreat, on the first 150 miles of the march. And not more than a fourth of them had fallen before the human foe and met a soldier's death. All that havoc was wrought before the end of the first week in November, when the weather was so unseasonably mild that it was remarked as a gift from fortune to her long-time favourite. Napoleon's bulletin likened it to "the sun and the beautiful days of a trip to Fontaine- bleau." There was not even a serious frost the first week, and the temperature did not fall below the freezing point until the army was twelve days out. At the end of sixteen days the Emperor still described the weather as "perfect." Yet his armed force had dwindled to 55,000 men ! Napoleon was not overwhelmed by the elements in his Russian campaign. Neither the fires of Moscow nor the snows of the steppes undid him. On the contrary, before ever he looked upon Moscow and as he was advancing in summer, half his army had melted away, while in a fortnight of a genial autumn he lost nearly half his retreating army. The weather was not to blame for the stupendous disaster of 1812. The hosts of the twenty nations perished for the simple, un- dramatic reason that they did not have enough to eat. Had they been housed at home in warm barracks they could not have lived on the food and drink they found in Russia. By the end of ten days after the retreat began there was neither bread nor beef for the men. Truly an army moves on its belly. On coming to Russia Napoleon had violated one of his own axioms, "Never make war on a desert." When, in a mad conceit, he marched more than 600,000 men into a poverty-stricken wilderness, where they could not live off the country and where the roads were so poor that the supply trains were stalled, he sealed their doom and his own. Neither General January nor General February nor yet General Kutusof was needed to fix his fate. For there was only a broken fragment of the army left when THE GREAT TRAGEDY 353 the first snowflake fell in the third week of the retreat. Nor did Napoleon lose a battle on Russian soil. As the winter drew on, another disaster befell the remnant of the army from still another prosaic cause. In the confident summer days when supplies were laid in, thought had not been taken of the possibility of a winter campaign, and no calks were provided for the horses' shoes. The horses of the cavalry, the hospital wagons, the supply trains and the guns not being sharp-shod, slipped on the ice, and when they fell, there was small chance of their finding strength to get up again. For want of a little sharp-pointed piece of iron, there- fore, the army suffered worse than from some far more picturesque causes. With the coming of the snow, the sleet and the icy blasts of winter, the men not only had to struggle for food, but for shelter as well. "Even the ravens froze." To be sure, the temperature never approached the low levels to which American soldiers have been exposed in some Indian cam- paigns. But many of Napoleon's men were from the sunny lands of the Mediterranean, and all were so ill prepared and ill clothed for the unaccustomed severity of a more rigorous climate that they were crazed by the biting cold. The rearguard marched over the fallen in the road, but never failed to stop long enough to strip the bodies of any warm garments they chanced to wear. A survivor tells of his surprise when one whom he supposed to be dead pleaded to be left in possession of a fur coat, and he reports his own grim reply, "All right, I can wait." Humanity survived in some breasts. "When a vivandiere was delivered of a child in the snow, the colonel of her regi- ment and the surgeon did everything possible for her com- fort. With her infant wrapped in sheepskins in her arms, she was placed on the colonel 's horse when the march was resumed the next morning. Nevertheless, as the regiment halted a few days later, and the mother prepared to nurse her baby, she cried out in anguish on discovering that the child was frozen. Her husband, the barber of the regiment, sadly took the poor, 354 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON lifeless little thing from the breast of the weeping vivandiere, kissed it and laid it in its tomb of snow. Another vivandiere, who had given two children to the snow, is portrayed sitting by the road as the troops stumble by, holding in her lap the head of her dying husband while her one remaining child is bending over them, her tears freezing as they fall on the father's face. The dog of a regiment, who had followed it from Spain to Vienna and to Moscow, unable longer because of frozen feet, to keep step with the soldiers was carried on the shoulders of one of them until he died of the cold. The humble loyalty of some Germans to their boy prince was not lost. To shield the twenty-year-old princeling from a bitter night while he slept in his cloak, they stood around him in a solid wall, where three-fourths of them froze and died that he might live. When the wretched remnant of the army came again in sight of the towers of the ruined city of Smolensk, the Em- peror himself was afoot, plodding through the snow with an iron-pointed staff. In the three weeks since he left Moscow, 200 guns had been abandoned along the lane of death. Worse still, thousands of the weakened men had found their muskets too heavy to be carried and had thrown them away. The force was now reduced to less than 50,000 soldiers in widely separated columns, and many of these were without weapons. In the twelve weeks that had passed since Napoleon first stood before the walls of Smolensk, in that period of less than three months, he had lost 135,000 men. As he paused there on the banks of the Dneiper, the Rus- sians were closing in upon him from all directions and threat- ening every avenue of escape. He dared not wait long enough to reunite and reorganise his slender, scattered forces, and he fled for safety with only 15,000 men, leaving his sick behind him. When he came to Krasnoi, almost the last town in White Russia, he halted for the belated divisions of Davout, Eugene, and Ney, before plunging into the Lithuanian wilds. With his 15,000 half-starved veterans, he turned in desperation upon his 80,000 pursuers and cowed them with the dread of THE GREAT TRAGEDY 355 his name. Marshal Davout succeeded in joining him, and Prince Eugene got around the enemy and effected a junction with the Emperor, but with the loss of nearly half of his 6000 men in twenty-four hours. Davout and Eugene having caught up with him at Krasnoi, Napoleon pressed on without waiting for Ney. As he sped onward, he had small hope of ever again seeing "the bravest of the brave" among his marshals. "I have," he sighed, "more than 80,000,000 francs in the cellars of the Tuileries, and I would gladly give them all for the ransom of Marshal Ney." The marshal ransomed himself with his courage. But when, at last, he overtook the Emperor, only 900 haggard faces appeared in the wasted ranks of the column of 6000 warriors who had left Smolensk four days before. Only those 900 were left of the corps of 39,000 men with which Ney had en- tered upon the Russian campaign. In a few days 200 more would rest in the snows. As Napoleon in his flight with the mockery of his Grand Army approached the Beresina river, the sun, which no longer shone for him as at Austerlitz, thawed the marshes and broke up the ice in the stream. With only 30,000 men, he must bridge and cross a river, while 65,000 Russians pressed be- hind him, 30,000 bore down upon him from the north and 34,000 threatened him from the south. Yet he had only to turn and growl at them to throw them back in such panic as to spread demoralisation throughout all their armies and ren- der comparatively harmless a force more than four times greater than his own. Unluckily he had burned his pontoon train as a useless in- cumbrance only to find that the Russians had destroyed the bridge by which he intended to pass over the Beresina. "Is it written there," he bitterly exclaimed as he looked up to the heavens, ' ' that we shall do nothing but make mistakes ? ' ' For the lack of better material, he tore down houses and built his bridges of such sticks as he could pick up. In the eagerness of his soldiers to put the river between them and the Russians, they fought among themselves in the desire of all 356 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON to take a hand in the work of bridging it. They leaped into the icy waters up to their shoulders and laboured there until two bridges spanned the little stream no wider than a narrow city street. But not more than five in 100 of those devoted bridge builders survived the exposure and returned to their homes. Napoleon and the Old Guard at once crossed to the home- ward bank. There, however, they had to make an all-day fight to beat off a Russian army which had come to dispute their passage. The weather was growing colder and guards- men went about the camp calling for dry firewood to keep the shivering monarch warm in his hovel on the river bank. Though themselves chilled to the marrow, half dead grenadiers took fagots from their own scanty piles and said, "Give these to the Emperor." On the other shore, the army and its hangers on, deprived of Napoleon's care, became an unmanageable mob. Not that they stampeded in their haste to escape over the river. On the contrary, the bridges remained idle all night long, while frostbitten men and women persisted in staying near the bridge heads in the warmth of the burning wagons that had been devoted to destruction. Thousands of others, stupefied by hunger and benumbed by cold, sank into a sluggish indif- ference to their fate, from which they could not be awakened in the morning until they saw the spears of the Cossacks bearing down upon them and the shells of the Russian artil- lery raining from the heights behind them. Then they rose in a wild panic and madly fought with one another at the entrance to the bridges, which were quickly choked with horses, wagons, and guns, men, women, and chil- dren. Many were struck down in the heedless rush and many others were pushed into the river. One of the bridges at last sank beneath its burden and filled the stream with a scream- ing, struggling, drowning mass. Many w T ere still on the re- maining bridge when the Russians advanced to seize it and the French fired it, giving their own people to the flames or the waters to save themselves from pursuit. Other thousands were still on the shore, ready for the Cossack knife. THE GREAT TRAGEDY 357 Perhaps only 12,000 or 13,000 had crossed the Beresina, no more in number than they who were found asleep on the bank when the Russian spring came and lifted their mantle of snow. But flood and flame never told how many thousands of lives they took between them. "Food!" "Food!" "Food!" That was the cry Napo- leon sent on ahead, as he marched his tatterdemalions toward Vilna, where, five months before, the earth had trembled be- neath the tread of his hundreds of thousands of troops. He himself was not going to Vilna, but was about to shake off his nightmare army. A month had passed since a courier, riding at a furious pace, came to him on the march to Smo- lensk and brought the report of a movement to seize the gov- ernment at Paris. A demented man, who had broken away from his keepers, had been able to communicate to others his delusion that the Emperor was dead, place himself in com- mand of 600 of the Guard and cast into prison Savary, the minister of police, along with the prefect of police. If a crazy man, armed with a crazy rumour, could do that, Napoleon naturally wondered what would become of his throne if he were not seated upon it, when Paris should hear that the Grand Army was dead. He rode into the little village of Smorgoni, therefore, with a determination to free himself from the wreckage and race to his capital ahead of the news of his disaster. Closeting himself at Smorgoni, he sat down and wrote the last bulletin of the campaign, blaming everything on the Russian winter and on "men whom nature had not fashioned stoutly enough to be above all the chances of fate and fortune." As if to draw a contrast between himself and the Half Million who had fallen, he added, "the health of His Majesty has never been better." That closing line, however, obviously had the less sinister motive of assuring the restless revolutionists of France that the eagle was not winged. Finally having committed to King Murat the horrid skele- ton of the greatest military body that ever had marched to war in modern times, Napoleon stole away by night in an open sleigh with Duroc and Caulaincourt, Roustan and a Polish 358 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON guide. It was not glorious, but it was the only thing to do. Some one else could lead the staggering Ten Thousand, but he alone, once he was in Paris, could stamp his foot and raise up new legions. Other detachments came and joined the little column from Moscow, but only to swell its list of deaths to 20,000 in the short distance between Smorgoni and Vilna. The feasting in the latter city proved to be as fatal as the fasting had been on the march from Moscow. As the flight to Kovno began there were only 9000 under arms. "When Ney, bringing up the rear, rode into that town on the Niemen, the gateway which in June had opened so in- vitingly to the grave, he found 2000 soldiers lying drunk in the streets. Others, hardly less delirious from privation, crouched about the fires and doggedly refused to take the few steps remaining to complete their long retreat out of Russia. The Cossacks soon swooping down upon the place, sent panic into the feeble ranks of the little rear guard. Ney, however, seized a musket and laying low the boldest, fought on until he had only thirty men in his redoubt, but he had re- pelled his assailants. The next morning at dawn, he crossed the Niemen, the last to quit Russian soil. The pursuing Cossacks galloped beyond their national boundary, and the miserable fragment of the Grand Army broke into atoms as it dispersed in the sheltering woods of East Prussia. A spectral band of 400 of the Old Guard stalked into Konigsberg behind Murat, who, remembering that he as well as Napoleon had a throne to save, dropped the command and hastened away to Naples. The ever faithful Prince Eugene then picked up such pieces as he could, and welding them together in the warmth of his own loyalty to the Empire, backed across Germany until he stood on the shore of the Elbe. The Russian campaign was at an end. Again the Czar was dancing at Vilna. The cost of the expedition in human life was so enormous that there is no agreement as to the total. By one calcula- tion, 630,000 men entered Russia and 60,000 returned. For THE GREAT TRAGEDY 359 although only 6000 escaped over the Niemen with their arms, there were small supporting columns in Poland which were not engaged in the deadly advance and retreat, and which suffered much less. The Russians boasted that they took 200,000 prisoners, but how many of these died in captivity or remained after the war to disappear into the Russian nation no one knows. Another computation gives 125,000 as the number slain in battle, 132,000 as dying of privation, and leaves to doubt the fate of the captured, while 10,000 is given as the total of the French who escaped with their lives. Napoleon himself ad- mitted a loss of 300,000 men. Of the more than 1200 guns Napoleon hurled into the frightful abyss, at least a full thousand were lost, together with countless standards and eagles. The crew went down but the officers were saved, not a marshal, not a man above the rank of general of division having been sacrificed. The aggregate of the Russian losses is unknown. But the armies of the Czar suffered only less than Napoleon's. They lost 50,000 between Moscow and Krasnoi, and the estimated total for the entire campaign of six months runs as high as 150,000. Fleeing over the snow night and day from the scene of the tragedy, the Emperor surprised his ambassador at Warsaw by his sudden and unheralded appearance in the Polish capital. The inn at which he stayed under an assumed name is now the Hotel English, and Napoleonic pictures hang on the walls which echoed his memorable exclamation as he compared the pomp of June with the plight of December, "It is but a step from the sublime to the ridiculous. ' ' A knock at the door of the French embassy at Dresden was the first announcement of his return to the Saxon capital, which had last seen him with the monarchs of Europe at his feet. Now he came in the night, without trumpeters or even servants, and borrowed $800 and six shirts for the rest of his homeward flight. At Weimar, the sleighing grew poor and he changed to a carriage. This time, however, he did not venture into the 360 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON castle, as after the Battle of Jena, but excused himself to the Duchess of Weimar on the ground that he was not present- able. For three weeks Paris had heard not a word from the Em- peror or the army until the appearance one morning in December of the last bulletin penned at Smorgoni. The next night at eleven-thirty, after Marie Louise had gone to sleep, Napoleon, disguised in furs beyond her ready recognition, burst in upon the Empress. In the morning, Paris awoke to the startling report that in- stead of being in Russia, battling with snowdrifts, the Em- peror was safe in his palace and would hold a levee at nine. In her surprise, the excited city all but forgot to ask him what had become of the Grand Army, and France promptly rose at his call to face allied Europe once more. E CHAPTER XLII THE RISING OF THE PEOPLES 1813 AGE 43 MBOLDENED by the calamity that had overwhelmed , Napoleon and his army in the Russian campaign, the ^ people of Germany rose in the summer of 1813 and fell upon him. The leader of that great popular uprising was none other than Alexander I, the autocrat of all the Russias, who presented himself as the deliverer of the nations from the tyranny of the French. Napoleon could not believe that the continent would trust itself to such a leadership. He never ceased to admonish the countries of the west to beware of the Russian peril, which he himself had always viewed with dread. No doubt he was honestly persuaded that he was defending civilisation when he marshalled the hosts of twenty nations and led them against the Czar, and he was equally sincere at St. Helena when he raised the warning cry, "In ten years, Europe can be all Cossack or all republican." Diplomacy as well as politics makes strange bedfellows, however, and in 1914, England and France appeared as the allies of the Slav against the Teuton. Napoleon failed to fore- see the development of the great Germanic Empire which would avenge Jena at Sedan ; challenge England on the sea and divide the west in a political and economic rivalry. Thus in the War of the Nations, France and England joined with Russia against the Germans just as 100 years ago Germany and England joined with her against the French. All of Napoleon's fellow sovereigns shared in some degree his distrust of Russia, when in the spring of 1813, the aveng- ing Czar entered Germany in pursuit of the wreck of the re- 361 362 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON treating Grand Army. "Napoleon or I, I or Napoleon," Alexander had exclaimed. "We cannot reign side by "side." The earth was not large enough to be divided with the Corsi- can. The subjugated monarchs of the west drew back from the offer of the Czar to be their defender. They seemed for a time to prefer even the chains of the French and the ills they had, rather than fly to others unknown which the Slavs might bring upon them. The Emperor of Austria and the King of Prussia equally dreaded the thirst of the Russian bear for the waters of the Hellespont and the Vistula. While the crowned heads of Europe hesitated between a choice of evils, their subjects hailed Alexander as a saviour and they welcomed as friends and brothers the wild horse- men from the Valley of the Don as they loped across the German plains clear to the gates of Hamburg. The German people sprang to arms and, throwing off the galling yoke of the French, drew around the hated conqueror of Jena, a guerdon of fire and iron. Napoleon might still be the ally of kings but he was no longer the son of the Revolution and the hope and champion of mankind. On the contrary, he saw the inspiring title of Liberator, which he wore in his magic youth, caught up by a Russian Czar and flaunted on the banners of the Cossacks, who snatched from him the watchwords of patriotism and liberty which in other days had fired his legion with an irre- sistible passion. Patriots were no longer behind him but were in front of him and they challenged him whichever way he turned, whether in Spain, in Russia or in Germany. Byron and Tom Moore sing the unhappy lot of the eagle which saw his own feathers plucked to wing the darts that brought him to his doom. Such was the fate of Napoleon. In vain he appealed to his new allies, the kings and princes, to help him beat back the tide of popular feeling. Fatuously imagining that the bond of blood was as sacred and strong among the Hapsburgs as the Corsicans, he looked upon Marie Louise and her baby as hostages of peace between Austria and France. THE RISING OF THE PEOPLES 363 While he was relying on a young woman and a teething child, a poor little German girl, without a crown and without a title, influenced the destinies of nations far more than the daughter and the grandson of the Hapsburgs. When that simple fraulein sold her finger rings for $1.50 and gave the money for the triumph of her fatherland, the loyal women of Germany caught the infection of her spirit of sacrifice and heaped upon the altar of patriotism not only their rings but all their gold and silver as well. As many as 150,000 German frauen, we are told, pulled the wedding rings off their fingers and dumped them in the mint, gladly taking and proudly wearing in exchange iron rings inscribed, ''Gold I gave for iron. ' ' Although Goethe might smile and say to the Germans, "Shake your chains, if you will; Napoleon is too strong for you; you will not break them," simpler minds were braver and truer. The spirit of Queen Louise walked abroad ; songs of freedom burst upon the land and the church, the school and the home were leagued for German independence. When the patriot politicians had induced Frederick Wil- liam to leave Berlin, which was still only a French garrison, the Prussian King was quickly swept away on the tide of patriotism. Austria, however, declared an armed neutrality, but one of her ablest statesmen, Count Stadion, only foretold the truth when he said, ' ' We are no longer master of our own affairs; the tide of events will carry us along." The Empire and the church still were at war. The Em- peror Francis having appealed to his son-in-law to deal more gently with the Pope, Napoleon had ordered Pius VII to be brought from Savona to Fontainebleau in 1812. There, in the great palace, the prisoner was installed in spacious apartments, with carriages and servants at his command. But Pius de- clined the favours of his captor and dwelt like a hermit in the sumptuous chateau. Napoleon never was so futile against any other antagonist as against the gentle shepherd of the flock of Rome, whose Empire, unarmed and invisible, calmly withstood the assaults of the Great Captain. "Alexander declared himself the son 364 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OP NAPOLEON of Jupiter, and in my time," he complained, "I find a priest more powerful than I am!" When the year 1813 opened, France was a nation disarmed and worse than that. Her best fighting men and her war material were either buried beneath the Russian snows or were hotly enlisted in the Spanish campaign against the allied Spaniards and English under Wellington. Two decades of warfare had drained the country of its military resources and left it in a state of exhaustion which many biologists contend is reflected to this day in the national birth rate. The land had been combed again and again, and now it had to be combed with fine teeth. The sons of the well-to-do who had been avoiding service by paying from $2500 to $5000 for substitutes were raked in along with those who had drawn lucky numbers in the yearly draft. For three years the an- nual conscription had been anticipated to meet the demands of the Spanish, Wagram and Russian campaigns, and the youth of the nation had been called to the colours a year in advance of the normal time. Now another forced loan was extorted from the future, and the conscripts of 1814 were snatched from their mothers in the beginning of 1813. The adult male population of the country had been win- nowed so often that hardly anything remained but the chaff. The physical standards of recruiting were lowered to catch all who were big enough to carry a musket. .Many of the recruits were so small or young that Savary. the minister of police, objected to their drilling before the jeering crowds of cynical Paris. The equine race had suffered with the human from the desolation of the wars. The country was without horses old and strong enough to draw the artillery, and that branch was seriously crippled by animals too young and small for the load. In the face of all difficulties, Napoleon had an army of more than 200,000 soldiers in Germany, with 600 cannon, when he left Paris for the front at one o'clock of an April morning. As he was leaving, he invested the Empress with the regency and bade good-bye to the little King of Rome, who in vain had THE RISING OF THE PEOPLES 365 been lisping the prayer for peace which his governess taught him. In less than four months since his return from Russia the Emperor had built up a new army on the wreck of the Grand Army. It is well to remember that he had to do it without telegraphs or telephones, without railways or automobiles, without even a press to aid him in rallying and enrolling the people and in organising and supplying his forces. Thanks to his own titanic labours, he was enabled to cross the Rhine with nearly twice as many men as the Russians and the Prussians had been able to assemble against him. Few, however, had ever smelled powder and most of them had to be taught to load a musket. The majority of their cor- porals, sergeants, lieutenants and captains also were strangers to war. The veteran officers of the lower grades as well as the veterans in the ranks lay beneath the wheat fields of the Danube, in the valleys and on the Sierras of Spain, or on the Russian steppes. Moreover, the very soul of the army was dead and its commander no longer wore the aureole of victory. The foe, on the other hand, not only had stolen away the spirit of the Grand Army, but many of the officers of the Prussian contingent also had borrowed leaves from the mas- ter's book of recipes for making war and they understood the Napoleonic method as well as his own marshals. They had not served for nothing a seven years' apprenticeship since Jena. Although Napoleon had sternly limited the army of con- quered Prussia to 42,000 men, its staff had been smart enough to give vacations by the wholesale and call up new men to sub- stitute, thus making the little organisation a training school for many more than the stipulated number. At the out- break of the war, the King had recalled General Blucher from a banishment which he had incurred by his fiery rebellion against the French domination, and had placed him in com- mand. Like most of the patriot leaders who had aroused Prussia, Blucher was not a Prussian but a native of a minor German 366 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON state. An old man of seventy-two, his flaming hatred of Napoleon filled him with the ardour of youth and, although an illiterate, hard-drinking, loud-swearing, tumultuous char- acter, his natural fighting qualities made up for his lack of technical knowledge. The Allies, however, suffered from a divided command. The Slavs would not tolerate a Teuton over them and the Russians had not yet developed a high order of generalship among themselves. Kutusof had died just as he finished his long chase of Napoleon, and the Russian Czar was the real commander of his contingent in the allied army in Germany. Alexander had no special military training, hut he was served by a fairly sound common sense. The Russians and Prussians undertook first of all to wrest Saxony from Napoleon's control, and that kingdom bore the brunt of the entire war of 1813. For six months the Saxon plains were trampled by the armies of all the nations of Eu- rope ; humble homes were laid waste, and the sickle of Death reaped in the fields where the toiling peasants had sown, while in the desperation of a loser, the discarded favourite gambled with fate. For a half year the hurricane of war swept back and forth over a battle ground ninety miles long and forty miles wide. The storm first broke in full fury on an afternoon in early May at Liitzen, near where Gustavus Adolphus found his grave and where the land rolls away to the mountains of Bo- hemia. At the end of a bloody half-day struggle between 180,000 men, there came that inevitable hour of weariness and irresolution for which Napoleon always waited and watched in the ebb and flow of the battle tide. Then he called out, "Eighty guns, Drouot!" The guns, being quickly parked, opened their mouths and poured forth a torrent of iron and fire which tore through the enemy's line and put the Allies to flight. War was terribly simple with Napoleon. After the battle was won and finished, a Prussian cavalry brigade made a spurt that surprised and broke up the Em- peror's own escort. In the confusion and the darkness, he was separated even from his staff, and after the flurry was THE RISING OF THE PEOPLES 367 over Lad to gallop about to find his aides. He had already begun to display that heedlessness of peril which characterised his last campaigns, when, seeming to challenge the fickle god- dess to do her worst, his grey coat was carelessly offered in nearly every engagement as a target for the slings and arrows that outrageous fortune was raining upon his empire. His suite often could not avoid the risks he ran, and Bessieres, commander of the Guard, was killed on the eve of the fight at Liitzen, the second marshal of the Empire to fall, Lannes having been the first. As the Battle of Liitzen was fought near the last battle ground of Gustavus Adolphus, so the Battle of Bautzen was waged three weeks afterward close by a field already made memorable by Frederick the Great. In its gentle descent from the mountainous frontier of Bohemia, through the fa- mous Spreewald and on to Berlin, the River Spree washes no walls more picturesque than those of the little city of Bautzen, whose quaint mediaeval towers stood witness to the deadly grapple of more than 200,000 men as they swirled for two days about the hillocks that rise from the countryside. In the fighting on the first day, Napoleon drove the Czar and the Allies out of the town, and that night the camp fires of his army formed a flaming line nine miles long. At five in the morning of the second day, he was in the saddle and riding among his troops, and at three he announced to them that the battle was won. The chimes were sounding five in the belfry of the cathedral of Bautzen, where for nearly 300 years now Catholics and Protestants have used the same altar, when the Czar ordered the defeated army of the alliance to retreat through the Silesian gorges. The losses of both sides together aggregated not far from 40,000. Napoleon had won another victory but it was as costly and bootless as that of Liitzen. For through a misun- derstanding of orders on the part of Ney, the Russians and Prussians, who could and should have been cut off and smashed, made good their escape, leaving not a button or a nail in the hands of the victor. The Emperor hastened after the fleeing Allies the next day 368 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON in an effort to retrieve the mistake and destroy the retreating army. While he was in hot pursuit, a Russian gun was trained upon him and a ball hissed in his ear as it tore past him to lay low Duroc, the grand marshal of the palace, who was riding a few yards behind him. Napoleon turned to see his devoted servitor writhing in pain from a mortal and hideous wound. The order was given to cease firing, and the Emperor, returning to his camp, seated himself in the midst of the Guard where he surrendered to his emotions of grief over the loss of an inseparable companion in all the campaigns of the Empire. No other man but Ber- thier had been so closely associated with him, and Berthier sometimes quarrelled with him. But Duroc, he used to say, "loves me as a dog loves his master." And faithful even in the grave, he lies at the gate of his master's tomb in the In- valides. When Napoleon resumed the chase in the morning the Rus- sians and Prussians continued to flee before him and to quar- rel among themselves. He had been in the field only five weeks and had won two great battles, swept back the enemy from the Saale to the Oder, a distance of more than 200 miles, and filled the counsels of the Allies with dis- sension. Although he had 200,000 men at his command against not more than 130,000, still without horses for his cavalry, he despaired of overwhelming this smaller force. He had found it harder to get horses than men — or boys. He was ready, therefore, to welcome a pause in the campaign. Moreover, he was fast driving his foes upon the Austrian frontier and into the arms of his father-in-law, who, he feared, thus would be drawn into the alliance against him. In the presence of that delicate situation he did a thing alien thitherto to Napoleonic warfare — he dropped his hands and stopped fighting. Accepting the mediation of Austria, he entered into an armistice for two and a half months with the Czar and the King of Prussia, a truce that was to prove fatal to his cause. CHAPTER XLIII THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 1813 AGE 43-44 NAPOLEON, the Czar and the King of Prussia called the truce, only for the purpose of resuming the struggle with heavier forces. Although a peace congress was to assemble at Prague, peace was not the object of the armis- tice on either side. Napoleon needed horses and his allied foes equally needed human reinforcements. Above all, both sides wished to enter into negotiations with Austria, which had adopted a policy of armed neutrality. The matrimonial alliance of the Bonapartes and the Haps- burgs was cast in the scale and weighed when Metternich came to Dresden to hold an interview that has become his^ toric. Napoleon had taken up his residence in the Marcolini palace, then a beautiful villa in the suburbs of Dresden, but now converted and enlarged into a great hospital. In the long, stony corridors and spacious salons, where the imperial Corsican diffused his favourite perfume of eau de cologne, the air is heavy to-day with the pungent odour of disinfectants. The walls, which now echo the plaintive murmurs of the suf- fering, once resounded with the voices of marshals and cour- tiers and of the celebrated actors of the Comedie Francaise, who came on from Paris to amuse the Emperor in the lull of warfare. One room only in all the palace hospital remains as it was. It has been preserved in memory of the day when, within its precincts, a mighty empire tossed in its crisis, while Napoleon wrestled with Metternich in a vain effort to keep Austria from taking up arms against him. 369 370 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON For nine hours they grappled and struggled in that room, where the Emperor exclaimed, ' ' Ah, Metternich ! How much has England given you to play this part against me?" The same dragons still contort themselves on the inlaid floor; the same desk continues to stand in the corner, and the windows look out upon the fountains in the same park, where the King of Saxony and the imperial dignitaries anxiously waited for the momentous decision, but where in this time the con- valescent patients take the healing air. And hold ! Is not that the veritable door knob, which Napoleon gripped at dusk, when the long interview was at an end and when the depart- ing Metternich, as his memoirs would have us believe, pro- nounced the doom of the Empire: "You are a ruined man, Sire. I had a presentiment of it when I came here; now I am sure of it ! " Metternich offered him peace if he would only content him- self with France, Belgium, Holland, and Italy, and the Em- peror's counsellors implored him to accept those apparently liberal terms, which would have left him a far wider do- minion than any other French monarch ever had possessed. Already he had lost Spain, and even while he was at Dresden, he received the news of the flight of Joseph Bonaparte from that country. Jerome Bonaparte's kingdom of Westphalia was fast being engulfed in the tide of German patriotism, and Louis had thrown away his crown of Holland. Furthermore, the vassal states in the Confederation of the Rhine were aban- doning Napoleon day by day. Metternich 's liberality, however, was somewhat illusory, for both sides really were bent on fighting to a finish. As al- ways, England was the backbone and the purse pocket of the alliance. She did not wish to make peace until France was shut up within the boundaries that confined her in the igno- minious days of Louis XV. In twenty years of nearly con- tinuous warfare, England had been Napoleon's most constant foe. Yet he had not seen an English soldier. The British contingent in Spain under Wellington had brought confusion upon his marshals, but England had fought the master him- self with gold rather than lead. British, agents were in THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 371 every camp of the Allies, and were the paymasters of the allied sovereigns. Napoleon made a pretence of yielding almost everything, but he was still insisting on keeping Hamburg, Bremen and one or two other dots on the map of Germany, when the bells of Prague struck the midnight hour on the 10th of August. Instantly bonfires flamed up from the hilltops clear to the Silesian frontier, as a signal that the armistice was over. The truce of ten weeks had been far more profitable to the Allies than to Napoleon. Not only had Austria been drawn to their side, but Bernadotte, Crown Prince of Sweden, with a small contingent of Swedes generously subsidised by Eng- land, also had come to join in the attack upon the tricolour flag, beneath whose favouring folds he had risen from the peasantry to royalty. Moreover, the Russians and Prussians themselves had brought up two new men for every recruit that Napoleon had been able to call to his standard. Against his 350,000 troops and 1200 guns at the reopening of the war, the Allies had no less than a full half million actually in the field with 1400 cannon, and they had also enormous reserves. The total of all Napoleon's forces everywhere was less than 600,000, nearly 180,000 of whom were wasting themselves in Spain and Italy and in German fortresses, while his foes had more than one million men enrolled beneath their banners. Confidence reigned in the allied headquarters, where, around the avenging Czar, a motley group had been drawn together from the ends of the earth with no other motive in common than their envy or hatred of the colossus, who had so long bestrode the narrow world. There was Frederick Wil- liam of Prussia, who saw at last his chance to break his chains and revenge himself for Jena and Tilsit. There were Eng- lish representatives, who had camped on Napoleon's trail for twenty years, and among them was Col. Hudson Lowe, ready to bind the fallen giant and drag him to his rock of captivity. Irreconcilable emigres, whom the usurper in his glory had been unable to lure from their Bourbon allegiance, were gath- ered like huntsmen when the game is run to cover. One of 372 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON them was his old seat mate in the military school of Paris, where three boys sat in a row — Phelippeaux, Picot de Peccaduc, and Napoleon Bonaparte — and the first named and the last kicked at each other behind the desk until the second, who sat between, had to move his wounded legs from the firing line. Phelippeaux settled his score at the gate of Acre, where he mounted the guns on the wall for the Turks and stopped his schoolroom enemy in his march to win an empire in the east. Now Picot was on the staff of the Austrian commander, Prince Schwarzenberg, where, after twenty-five years, he was fondly hoping to avenge his shins. The ubiquitous Pozzi di Borgo, that Corsican Nemesis, was there of course, panting with an unslaked thirst for revenge, and eager to carry to the bitter end a neighbourhood quarrel begun in the streets of Ajaccio. "Napoleon needed only one man to have become the master of the world and I am that man." Such was Pozzo's boast in all the after years. By the side of that relentless vendettist was a man whose hate was younger but no smaller. This was Moreau, the victor in the Battle of Ilohenlinden. Moreau 's wife and mother-in- law being from Martinique, had rebelled against the exaltation of their sister islander, Josephine, and estranged the general from Napoleon, who banished him to America at the time of llic Bourbon plot and the shooting of the Duke d'Enghien. There is a tradition that President Madison offered the refugee the command of the American army in the War of 1812. After an exile of more than eight years on the banks of the Delaware, he was tempted by an emissary of the Czar to re- turn to Europe, and join in bringing down the eagle. The Czar had drawn one man to his side out of the very camp of Napoleon. That was General Jomini, the Swiss banker who had divined and published the wizard's tricks of military magic but had grown dissatisfied with his rewards as a member of Marshal Ney 's staff and had changed flags in the course of the armistice. One alone in the crowd at the allied headquarters could not frankly share the general rejoicing over the prospect of upsetting the Napoleonic throne. Francis of Austria was THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 373 unable to forget that his daughter was sitting upon it and his grandson was playing about its steps. A father's love and a monarch's ambition were tearing the Austrian Emperor's emotions between them as he moved among the confident plot- ters for the overthrow of his son-in-law. He drew back from the Czar's table when he saw Jomini seated at it. "I very- well understand that it is necessary to avail ourselves of spies and traitors, but is it necessary to break bread with them?" Francis inquired. Among all the cooks at the allied headquarters, there was no chef. The sovereigns were too jealous and suspicious to choose one of themselves to be commander-in-chief, and there was no general of the first rank among the Russians, Prussians and Austrians. Besides, the oil and water of Slav and Teuton persistently refused to mix. The greatest general of modern times, therefore, must be beaten by an army without a general, and the allied forces were divided into three armies under independent com- manders. There was, however, a common plan of campaign, chiefly the work of Moreau. Its salient principle was to keep out of Napoleon's way and whip his marshals. The Emperor, never suspecting the scheme to refuse him a battle, made a lunge at Blueher on his front as soon as the war was on again. The old Prussian only drew back into the Silesian gorges, whereupon the allied sovereigns themselves began to move up into Saxony. This menace behind him obliged Napoleon to hasten back to Dresden, whither he flew with truly Napoleonic swiftness, marching the Guard through 120 miles of mud in four days. The sovereigns had 100,000 men in hand when they arrived on the heights of Dresden. Although they knew that Napo- leon was absent and that the defences were manned by hardly 20,000 men, they flinched from the attack and decided to wait for the remaining half of their army to come up. While they waited, the Emperor raced into the city and took his stand at the head of the bridge over the Elbe to stir his tired and sleepy men when they crossed the river. As their cheers of "Vive l'Empereur" mounted in waves to the hills 374 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON behind the town, the camp of the Allies was filled with dis- may. They knew now that they had the lion in front of them. Napoleonic battlefields generally are fair to see. None is fairer than the field of Dresden, for it is all but overgrown to-day with the streets and homes and lawns of that fairest of the fair among the beautiful cities of Germany. In the battle time, the Saxon capital was not the imposing city of more than half a million people that it is to-day, but only a big town of 30,000. The village lanes and peasant fields, in which the armies of all the nations fought for two days, have given way to the broad thoroughfares and handsome resi- dences of the modern city. The villas and pensions and schools of the Anglo-American colony to-day are set almost in the centre of the battle ground, where the Cossack spears and the French lances clashed in furious combat, while the trees were shattered and the sward was crimsoned in that lovely old park, the Grosser Garten. Napoleon's battle line is now lost in the expanded business section, where the clamour of arms has been succeeded by the no less clamorous street cars and automobiles. The red tide flowed almost to the walls of the royal palace, where the Emperor was a guest of the King and where in these days the tourists linger in the apartments he occupied. The battle broke at four in the afternoon, when the sovereigns from their hill hurled their Russians, Prussians and Austrians upon the redoubts of the French. The storm of fire did not subside until midnight. But that first day was only a draw. As early as six the next morning, Napoleon was out on the firing line again. He stood in his tent door before a huge bonfire while he dried his clothes which were soaking with the rain that descended in floods. After the mingled storms of fire and water had beaten upon the two armies for hours, he delivered the decisive stroke in the afternoon, when he sent Murat and 25,000 men with seventy-five guns to hurl them- selves upon the left flank of the enemy. The horsemen slashed their way with lance and sword and rode down the allied THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 375 infantry, whose flintlocks were so wet they could not fire. The entire wing was swept away and 10,000 of the foe stacked their useless weapons and surrendered. That was the finishing blow which spread consternation through the ranks of the Allies and won the battle. In the two days of fighting the sovereigns had lost 15,000 men killed and wounded and 20,000 taken prisoners, while Napoleon's loss was 10,000. The allied army, however, was only beaten ; it was not broken. And a battle is not fought to conquer a few acres of ground but to conquer an army. Alas! the victor of Dresden, tired, wet, and bedraggled, stopped to dry and rest himself rather than complete his vic- tory. With his cocked hat dissolved into a shapeless mass and hanging over his ears, he mounted his horse at four o'clock and trotted into the town. The water dripped from the skirts and sleeves of his grey coat as he entered the palace, where the King of Saxony embraced him and congratulated him on one of the most notable successes of his career. He had brought up 110,000 almost exhausted troops, crossed a river in the face of 180,000 enemies and put them to flight. While he slept, the Allies made good their escape. The rumble of their wagons on retreat was heard through the night, and when, at dawn, he rode to the hill where the sovereigns had stood the day before, their hosts had vanished toward the Bohemian mountains. Only a dog had been left behind, and his collar, inscribed "I am General Moreau's dog," is preserved among the keepsakes of Dresden. Napoleon himself had all but pointed the gun that brought down the dog's master. When, in the midst of the battle, he had seen a party of horsemen on the hill, he remarked, "There must be some little generals there, ' ' and he ordered his battery to fire upon them. Had he been facing his old enemy on the duelling ground, he could not have drawn a deadlier aim than the battery drew on Moreau, who was with the Czar in the centre of the group. The returned exile was even then giving Alexander some military advice, when the shot struck him and shattered both legs. 376 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON The wounded general in a jolting vehicle bore with calm fortitude the agony of the retreat, and persisted until the end in debating the future course of the campaign. Only the day before he died, he wrote to his wife: "At the Battle of Dres- den, three days ago, I had both legs carried off by a cannon ball. That scoundrel Bonaparte is always fortunate." Seldom does a soldier who dies in arms against his flag and his country receive a monument. Not only was Moreau's body sent to Petrograd by the Czar's orders and buried with honours in the Roman Catholic church at the Russian capital, but his memory was honoured also on the spot where he fell. There is a cenotaph on the hill where he stood beside Alex- ander, when one of Napoleon's gunners brought him down. Over it the green ivy climbs to decorate the sculptured helmet and sabre on the top. Three oaks mount guard about the memorial stone and all around an oat field smiles above the battle-furrowed ground. Across Moreaustrasse and down in the valley, the cabbages in the little gardens of the city poor grow on the graves of the fallen foemen. Seemingly hardly more than a mile away, the castle tower and the church belfry of the King's palace by the Elbe rise in the midst of the city, whose murmur ascends to-day even as the cheers for Napo- leon rolled up the height on an August morning and spread despair among the Allies. The victory of Dresden was set at naught in the first month of the new campaign. Napoleon's lieutenants lost 150,000 men and 300 guns, while 50,000 sick and wounded crowded his hospitals. Those heavy losses could be repaired only by bor- rowing from the future, and the Emperor called to his colours 160,000 boys, who were not due to give military service until 1815. While he continued week after week to cling to the worth- less ground he had won at Dresden, the three allied armies moved to unite behind him in the neighbourhood of Leipsic. Thither at last he betook himself in the confidence that he could whip them one by one as they came up. He was no longer choosing battlefields. On the contrary, THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 377 he was accepting the choice of the enemy. Having morally planted himself on a negative, the denial of the German peo- ple to govern themselves, he inevitably passed over to the defensive in his military operations. It is an interesting coincidence that the two great battles of the war of 1813 were fought under the walls of the two great cities of Saxony. Not that either was much of a city in the battle year, for Leipsic with its nearly 600,000 popu- lation now, was then only such a town as Dresden. Its 30,000 people were huddled within an old encircling wall, hardly more than two miles round, when for three days in mid-October, 2000 cannon roared and half a million men fought the Battle of the Nations at its gates. On a hill at the very edge of the twentieth century Leipsic, only a short car ride from the city centre, rises a huge moun- tain of concrete, a German pyramid, which in 1913, on the centenary of the momentous struggle, the Kaiser William II, great grandson of King Frederick William, dedicated in the presence of the representatives of the German states and of Austria, Russia and Sweden. Although the pious motto, "God with Us," in letters six feet high, is carved above the door, this memorial of Napo- leon's overthrow in Germany, with its sculptured mob of pagan deities, offers a suggestive contrast to the memorial of his repulse from Russia, the Church of Our Saviour in Moscow. And here, too, on the battlefield of the nations, the Russians have reared a church in memory of their dead and of their victory. But around the lofty cupola of the German monument at Leipsic, bronzed giants mount guard with their war clubs, and a gigantic effigy of the German Michael grimly stands sentinel at the portal in the midst of a terrifying group of furies who hold aloft flaming torches of destruction, while within, the Fates glower from the walls of the crypt. This surely is no cote for the dove of peace, but a massive temple of war, the tabernacle of the sword and the mailed fist. That giant cairn of German patriotism is heaped upon the very mound where Napoleon was overwhelmed, but a little commemorative stone almost hidden among the shrubs and 378 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON flowers, marks more precisely the position of the man of destiny when his star shot across the firmament in that October evening and vanished behind the hills of Thuringia. On top of this lesser monument lies a three-cornered hat cut in marble, while a marble sword rests on a marble pillow. Only these lines from Exodus are chiselled on the face of the stone : THE LORD IS A MAN OF WAR THE LORD IS HIS NAME Simply that and nothing more. But the story is told plainly enough by the cocked hat and the sword, and the exultant words spoken by Moses when the Lord cast into the Red Sea the chariots and host and chosen captains of Pharaoh and the depths had covered them. The name of the Corsican Pharaoh does not appear in the inscription. It would be superfluous. As the visitor walks around the balcony of the great monu- ment, he sees spread beneath his gaze, the panorama of the entire battlefield of the nations. As at Dresden, so at Leipsic Napoleon occupied the town, and when the Allies came to drive him out of it they assailed the city on three sides at once. He himself, however, emerged from the southern gate and faced his foes on the field about the monument. The numbers were fairly even in that opening battle, but for the first time in his life, Napoleon failed to win a fight be- tween equal forces. As night fell on the field, and while a pitiless rain beat in the upturned faces of the slain, the Em- peror sat in his tent in the brickyard close to the monument, facing the fact that Germany was lost to him. At his order, the bells of Leipsic had rung for his victory, but that was as sounding brass. His German allies, caught in the tide of na- tionality, had been falling away from him day by day. The Westphalians and the Saxons had been going over to the other THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 379 side for weeks. Now the Bavarians had heard the call of the fatherland and joined the army of liberation. Well might the baffled warrior in the brickyard cry out in bitter despair: "Ah! give me back the old soldiers of Italy!" He might better still have cried out for the lost soul of that victorious army and its conquering watchwords: 1 ' Liberty ! Equality ! Fraternity ! ' ' The next day was Sunday and as dismal as his fortunes. While the allied sovereigns were bringing up huge reinforce- ments and combining to overwhelm him, he had no reserves to call on. He could only draw in his wet, hungry, and dis- pirited troops closer to the walls of Leipsic in preparation for one more throw of the dice. Monday dawned in a sombre mood, but soon a brilliant sun burst upon the field where the races and nations of Europe were gathered to wrest from the hands of Napoleon the sceptre of empire. Even Asia had been drawn into the strife, for the Bashkirs of Siberia were there with their bows and arrows. From the Hill of the Monarchs, the Czar, the Aus- trian Emperor and the Prussian King sent forward an army of 300,000. Formed like an enormous pair of open shears, they closed in upon the 150,000 troops who upheld the eagles of France in lines that fell away from the hill of the monu- ment, where Napoleon alternately sat and stood beside a ruined windmill. All day a storm of steel and lead beat against his lines in the struggle to hurl his army back into the narrow, tangled streets of Leipsic. He breasted the furious onslaught of the 300,000 until night came and until nearly all his cannon balls were gone. His artillery had fired no less than 220,000 rounds in two days. As darkness stole over the field, he fell asleep on his camp stool in the awful silence that succeeded the fury of battle. While his generals stood by awaiting his orders for the in- evitable retreat, a stray round shot fell in his bivouac fire and awakened him. For a moment he looked about in drowsy bewilderment and then pronounced the word which once had no place in his lexicon. 380 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON The only escape for the beaten army was through the un- lighted streets of the town, over two rivers and thence by a single causeway across wide marshy flats. That one avenue to safety was quickly crowded with soldiers, wagons and guns. The cavalry rode down the infantry, and the wounded, lying about the streets and squares, were heedlessly trampled upon in the confusion and the darkness. At daybreak, the Allies opened their eyes on the rear of the retreating army, and they rose to pursue the fleeing troops through the gates, while their artillery rained their shells upon the roofs of Leipsic. Napoleon had passed a night of horror at the Hotel de Prusse, whose doors are still open. Although the Czar slept in the hotel the next night, it is the room of the conquered, not the conqueror, which has been set apart through the gen- erations, and the "Napoleon Zimmer" remains to this day the special boast and exhibit of the landlord. It was about nine in the morning when the Emperor came out of the Prusse and joined in the retreat. It was an even year that very morning since he had taken flight from Mos- cow. Now as then he had to fight his way through another mob of fleeing soldiers; but he whistled his war song as he went. After escaping from the town, he came to a village near by and lay down to sleep. He had passed three almost sleepless nights. Now that the strain was over, nature would be put off no longer. While he slept, the loud report of an explosion startled him. It was the signal that his catastrophe had received its corona- tion. A French corporal had been left in charge of a mine under the bridge over the Elster river, with instructions to destroy the structure when his comrades were all safely across. But losing his head in his terror of some yelling, charging Prus- sians, he had blown up the bridge and left from 10,000 to 15,- 000 French, with hundreds of cannons and wagons, stranded on the shore, ready for the eager hands of the captors. Many leaped into the river to swim their way to the other bank, but most of them only dragged one another beneath the THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 381 water. Marshal Macdonald succeeded in crossing, but Poniatowski, the knightly Pole, who had won a marshal's baton only two days before, was among the drowned. Now, when the Elster is but a mere canal flowing through the pres- ent day city, one who stands by the monument which marks the place where the Prince's body was recovered, can hardly believe that the narrow, placid stream could have been so fatal a barrier to the soldiers of Napoleon. With that disaster, the sum of the Emperor's losses around Leipsic amounted to not less than 80,000, together with 28 flags and eagles and 325 guns. The allied loss was not far from 50,000. When at last, Napoleon had put the Rhine behind him at Mayence, he had only 50,000 or 60,000 men under arms. Of the rest of the nearly 500,000, whom he had rallied to his standard for the war, perhaps half were captives or besieged in their fortresses. The remainder were dead of wounds and disease. Thousands had perished on the retreat from the cold and from hunger and fever. In Russia and Germany to- gether above 800,000 men had been lost in sixteen months. For the second time in a year France was disarmed. CHAPTER XLIV AT BAY AGE 44 WITHOUT guns and without ammunition, without money and without horses, without forts and with- out men, Napoleon, in the opening weeks of the year 1814, turned at bay to face a world in arms and defend France and his crown against a mighty host of Germans, Russians and Austrians swarming on the banks of the Rhine. France lay bleeding, exhausted and despondent. For twenty-two years she had been giving her sons to war and grieving over her unreturning brave, sunk to rest unknelled and uncoffined beneath the palm and the pine, until their un- buried bones half encircled the earth, from the swamps of Santo Domingo to the mountains of Galilee, from the salt mounds of Cadiz to the melancholy wastes of Russia. Year after year she had gathered her martial brood and hurled army after army at the walls of her foes. Now, when her own gates were assailed, they were without defenders. The Emperor called upon the nation to rise and repel the invader from the frontier, which no foe had passed in the twenty years since he trained his cannon on the British in the harbour of Toulon. The France, however, that had risen in her wonderful strength the last time a German had dared cross the Rhine was the France of the Revolution, which Na- poleon himself had slain on the steps of St. Roch and in the Orangery at St. Cloud. ''We must pull on the boots of 1793," he cried. But the spirit of '93 was dead and even he could not call it back. The nation had been reduced to one man and he alone re- mained to face allied Europe. How he was overwhelmed, it is 382 AT BAY 383 easy enough to imagine. How he breasted the tide week after week and beat it back time and again ever remains an amazing chapter in history. With the armies of thirty nations at his frontier and a British army under Wellington actually on the soil of south- ern France, he found his treasury, his arsenals and his bar- racks empty. All the hundreds of millions of dollars which he had collected in tribute from conquered states were swal- lowed up in the disasters in Spain, Russia and Germany. For he had supported his armies almost entirely from levies on other countries. Yet he had not spent quite all he had taken in. In the splendour of imperial power, he never lost the homely virtue of thrift, and every year he laid by against a rainy day nearly $3,000,000. Those savings from the annual ap- propriation he hoarded under the Tuileries, and now that the rainy day had come, he went down into the cellar and took the money for his campaign. Alas ! He had not saved any of the human millions whom the people had intrusted to him. Had he been as parsimoni- ous with blood as with gold it would have served him in good stead now. Almost all the arm-bearing population had been spent, however, and for five years he had been running into debt and drawing the conscripts to his colours a year and two years before the appointed, time. He had been so improvi- dent as not to leave enough of the human crop for seed. For two decades the most stalwart candidates for paternity had been carried off to die in the wars or drag themselves home physical and moral wrecks. Hard as it was to gather even a few thousand men and boys of all ages and all sizes, it was harder still to find horses for them to ride and good muskets to put in their untrained hands. There were virtually no forts, for Napoleon had been the destroyer not the builder of citadels, which he had captured only to dismantle. He had conquered Europe in open fields and generally had disdained even to throw up breastworks. His only castle had been his bayonets and his batteries, while 384 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON his frontier had been as far from the boundaries of France as the Vistula and the Tiber. Now, however, he no longer held anything beyond the Pyrenees, the Alps and the Rhine. Spain and Germany had driven him out. The Austrians had invaded Italy and were hastily snatching from him the first of his fruits of victory, while hemming in his viceroy at Milan. At the same time Murat 's childish and futile perfidy was fast losing the rest of the Italian peninsula. Vainly striving, by allaying himself with the enemy, to save his royal house of cards from the impending crash, the King of Naples seized Rome and marched northward, and Napoleon, who had counted on having the French soldiers in Italy join him in defence of France, had to march them against his foolish and ungrateful brother-in- law. Still another blow was dealt the Emperor in his extremity by the hand of another of his old marshals, when Bernadotte took from him the last of his allies. The Crown Prince of Sweden, forehanded in picking up the wreckage, moved upon Denmark, which was compelled to renounce its alliance with France and cede Norway to Sweden, and Heligoland to Eng- land. The ill-wind that was driving the Empire on the rocks, how- ever, blew open the prison door of Pope Pins VII. Napoleon no sooner saw Rome in the hands of Murat than he started the prisoner of Fontainebleau on his homeward journey to the Eternal City, that he "might burst on that place like a clap of thunder." Another prisoner also profited by the misfor- tunes of the Empire, Ferdinand being liberated from his cap- tivity of nearly six years to return to Spain and claim his crown. Thus Napoleon threw over the ballast from his sink- ing ship, but too late to keep it afloat. The Allies concentrated behind the Rhine in early Decem- ber for an immediate invasion of France. They had a grand total of 880,000 troops but they did not choose to wait to as- semble those great masses. They chose instead to open a win- ter campaign with 300,000 men, while the Emperor yet had no more than 50,000 troops at the French border. AT BAY 385 With the exception of Switzerland there were then no neu- tral, buffer states between Germany and France. Holland and Belgium had been swallowed up in the Empire, whose frontier included not only everything on the left bank of the Rhine but also ran beyond the Elbe. Biilow entered Holland, where the Dutch people rose to welcome him, while Bliicher came down the Moselle, and ad- vanced through Lorraine, driving Victor from Nancy and easily capturing Toul. The main army, under Schwarzen- berg, and accompanied by the Czar, the Emperor of Austria and the King of Prussia, did not scruple to ignore Swiss neu- trality. Crossing the Rhine between Basle and Schaffhau- sen, its advance, in overwhelming numbers, was a military promenade. The French helplessly fell back from town to town and from river to river, while the invading forces swept forward until they stood at the borders of Burgundy and Champagne, where they looked down the valleys of the Seine and the Marne toward Paris. Thus the Cossacks were in the heart of eastern France be- fore Napoleon could piece together the semblance of an army of defence. He did not leave Paris, indeed, until nearly a month had passed since the Allies first crossed his frontier. Realising the desperate chances of his situation, he again in- vested Marie Louise with the regency, and chose Joseph Bona- parte, the dethroned King of Spain, as her chief adviser. Assembling the officers of the national guard, in the great hall where he had seen Louis XVI compelled to put on the red cap of liberty nearly twenty-two years before, he held his last levee with the Empress. The courtiers all came, hiding their fears behind their smiles, or their treacheries behind their fawnings. When the Emperor entered, the Empress was with him, and between them was the King of Rome, his yellow curls falling over the shoulders of the blue coat of his uniform of the national guard. That simple picture of father and mother and son touched the heart and kindled a devotion beyond any words however eloquent. After the three had walked directly to the large group of 386 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON officers, the Emperor said to them: "Gentlemen. I am about to go to the army, but I intrust to you what I hold dearest in the world — my wife and son. Let there be no political di- visions." Lifting up his son, he carried him among the officers and courtiers, who cheered ami wept while they pledged their lives for the protection of the Empress and the King of Rome. In a few hours more Napoleon held his boy in his arms and looked into his blue eyes for the last time. For the last time, too, he folded Marie Louise in his embrace as he was depart- ing at three o'clock on a dreary January morning to battle with her father. The drama of Napoleon's life from prologue to epilogue was highly theatrical. It became sheer melodrama when the curtain rose upon him standing at bay amid the charred ruins of Brienne. Driven from Cairo and .Moscow, Rome and Vienna, .Madrid and Berlin, hunted out of Egypt and Syria and Russia. Spain and Austria and Poland, Italy and Ger- many and Holland, chased from river to river across the face of Europe, he took refuge in the Tillage of his boyhood days, and from behind its garden walls he turned upon the avenging nations. Russian Cossacks and Prussian Uhlans, the soldiers of all the lands which his Legions had overrun, were upon him and the village lanes resounded with the yells of the eager pack. Some Uhlans almost rode him down in a neighbouring town and had nearly surrounded him, when a French brigade came up just in time to cut him out. After they were beaten off, he saw the priest of the place, standing by the roadside. Rec- ognising him as one of his teachers in the friars' school, he exclaimed: "What! It is you, my dear master! I don't need to ask if you know this neighbourhood?" The father assured him, "Sire, I could find my way every- where blindfolded." Roustan thereupon was ordered to dis- mount and give his horse to the clerical guide, who led the way toward Brienne. It was dusk when Napoleon approached the town, riding beside his old teacher. Blucher had occupied the village and AT BAY 387 was eating his supper in the big chateau when a hail of shots suddenly descended and the French cavalry dashed up to the front gate. The old Prussian marshal did not stop to finish his meal, and was fortunate to be able to make his escape by a back way. He rallied his forces out on the snow-covered fields and blazed at the town until midnight, but the schoolboy of Brienne had come into his own and held it. Seated in the chateau he heard again the never forgotten tones of the bell in the old church tower at the foot of the hill. Once more he slept in the bed ever after cherished by the counts of Brienne, which he had first occupied when he came ten years before to let the villagers see the crown the little Corsican had won. That crown, beside which all other crowns had paled and before which the nations had bowed in subjec- tion, that crown which millions of bayonets had guarded, now could command no more than 100,000 ill-armed, ill-clad, ill-fed and ill-trained defenders against the over-whelming hosts of the Romanoffs, the Hapsburgs, and the Hohenzollerns, banded together to snatch it from his brow. Bliicher was determined to retake Brienne, and on the third day he returned to the attack. Napoleon went forth to meet him about the village of La Rothiere, which lies across the prairie in view of the old belfry. It was another snow battle, for the combat was waged in the midst of a cold and heavy snowstorm; but unlike the memorable snow battle in the schoolyard, an Empire was the prize at stake now. And Napoleon lost. After sacrificing a full tenth of his little army, he retreated under cover of darkness to another night in the chateau. It was a night filled with alarms. At four in the morning, he hurriedly rode away from Brienne forever, to fall back across one more river in a retreat which really began at Moscow. Hastily crossing the Aube, he ran into Troyes, that pic- turesque old town of narrow, winding streets and timbered houses. There, in the ancient capital of Champagne, he stood by the shore of the last river at his command, the Seine, and only 100 miles from Paris. But in its dread of the wounded lion, the Army of the Sovereigns halted behind the Aube. In- 388 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON stead of falling upon him in crushing force, the Allies di- vided, Bliicher moving up to the Marne, with the intention of marching to Paris down the valley of that river, while the main army undertook to advance on the capital by the valley of the Seine. Meanwhile the diplomats of the belligerent nations had as- sembled in a congress at Chatillon and raised the price of peace. At Prague they offered to let Napoleon keep Belgium, Holland, and Italy; at Frankfurt they subtracted Italy and Holland, and now, at Chatillon, they withdrew Belgium, which France had taken from Austria in the Revolution, before Na- poleon came to power. This latest demand infuriated him. "Unheard-of disasters may have snatched from me the prom- ise to renounce my own conquests," he said, "but give up those made before me? Never! God save me from that dis- grace!" England was determined, however, to remove the entire Netherlands from the control of a great rival power like France. For she has ever regarded the coast of Holland and Belgium as her landing place on the continent. The Czar, implacable as the English, was eager to enter Paris and destroy the Bonaparte throne. The Austria ns, how- ever, having already retaken virtually everything he had cap- tured from them, were less eager for the pursuit. With allied Europe only five or six marches from Paris, Napoleon could not bend his pride and bring himself to accept any bounds to his sovereignty. Like a high-powered locomo- tive descending from a great height at top speed, he could not stop until he was thrown and ditched. His fall must equal his rise, his misfortunes must be in proportion to his fortunes. Two days after his arrival in Troyes, the Emperor rose from his maps and exclaimed, "I am going to beat Bliicher!" Starting at once on a swift cross-country march, he ordered the detachment remaining behind to maintain a noisy show of aggressiveness toward Schwarzenberg, shout "Vive l'Em- pereur" and make that cautious commander feel that he still had Napoleon in front of him. AT BAY - 389 While both Schwarzenberg and Bliicher supposed him still at Troyes, while the former was slowly manoeuvring with ex- treme prudence and the latter was flattering himself he had stolen a march on the Great Captain, he fell like a cloudless thunderbolt upon the carelessly strung-out column of Bliicher. For one swift week, the Emperor was again the Little Corporal of Montenotte, of Lodi, of Castiglione and of Rivoli. Catching up some veteran dragoons of the Spanish cam- paign, who had galloped across France "without unbridling," he drove them on without giving them a breathing time. He marched his conscripts all night and kept them fighting all day, and like a whirlwind tore through wondering villages, where he never before had been seen. Loading his infantry into the carts of the peasantry, he carried his little band over slushy roads sixty miles in thirty-six hours. His appearance thrilled alike the populace and the troops, and we are told that under the inspiration of his presence "the cavalry attacks were fiercer," and that even "the fire of the cannon was heavier." First striking one of Bliicher 's divisions at Champaubert, only 1500 of its 5000 men escaped him. Next he fought what is called the Battle of Montrnirail and routed two other divisions. He pounced upon the marshal himself the follow- ing day and hurled him from Chateau Thierry. In four whirling days, his 30,000 men smashed to pieces an army of more than 50,000 when its van was within fifty or sixty miles of Paris. Bliicher found himself driven back in disorder to Chalons sur Marne, more than 100 miles from his goal, and with a loss of nearly 20,000 men. Turning in a flash from Bliicher, Napoleon smote and paralysed the left wing of the Army of the Sovereigns when it was only twelve miles or a day's march from Fontainebleau. Throwing himself upon it at Montereau, which snuggles in the elbow formed by the Yonne and the Seine, he dealt a blow that sent Schwarzenberg staggering back to the Aube. In the rejuvenation of victory, he became once more the young artilleryman and pointed the cannon that tore the enemy's front. The gunners protested against their Em- 390 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON peror's exposure to peril, but he reassured them: "Ah! my friends, never fear; the ball is not yet cast that will kill me." As he moved forward from Montereau, an army that out- numbered his five to two timidly retired before him and he declared to his minister of war that he would have wiped it out but for his lack of twenty skiffs with which to cross the Seine in pursuit. "It was not fifty boats that I needed — only twenty!" While the Emperor was pausing again at Troyes, he heard that Bliicher had organised a new army of 50,000 men for a fresh start toward Paris. Resolved to break him up once more, he left the Seine, crossed the Maine and the Aisne, and fell upon the old hussar at Craone, a crow flight of eighty miles north of Troyes. The fortress of Soissons, however, had fallen, and Bliicher, having been joined by Biilow's army from Holland, had in hand no less than 110,000 men against 45,000 French. In vain the Emperor flung himself against that wall of steel and then turned back to open a new cam- paign of intimidation against Schwarzenberg. When he thought that commander was retiring before him, as usual, the Army of the Sovereigns turned upon him at A iris sur Aube, where with only 20,000 men he was sur- rounded by 80,000 and had no other means of escape than by a narrow bridge. Yet for two hours those 80,000 stood silent, motionless, and irresolute on the heights of the Aube before the mere handful on the river bank. The Emperor was lucky in the end to get away with no greater loss than 5000 men; but that was one-fourth of his strength. Both Bliicher and Schwarzenberg having beaten him off, he saw in his hand but one more card to play. If he could no longer block the road to Paris, he would try to cut in behind the invaders, arouse the population of Alsace and Lorraine and bring the Allies back to defend their lines of communica- tion. With only 10,000 men, he started for the Rhine, but he declared "soon I shall have 100,000." As he sped eastward, however, and Schwarzenberg was turning to pursue him, two couriers were captured by the Cossacks and two letters taken from them. By that mis- AT BAY 391 chance of the road, the ruse was exposed. One letter was from Savary to the Emperor telling him that France could no longer resist and the other was from the Emperor to Marie Louise, divulging his purpose to draw the Allies away from Paris. "With those tell-tale letters in his hands, the Czar in- sisted that Schwarzenberg and Blueher should at once join forces in an advance on the capital, and only a small force was sent to the rear to delude Napoleon with the idea that the Allies were following him. After the Emperor had fenced for two or three days with the decoy division, some bulletins of the Allies were found in the pockets of captured soldiers, which announced that the allied army was paying no attention to him, but was making straight for Paris. Then the true situation dawned upon his understanding. He was at St. Dizier when the scales fell from his eyes and he saw the peril of his capital, 150 miles away. He turned at once to run a race across France in an effort to get ahead of the invaders and, sword in hand, take his place at the city gate. CHAPTER XLV THE FIRST ABDICATION 1814 AGE 44 NAPOLEON was yet 100 miles away and furiously gal- loping through Champagne when, on the 29th of March, 1 S 1 4, the Allies, the first alien invaders in 350 years to come in sight of the capital of France, saw from Clichy the setting sun gild the spires of Paris. From a tower of Notre Dame, the Parisians could see the Russians and Germans and Austrians rolling toward their walls like a tidal wave, and could see the smoke curling above the camp fires of the enemy. The French had conquered the capitals of Europe, but at last retribution awaited them at the gates of their own capital, where the eager Cossacks echoed the cry of a hetman : "Ah, Father Paris! Thou shalt now pay for Mother Moscow!" The beautiful capital was adorned with the treasures of conquered lands and the monuments of military triumph. No less than 1200 melted cannon, which Napoleon had captured from Russia and Austria, were in the lofty Vendome column. But there were no guns to mount on the city wall. Paris, like all France, was exhausted by victory and bankrupted by glory. Already Marie Louise and her three-year-old son had left the Tuileries. The Emperor had repeatedly commanded that his wife and boy should leave before the city fell. "I would rather my son should have his throat cut than that he should be brought up in Vienna as an Austrian prince," he wrote King Joseph. As for himself, he plainly warned his brother that when Paris fell he would have ceased to live. When the batteries of the Allies began to knock at the gates on the 30th of March, there were only seven old 392 THE FIRST ABDICATION 393 cannon with which, to hold those natural defences of the city, the heights of Montmartre. Marshals Marmont, Mor- tier and Moncey gathered a few defenders, some of them only high school boys, and offered a gallant but vain show of resistance. At four in the afternoon the struggle was over and a trumpeter rode out with a flag of truce. By the gate of La Villette, not far from the Gare du Nord to-day, a parley was held as the sun was sinking behind Montmartre, and it was agreed that the little army of defence should evacuate the city in the night and that the Allies should make their entry in the morning. For three days Napoleon had been racing back from St. Dizier. Leaving his exhausted soldiers behind him on the third day, he jumped into a light wicker carriage with Caulain- court, while Drouot and Flahault, Gourgaud and Lefebre fol- lowed in similar conveyances. At Sens he heard that the enemy was before Paris; at Fontainebleau that the Empress and the King of Rome had left the city ; at Essonnes that the battle was on — and he still twenty miles away ! It was ten o'clock at night when he dashed into the village of Cour de France and stopped for his last change of horses. That Gethsemane of the Empire no longer is Cour de France, but is now called Fromanteau. In all else, however, with its stone cottages bordering the high road between Paris and Fontainebleau, it is much the same simple hamlet that it was in the days when the Emperor and his court, in a cloud of dust, passed through on their imperial progresses between the capital and the great chateau, and as it was that night of the 30th of March, 1814, when, in an agony of rage and despair, he paced its only street. At the southern entrance of the village there rise by the road two time-scarred fountains, the fountains of Juvisy, as they are called in honour of the municipality of which Cour de France is but a small part. The women and children of the neighbourhood, who still come to hold their buckets and pitch- ers under the flowing streams, are reminded by the inscrip- tions that they are indebted for the refreshing bounty of the fountains to King Louis XV, and for their restoration to 394 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON "Napoleon le Grand." It was the irony of fortune that by those fountains of Juvisy, "Napoleon le Grand" should have received the bitterest draft that until then ever had been pressed to his lips. While the impatient Emperor waited there for fresh horses to speed him on the last stage of his race for empire, a cavalry command came toward him from Paris. "What! you, Bel- liard!" he exclaimed as he recognised that general. "What does this mean ? You here with your cavalry ? Where is the army?" The general detailed to the Emperor the dire events of that fateful clay when Paris and the Empire fell. The Allies were not to enter the city until the morning? The Emperor knit his brow. He could be in Paris in an hour! "There is still time!" he cried to Caulaincourt. "My carriage ! You hear what I say ? I mean to go to Paris ! My carriage! Bring me my carriage!" Mote retreating troops came, bringing the same despairing story to the Emperor where he sat on the base of one of the fountains, supporting his throbbing head in his hands. Soon he started up from his roadside revery and strode through the village and to the brow of the hill. Standing there, he saw the bivouac fires of allied Europe drawn in a cordon about the surrendered city. Caulaincourt inducing him to turn his back on the painful spectacle, he retired to the Inn of Cour de France. That humble wayside tavern is gone now, and on its site are the villa and astronomical observatory of Camille Flam- marion, whose most powerful lens, however, cannot catch a gleam of the star which Napoleon saw leading him on to glory and to disaster. No sooner had the Emperor entered the inn than he spread his maps and fell into a soliloquy: "Alexander will hold a review to-morrow; he will have half his army on the right bank of the Seine and the other half on the left. If I only had my army, I could crush them all." Again he looked up, with a new hope flaming in his eye. "I've got them! I've got them!" he shouted. "God has THE FIRST ABDICATION 395 placed them in my hands ! ' ' He would go to Fontainebleau, assemble his army and drive the aliens out of his capital. Caulaincourt begged him to accept the terms offered by the congress of Chatillon, but which, of course, were no longer open to him. Still he would not consider the suggestion of his minister. Although he started him to Paris with instruc- tions to negotiate with the allied sovereigns, he warned him, ' ' No shameful peace ! ' ' Even with Paris fallen, he would not give up Antwerp ! ' ' France would be nothing without Antwerp ! " he persisted. When Caulaincourt had departed on his futile mission, the maps were rolled up, and the Emperor, worn out by his three- day race against fate, fell asleep in the tavern chair. It was nature's truce. Oblivious to his misfortunes he sat there un- til four o'clock in the morning, when he re-entered his wicker carriage and drove back to Fontainebleau. At eleven o'clock that morning, a troop of Cossacks, fol- lowed by the Czar and the King of Prussia, passed under the arch of Louis XIV at the Porte St. Martin in Paris. As the victorious spearmen from the Don and the conquering mon- archs pranced along the boulevards, welcoming cheers rang from the crowded windows and roofs. * ' Long live the Czar ! ' ' "Long live the King of Prussia!" "Long live our liberators !" "Long live King Louis XVIII!" "Down with the tyrant!" All the better dressed people had brought out and donned the white cockade, and the lilies of the Bourbons fell like snow- flakes in the pathway of the conquerors. Paris had ex- hausted her passion in the Reign of Terror, and her popula- tion as a whole had been indifferent lookers-on at the rise and fall of each successive regime. She only shrugged her shoulders and smiled as a mere claque acclaimed the Empire, the marriage of Marie Louise and the birth of the King of Rome. Now the downfall of the Emperor was applauded by but a mere claque of time servers and Bourbon nobles. That rejoicing faction was under the leadership of Talleyrand, the bishop who had blessed the pikes of the Revolution, who be- came a prince of the Empire, and who was now waiting in 396 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON the doorway of the great palace which Napoleon gave him to offer its hospitality to the Czar. By his side stood Bour- rienne, his lips puckered to kiss the hand that had overturned the Empire of the old schoolmate of Brienne, of the man who had kept him on his payroll as minister at Hamburg even after he had betrayed his confidence in the post of private secretary. The compliant senate as readily voted the dethronement of its former master as it had registered his every will for ten years. Even the marshals, anxious to save their batons and their ducal palaces and estates, hastened to change their al- Legiance and pledge their BWOrdfl to the new rule. "Away with Bonaparte!" was the watchword now, and thus in a day the reign of Napoleon vanished like a dream. While the Parisians were cheering their conquerors and supple courtiers were administering on his estate. Napoleon was sitting in the deepening gloom that hour by hour gathered aliont him in the old chateau of Fontainebleau, whose shadows to-day, crowded though they are with the spirits of the scep- tred dead, still are ruled by his stubborn, unlaid ghost. It rises before the visitor as he enters the palace gate. lie sees it walking down the Horseshoe stairs on the way to the Elban exile and pausing to bestow a parting kiss on the im- perial eagle. He hears the echoed accents of the eloquent farewell to the Old Guard, which have been treasured these hundred years by the grey walls of the Court of the White Horse, or the Court of the Adieu, as it is sentimentally called. As the pilgrim passes into the chateau itself, he is led first of all up a flight of stairs and through the haunted apart- ments of Napoleon in a corner of the vast pile, where, like a tenant in a second story flat, the Emperor occupied only a half-dozen rooms in a row. The one other suite in this wing of the chateau faces the opposite direction and looks across the long corridor of Francis I, and out upon the Court of the Fountains. It was in that row of rooms, just on the other side of the wall from his own, that Napoleon imprisoned the Pope of Rome. And Pius VII had been liberated less than ten weeks, THE FIRST ABDICATION 397 when the captor himself was virtually a captive in the ad- joining suite. Could punishment more closely tread upon the heels of an offence, even within the jurisdiction of poetic justice? Ney, Macdonald and Oudinot, Berthier, Marmont and Lefebre were at Fontainebleau, anxiously waiting for their release and an opportunity to make terms with the new regime. At last, Ney, the outspoken hussar, burst in upon the Emperor and boldly proclaimed their mutiny. "Sire," the marshal Prince of the Moskva, bluntly announced, "it is time to stop ! You are in the position of a man on his deathbed. You must make your will and abdicate in favour of the King of Rome." Must ! Never in the eighteen years since he took command of the Army of Italy had Napoleon heard that word from the lips of any man. In his astonishment, he appealed to his other princes and dukes. Their answer was made with Scotch candour by Marshal Macdonald, "We have had enough of war without kindling a civil war." The Emperor could not fail to see that he was helpless in the midst of a palace revolution. In his bewilderment, he re- treated from the scene, but only to surrender after a painful wrestle with his tumultuous impulses. Seated at the table which still stands in the salon of his suite, he scrawled a con- ditional abdication and sent Caulaincourt, Ney and Macdonald to Paris, charged with the duty of securing the crown to the King of Rome. That night, however, Marshal Marmont went over to the Allies, carrying his 12,000 soldiers with him, al- though the men rebelled and cursed their officers when, too late, they found they had been led into the camp of the for- eign invaders. This was the cruelest of all the blows which ad- versity was raining upon Napoleon's head. The desertion advertised his weakness among his marshals and emboldened the Allies, who no longer hesitated in their purpose to ex- terminate the Bonaparte dynasty and restore the Bourbons. Bowing to the inevitable, at last, Napoleon seated himself once more at the little round-top mahogany table by the w r indow, looking out upon the springtime bloom in the garden of Diana, and scratched his second and unconditional abdi- 398 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON cation. After he had written it, he inserted the words, "for himself and for his heirs." With those half dozen words added, he had signed away not only his Empire, but also the birthright of his boy, whom only three years before he had hailed with joy as the inheritor and perpetuator of his lord- ship of the earth. The King was dead in a living death ! Long live the King! One by one the princes, the dukes, the courtiers, and even the servants softly tiptoed out of the chateau and ran breath- lessly into Paris to salute the rising sun. Ney did not return to say farewell to his old commander. Berthier excused him- self for a brief absence. "He won't come back; I tell you. He won't come back," the Emperor predicted, and truly. For he never again saw his chief of staff and his tent mate in all his campaigns. Savary refused to come at all. Roustan, who ever since he entered Napoleon's service at the Gate of Victory in Cairo, had slept, poniard in hand, at his chamber door, went to fetch his wife and children that they might help him share his master's exile, and the Emperor gave him $5000 ; but the mameluke never returned. Nor did the valet Constant, his pockets bulging with the Emperor's gold, reappear after leaving to visit his family. At last the companions of his glory and the partakers of his bounty all were gone and he was left alone in his gloom. The Allies had drawn their barrier of alien bayonets between him and his wife and son, and cut him off from his mother and his brothers. Abandoned and solitary he received his sentence of ban- ishment to Elba. His spirit gave way under the burdens that pitiless fate was heaping upon it, and he turned to the old, familiar companion of his melancholy moods. This dark- visaged mate had walked with him in his unhappy youth on the banks of the Rhone and the Seine. They had tramped together the snows of Russia, when in the retreat from Moscow he had armed himself with Frederick the Great's favourite weapon against misfortune and carried in his pocket a little bottle as the sure means of escape from the humiliation of THE FIRST ABDICATION 399 capture. Moreover, had he not warned King Joseph in Feb- ruary that he would die if Paris fell ? Even this friend proved faithless and refused to do his bid- ding. His violent sickness, after taking the drug, aroused his attendants, and, though he begged his physician for an- other and more efficacious poison, he was saved from suicide. "Every one, everything has betrayed me," he grieved. "Fate has decided; I am condemned to live!" The Allies, after considering Corfu, Corsica and Elba, had chosen the latter island as the place of exile. They presented to Napoleon a formal treaty — the Treaty of Fontainebleau — which ceded to him its few square miles and recognised him as Emperor of the tiny realm. By this same instrument, the near-by Italian duchies of Parma, Placentia and Guastalla were bestowed upon Marie Louise, who was still to wear the title of Empress, while the King of Rome was to be the Duke of Parma. After Napoleon had been three weeks at Fontainebleau, the morning came for his departure. Four commissioners of the Allies, an Austrian general, an English colonel, a Prussian count and a Russian general, had arrived at the chateau to see that the treaty with the new sovereign of Elba was ful- filled. The Old Guard were drawn up in the Court of the White Horse for their last review When the Emperor descended the Horseshoe Stair. Standing by his carriage door, he bade them farewell in clear, ringing tones, concluding with these words : Be always faithful in the path of duty and honour. Serve with fidelity your new sovereign. The sweetest occupation of my life henceforth will be to make known to posterity all that you have done, and my only consolation will be to learn all that France may do for the glory of her name. You are all my children. I cannot embrace you all, but I will embrace you in the person of your general. After he had folded the general in his arms and kissed him on either cheek, the standard of the Guard, surmounted by 400 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON an eagle, was brought to him, and for half a minute he held it to his breast. Then, lifting his hand, he said to his sobbing veterans, ' ' Adieu ! Keep me in your remembrance. ' ' The tortures he had endured at Fontainebleau, where his marshals and followers abandoned him, were inflicted anew along the route of his journey, where the people came out only to heap curses upon him. And this on the very road where, on his return from Egypt less than fifteen years before, he had been hailed with joyful acclamations as the liberator and deliverer of France ! After a week of ignominy, he rode into the town of Frejus, where, on landing from his Egyptian campaign, he had re- ceived a delirious greeting as the saviour of the country from the Allies and the Bourbons. Now as he stepped aboard the British warship Undaunted, he welcomed the flag of his most hated foe as a refuge and a protection from his own people. Even as the Emperor was boarding the Undaunted, the Empress and the King of Rome were being conducted within the lines of the Austrian army at Dijon. The Allies had taken away not only his Empire but his wife and boy as well. After all Marie Louise was only a trophy of victory, a hos- tage which Austria had given to the conqueror, and now she and her son were convoyed out of France along the same road by which the Army of the Sovereigns had marched against her husband. Death next joined the Allies and reinforced the battalions of sorrows that were assailing Napoleon on all sides. Jose- phine had not seen the Emperor since he started on his fatal plunge into the Russian wastes, and she no longer spoke his name. While he was breasting the waves of invaders in the valley of the Seine, she sat, listless and tearful, among her ladies at Malmaison, making bandages for the wounded. After the fall of Paris, she received a call from the Czar, who pledged his protection. But she was troubled less about herself than about her children. "Must I again see them wandering and destitute?" she sighed. "The thought is kill- ing me." Alexander's kindness aroused in her the hope that he might be their protector. Her cordial welcome encouraged THE FIRST ABDICATION 401 him to come again and again to dine with her and stroll in her flowered paths. Russian grand dukes and German princes hastened out to the chateau, and even the King of Prussia brought the two sons of Queen Louise to see the wife of the victor of Jena and the tyrant of Tilsit. Only the Emperor of Austria balked at the suggestion that he pay his respects to Marie Louise's fair predecessor. But Josephine said, "Why not, indeed? It is not I whom he has dethroned, but his own daughter ! ' ' Under the patronage of the Allies, Malmaison became a court again. In the midst of the merry scenes, however, Jose- phine ailed — but it was only a cold. Her plrysician ordered her to bed, but she persisted in her anxious attentions to the new masters of her destiny and of her children's. On the day of her death, she insisted on being dressed in a beautiful robe-de-chambre, and we are told that when she welcomed her silent deliverer from a strange and troubled life, she lay in her pretty ribbons and rose satin, murmuring of "Bonaparte" and "Elba." Her body was borne into the village church of Rueil, where it rests beside the altar in a marble tomb erected by her children. Above it, her sculptured figure kneels in prayer, while across the church, Hortense lies in a tomb which her son, Napoleon III, inscribed to the "daughter and sister of Napoleon I." Far away in the New World, another shrine to the memory of Josephine rises by the shore of her native Martinique, where in the shade of palms at Fort de France, the Creole Empress stands, grasping her imperial robes with her right hand while her left rests upon a medallion of Napoleon. CHAPTER XL VI EMPEROR OF ELBA 1814-1815 AGE 44-45 THE monarchs of Europe who sent Napoleon to Elba must have been endued with a rare sense of humour. It is easily the best joke in history. What a mocking satire it was to give the Great Captain a little toy army and navy, crown the proud kingmaker Em- peror of eighty-six square miles of rocks in the midst of his native Mediterranean and hand him a rattle for a sceptre — to reduce the Empire of the mighty conqueror who had amused himself by dismembering kingdoms, to a tiny realm three to six miles wide and nineteen miles long — to leave the captor of the capitals of Europe in possession of only three or four wretched fishing villages — to make the sovereign of sovereigns ruler over 12,000 fishermen, miners, and goatherds! The mockery was only heightened by the choice of an island where the continent he had lost lay in full view of the exile. For Elba is but seven miles at the least from the mainland of Italy, although it is a steamer voyage of more than twelve miles from Piombino to Portoferrajo, the imperial capital which Napoleon exchanged for Paris. The town of Portoferrajo forms a delightful drop curtain for the opera bouffe, which was staged there and which en- joyed a continuous run of just 298 days and nights. At the top of the scenic picture, outlined against the turquoise sky, two massive but now senile forts frown down in an amusingly menacing way. Beneath them the stony pink little town hangs on for its life to the steep side of a hill, while the an- cient town wall zigzags down to the shore, where it thrusts a long, bended, protecting arm into a perfect harbour. 402 EMPEROR OF ELBA 403 Out over the end of this huge crumbling wall hangs an old watch tower and out of a window in this sentry box idly leans that unfailing delight of tourist ej^es — a bersagliere, with his rifle over his shoulder and his bunch of long cocks' feathers trailing from his hat. Around the end of the wall the steamer glides into the snug little mole behind it and ties up at the stone dock. At the shore end of the dock rises the ancient town gate, through which the visitor passes at once into the very Porto- ferrajo, unchanging in its petrification, which was set agog at eight o'clock in the morning of the 3d of May, in the year 1814, when the lookout descried a British man-of-war, under full sail, bearing down upon the town. "When Napoleon came ashore the next afternoon, the guns of Fort Stella — the fort of his new star — boomed over the crowded rooftops, and he was conducted to the cathedral, where he knelt in the doorway while the Te Deum was sung. Ten crowded years stretched between that month of May, when he was hailed Emperor of Elba and another May when he had been acclaimed Emperor of the French — the two extremes of imperial fortunes. Two of his generals had followed him into exile. General Bertrand was grand marshal of the palace, while the military governor was General Drouot, the artillery commander whose guns were wont to give the finishing touch to Napoleonic vic- tories on the battlefield. The imperial household also neces- sarily had its prefects of the palace, its court chaplain, its chamberlain, its physician, its musical director, its keeper of the wardrobe and its footmen and ushers. An army lieutenant, although a prey to violent seasickness, was the commander of the fleet, which consisted of the flagship Inconstant, a rotten old French brig of sixteen guns and sixty men; the Caroline, of one gun and sixteen men; the feluccas Abeille and Mouche, each with eight men, and the xebec Etoile of six guns and sixteen men. The foremost figure in the army was Cambronne, a gallant fire eater of the Old Guard, who declared that his "uniform and its very lining" commanded him to follow Napoleon. Arriving at Porto- 404 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON ferrajo with 700 men of the Guard, some time after the Em- pire had been set up, the veterans at sight of the Emperor ' ' wept copiously into their moustaches, ' ' as the imperial chron- icles record. Once the army was completely organised, it con- sisted of a Corsican battalion, the Polish lancers, a mameluke contingent, and the grenadiers and chasseurs of the Old Guard, with a grand total of 1600 officers and men. Not only did his veterans of the Guard follow Napoleon to Elba, but his war horses also came to eat their oats in banish- ment. There was the little white arab Wagram, who pawed his stall and whinnied for sugar whenever the man whom he had borne to the conquest of Vienna and the capture of a bride came near. There also were bays and chestnuts who, in Spain or Russia or Germany, had sped him down the hill from the heights of glory. A silvery Persian, although a gift from the Czar, had nevertheless returned to Russia as an invading foe, and it was on his back that Napoleon viewed Moscow from Sparrow Hill. On his back, too, he would yet fight another battle — at Waterloo ! Nor did the horses lack for exercise. Imperial progresses were forever on the schedule. In his gold coach, with all brakes set and with the postillions cracking their whips even while they leaned back on the reins, His Majesty daily coasted down the perpendicular streets of the capital, his grand marshal, his military governor and his grooms gallop- ing at the wheels. He did not pause until he had visited all the little hamlets which, with rustic arches of triumph, with children scattering flowers in the imperial pathway, with priests chanting Te Deums, bravely tried to outrival one an- other in honouring their sovereign. The Emperor graciously made due allowance for the awk- wardness of his untutored courtiers, whose insular and pastoral democracy never before had been called upon to render hom- age to a crowned head. When, however, a militia sergeant, in an excess of kindness and strength, too vigorously aided him to mount his horse, which he ever found a difficult feat, by seizing him bodily and pitching him, kicking and protest- ing into the saddle, he could not condone such conduct on the EMPEROR OF ELBA 405 part of a common soldier. Instead of punishing the sergeant, he adopted a Gilbertian expedient and promoted him to a lieu- tenancy, a rank that somewhat excused the liberty he had taken with the sacred person of His Majesty ! In the very first fortnight of his reign, the forts and the mines were inspected, most of the mountains were ascended and every mule path in the island was traversed by the Em- peror, who left behind him wherever he went his command for public improvements. When the wagon roads left off, he took to the saddle. When even the paths stopped, he pressed on afoot, walking under a broiling sun for ten hours at a stretch and "working the flesh off the bones of every one," to quote again the chronicler of the Empire. When he had completed his exploration of Elba, he sighed for more islands and sailed away to the south, where he found the midget islet of Pianosa, inhabited only by wild sheep. Annexing it on the instant, he fitted out and despatched a colony with orders to fortify and cultivate it. In the same era of expansion the island of Palmaiola also was annexed and fortified. Having surveyed and organised his Empire, the Emperor next turned to the erection of his imperial palaces. To es- cape from the little suite which had been hastily furnished for him, up one flight in the city hall, he purchased a windmill, at the top of the hill. There he erected from his own plans his new Tuileries, but in memory of the demolished mill he christened it the Mulini. The streets of Portoferrajo consist chiefly of three steep stairways up the fort-crowned height, and several shelves across the face of the hill. These stairs are named via Napoleone, via Victor Hugo and via Garibaldi, their names recalling three interesting and diverse characters, who at different times sailed into the little Elban world. Garibaldi hid there for awhile in the troubled days of '48, and there Hugo passed three or four years of his infancy, while his father, an army officer under Bonaparte, First Consul of France, was aiding to establish French rule in the island. At the foot of each of those street-stairways lies the harbour, 406 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON while Fort Stella, the Mulini palace and Fort Falcone stand in a row at the top. The Mulini, which is the property of the Italian government now, really is no palace at all, but a severely plain, modest dwelling, its plastered walls rising one and two stories from a little public square, the Piazzale Na- poleone. Some officials are now installed in it, but the green shutters are tightly closed on the Emperor's own special apart- ments, which are silent and untenanted, save for the spiders that spin their webs in the bare rooms where once Napoleon himself wove a clever little web. At the end of the house, a stone wall shuts in the yard, but the custodian swings the gate on its creaking hinges, the visitor passes in between two stone posts, on which cannon balls are piled, and is in the haunted stillness of the little dooryard garden of the imperial exile. It is still fragrant with the bloom of flowers, and in a circle of purple lilies stands a marble Minerva, the statue and the encircling flowers com- bining to suggest the warrior who put on the purple. There are also a palm and a pine tree, which seem to symbolise the wide rule that he exchanged for his island empire. Did he not boast that "I overlook Europe from my win- dows?" Well, there are the windows, giving on the garden. There across the flower patch is the parapet of the little ter- race, hanging high above the blue Tyrrhenian Sea, and there is Europe, away off through the cerulean haze, where the mountains of Italy break the horizon. The St. Cloud, or suburban palace of the Elban Empire lies about three miles from Portoferrajo's only gate, which is made trebly difficult for assailants and invaders by taking the form of a long, dark, twisting tunnel through the broad wall. Just outside the gate, the smokestacks of a modern steel mill smudge the azure sky. Beyond the mill, the dusty road, the only road from the town, stretches about the beautiful little bay until the pilgrim to San Martino leaves it for the byway that winds up a pretty green hill where Napoleon's simple suburban retreat nestles in a sylvan shade. Here the banished lord of all Europe settled down to the task of tilling a few acres of earth and to establishing a farm EMPEROR OF ELBA 407 that should be a model for his subjects. He planted a grove of mulberry trees and he introduced the potato into the is- land. But a tablet on a wall in one of the hamlets thus re- cords his overthrow as a ploughman: "Napoleon, while pass- ing by, took the plough from a peasant, but the oxen rebelled against the hands that had guided Europe and broke away from the furrow." Since the Emperor was resolved to be a farmer, San Mar- tino is but a farmhouse of twelve modest sized rooms and even less palatial than the Mulini. Its two-story front con- tracts into a one-story cottage in the rear, where the rising hill cuts off the lower floor, and whither the driveway leads. The entrance, therefore, is to the upper floor and into the Hall of the Pyramids. A sunken fountain is in the centre of this room, the walls of which are covered with imitation columns and carvings that some simple artist of the miniature empire crudely designed to recall the campaign on the Nile. On one of the columns the Emperor caused to be painted this inscription, calculated at once to taunt and reassure the mon- archs who sent him to Elba : Napoleon is Happy Everywhere. The room of General Bertrand, the grand marshal, opens from one side of the Salle des Pyramides, while on the other side is the imperial salon, where two doves flutter in the blue sky that overspreads the ceiling, the Emperor having com- manded that they ' ' be fastened together by a cord, the knot of which tightens the farther they fly apart." It was the exile's expression of his hope and longing for Marie Louise. Alas, only a ribbon unites the doves, while swords and bayonets cut asunder the imperial pair. In the next room beyond the salon of the doves, the Em- peror slept. Below his chamber, down a steep stair, which has only a rope in place of a banister rail, is his bathroom. 408 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON There above his marble tub the naked figure of Truth painted on the wall, continues to peer into a mirror with this moral inscribed below: ''He who hates the truth, hates the light." The charm of San Martino lies not within its now bare and almost humble walls, but out of doors, where Nature was the imperial furnisher and decorator. There one may tread Na- poleon's path into the depths of a lovely grove over a singing brook and to the spring, where he used to fill his leathern cup. Or the visitor may step from the imperial suite in the house out upon the terrace where, with his spy glass pointed straight ahead, the Emperor could examine every sail entering the harbour of Portoferrajo, and by turning a little to the left, could survey the forts and roofs of his capital. Long after the Elban exile was over and even six feet of earth sufficed Napoleon, San Martino was purchased by Prince Demidoff, the husband of Princess Mathilde, daughter of King Jerome Bonaparte. Unfortunately the Prince was not so much interested in preserving the simplicity of the place as in glorifying his uncle-in-law. In his misdirected zeal he set up a high iron fence of gold-tipped spears and costly ornate gates with bees and eagles and wreathes wrought in them. • The capital offence of the nephew by marriage was the erec- tion of a big stone temple with high columns and pillars, which he planted squarely in front of and against the villa as if to hide it from the world. Obtrusive as this structure is when viewed from the road, happily it is not seen from the house itself, but disappears beneath the terrace. The Prince intended to found there a great Napoleonic mu- seum. He had no more than gathered together all the relics of the Emperor in the island, however, than his feverish interest in Elba seems to have subsided and the collection was carried off to Florence, whence in time it was dispersed through the world. Thus the Elbans have hardly an old shoe or hat to show for their vanished Empire. Fortunately they still have the walls the Emperor reared, but those of San Martino are held in a precarious proprietorship. They passed from the Demidoff family into the hands of an islander who had grown EMPEROR OF ELBA 409 rich from the Elban mines. While this new landlord was at- tempting to fill the bare cabinets of the museum with a natural history collection, he lost his fortune, and some Italian creditors took his property, including the historic but deserted villa. When the heat of the southern summer descended upon San Martino, a still simpler abiding place was chosen by the Em- peror. This was in the house of a religious hermit, who tended an altar of the Madonna high up Monte Giove. On the 2500- foot climb along the stony path to this solitary hermitage, where the altar candles are still kept burning, the traveller leaves the village of Marciana Marina, at the shore, and passes through the mountain hamlet of Marciana Alta to the Ma- donna's lonely chapel. There, in the late summer of his Elban year, Napoleon passed a fortnight in the four-room stone hut of the hermit, although he really slept in a tent. There, too, is a rocky throne — Napoleon's seat, it is called. From it he looked over the amethystine sea to the northern slopes of his native Corsica, with the town of Bastia shining white against the verdant mountain sides. How near together his two islands were, and yet how long the path between them! The Elbans, only less eagerly than the Emperor, watched for the coming of Marie Louise and her child. Napoleon himself at first hoped and next begged that those who had taken away his empire would restore to him his wife and son. His efforts were vain. The politicians, so far from permitting the mother and child to join him, would not even let them go to their allotted duchy, because Parma was too near Elba. They separated the Empress and the boy, and moved her about from place to place, like a piece on a chessboard. At first she mildly begged to be allowed to join her husband in his exile, but soon her father brought her back to her girlhood habit of obedience to his will. And almost before her summer wanderings in Switzerland were over, her pliant affections were quite di- verted to Count Neipperg, an ingratiating courtier whom Metternich had craftily chosen to attend her. 410 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON The mother of the Emperor, whose prophetic soul had fore- told the coming of rainy days and whose maternal thrift had made provision for them, came to him as soon as he was fairly settled, and she faithfully stayed by his side. Mme. Mere's companion was her daughter Pauline. The heedless gaiety of this Princess had been Napoleon's torment in prosperity, but now she just as gaily shared her brother's fallen fortunes. The next of the imperial habitations the Emperor chose after he left the Hermitage was hardly less unconventional and romantic. This was an old castle at Porto Longone, the second port of Elba and on the opposite side of the island from Portoferrajo. There a suite of six rooms was fitted up, the Emperor choosing for himself a turret looking out upon the Italian shore. He now had four "palaces," but Elban palaces came cheap. A tent sufficed on Monte Giove, and for Porto Longone three iron beds, two carpets, a few plain chairs at a cost of $1 each and two or three equally simple armchairs and sofas were ordered. Indeed the furnishings of the citadel were almost as severely simple as they are to-day, when it is the gloomy abode of life convicts sent from the mainland. The construction or selection of palaces was but a diver- sion, an innocent pastime of the island Emperor. His more serious care was bestowed upon the welfare of Elba. While he housed himself and maintained his table with almost ascetic frugality, he shared with the local officials half the expense of all public improvements that he ordered. Finding no roads, he built them, and wisely planned a complete highway system, which still serves the convenience of the people, who have yet no railways. It was under his inspiration and direc- tion that the husbandmen planted and sowed the waste places, and the long-neglected soil was made so productive that it supplies now nearly all the needs of a population three or four times greater than the number of inhabitants a century ago. Although it was a tradition among the people that climate and earth alike were unfriendly to the olive, the lemon, the orange and the mulberry, he introduced them in the island, EMPEROR OF ELBA 411 and they are flourishing there to this day. He developed an abundant water supply against seasons of drouth and he im- proved the health of the people by draining the swamps and by barring the mosquitoes from the springs and wells. He also swept the streets and gave the islanders their first lessons in cleanliness and sanitation. In that attribute which is next to godliness, the Portoferrajo of to-day, with its 8000 people, is a shining example and as well scrubbed as a village in Holland. The little hotel which perpetuates the memory of the imperial symbol in its name, "Albergo l'Ape Elbana" — Inn of the Elban Bee — is as clean and unpretending as the town. The townspeople, the Elbans as a whole, are in keeping with their unique, if brief chapter in history. The women are pretty, modest and modish, the men kind, honest and self- respecting in their welcome of the stranger who comes among them seeking the shrines and mementos of the Empire that rose and fell in ten months. The custodian of the municipio, a veteran of Solferino, gently unfurls in the salon of the Emperor the flag of the Empire, with its silver bees, and the librarian proudly dis- plays the cherished remnants of Napoleon's Elban library. The janitor of the theatre, for a church was made over into an imperial theatre, seats his callers in the Emperor's box to watch him lower the original drop curtain, with its pictorial allegory of Apollo fallen from the skies to shepherd a little flock, even as Napoleon descended from the throne of Europe to care for the Elbans. While one good man is showing some empty wine bottles which he treasures because they bear the "N" in the laurel wreath, Signorina, his daughter, arrays herself in the gown her great-grandmother wore at the imperial court. The Elbans even have a young man who sufficiently resembles their Emperor to have satisfied the requirements of the oper- ators of a moving picture concern, when they came to make some films of the exile and the flight, and this "Napoleon of the Movies" has become an added exhibit of Portoferrajo. The Empire has a day all to itself in the island calendar. This day of days is the 5th of May, the anniversary of the 412 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON Emperor's death on another island less fair. Each year, the custodian of the municipio gives to the breeze the flag of the Empire and solemn services are held in the church of the Miserecordia, which is hung in black and gold. From a niche in the wall behind doors covered with crowns and eagles, a coffin in imitation of the Emperor's at the Invalides in Paris, is reverently brought forth and borne to the altar rail, where the worshippers passing by may see through a glass, the death mask of Napoleon resting on a pillow within the coffin. This yearly memorial service was established for all time by a provision of Prince Demidoff's will, and the Prince also left a legacy for the poor which is distributed on each 5th of May. Visitors to Elba are few in number and the Elbans have not been tempted to commercialise their past and exploit it. There are neither guides nor guide books in the little, un- sophisticated capital. The sturdy island race is yet un- awed by the condescension and uncorrupted by the tips of tourists, who pass by with the thought, perhaps, that it must be a dreary prison isle, the limbo of the condemned, instead of the rare little gem that it really is on the jewelled bosom of the tideless sea. CHAPTER XLVII THE RETURN FROM ELBA 1815 AGE 45 NAPOLEON'S return from Elba, in March, 1815, is the most adventurous exploit in a life' of adventure. Yet those who look upon all human history as the prosaic story of one long- struggle for bread and butter have some warrant for contending that in escaping from the island, in marching on Paris, in reclaiming the crown of France and in fighting the Battle of Waterloo, he was not inspired by a love of country or glory but impelled by the fear of hunger and poverty. In a letter to his government three months be- fore the flight, the British commander, Colonel Campbell, expressed the opinion that the Emperor would contentedly pass the rest of his life in the island if he received his pen- sion, but that if he was left without an income he would prob- ably take his troops and cross over to the mainland. By the Treaty of Fontainebleau at the time of the abdica- tion, Austria, Russia and Prussia guaranteed Napoleon the sov- ereignty of Elba and a yearly income of $400,000 from the French treasury, while his mother and his brothers and sis- ters were to receive and divide among themselves $500,000 a year. The duchies of Parma, Placentia and Guastalla were pledged to Marie Louise, and after her, to the King of Rome and his descendants, and a suitable provision was to be made for Prince Eugene Beauharnais. None of those promises was kept. The Allies, who sat down in the Congress of Vienna to divide the spoils of their victory, gave Eugene nothing, determined that the son of Napoleon should not inherit his mother's duchy or be per- 413 414 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON mitted even to live with her, and they suffered the Bourbon King of France to withhold from the Emperor the annuity stipulated in the treaty. Although he is supposed to have brought with him from France nearly $800,000, Napoleon began to feel the pinch acutely as the months went by. He pressed the people for their taxes until they riotously rebelled and he raked together all the useless old guns, and shipped them to Italy, where he sold them for junk and where he also found a market for some mouldy flour which he discovered in the commissariat. When he adopted the expedient of paying off with due bills on the French treasury, a feeling of homesickness spread among his troops and retainers until it threatened to become epidemic, and the army dwindled away from resignations and desertions. And the soldiers were no mere ornaments of the Empire. The Emperor had organised the little army to defend his island against the ever-present peril of the Bar- bary corsairs, but as time wore on, he came to regard it as his only protection from assassination or deportation at the instance of the allied nations themselves. Talleyrand and Louis XVIII were agreed that he should be sent farther away, to the Azores, perhaps, which were some 800 miles out in the Atlantic, or to St. Lucia in the West Indies. His Corsican enemy, Pozzo di Borgo, re- ported a unanimous sentiment among the statesmen gathered in Vienna, for his removal "from the eyes of Europe" and "as far as possible." Pozzo himself thought St. Helena would be an excellent choice. When Talleyrand declared "we must hasten to get rid of the man from Elba," Napoleon was left in doubt whether he would be called upon to defend himself from kidnapers or assassins. The choice really had narrowed down to abduc- tion or assassination, bankruptcy or flight when he chose the latter. He knew that France was growing restive under the reactionary policy of the Bourbon rule which foreign armies had imposed on the country, and that the French army was filled with the spirit of revolt. As he wrestled with his problem in secret, he retired more THE EETURN FROM ELBA 415 and more within himself. Colonel Campbell, the British com- missioner, was impressed with "something wild in his air." When, however, the colonel, in the middle of February, made a parting call before leaving for a brief absence in Italy, he found the Emperor "unusually dull and reserved," appar- ently interested in nothing but the affairs of his little Em- pire, its roads and bridges, and in his farms and gardens, with their cabbages and onions and flower beds. Neverthe- less, Campbell had his misgivings, but his suspicions were laughed away in Florence. "When you return to Elba," an inspired British under secretary of state for foreign affairs said to the commissioner, "you may tell Bonaparte that he is quite forgotten in Europe. Nobody thinks of him at all. He is quite forgotten — as much as if he had never existed." Meanwhile the Great Forgotten was dividing his attentions between the flower beds at the Mulini and at Fort Stella, which his soldiers were laboriously preparing, and the equip- ment of his leaky little navy for a mysterious cruise. Abso- lutely no one else knew when or whither the vessels would sail, until he let Mme. Mere into the secret the day before the departure and received the blessing of that spartan mother. The next day was Sunday, and there was a levee at the Mulini, when the Emperor astounded the company by frankly announcing that he should quit Elba that night. The island was already shut in, no boat having been permitted to leave or enter any of the ports for two days. All the while the grena- diers continued to pat down the loam in the garden. It was not until five in the afternoon that the drums beat to arms, and an army of 1100 men embarked for the con- quest of France, on a flotilla comprising the brig Inconstant, of 300 tons and eighteen guns; the bombard VEtoile, of eighty tons, and five feluccas of from twenty-five to fifty tons each. It was an enchanting evening, in one of the most beautiful harbours of all the Mediterranean. The Emperor stood on the quarterdeck. The town band played the "Mar- seillaise." The townspeople cheered and the mayor's tears fell upon the dock. How many times had wind and wave befriended the 416 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON islander on this, his native sea ! They had borne him a fugi- tive from Corsica to Toulon and to his first victory. They had parted a lane for him through Nelson's fleet as he went to find an empire in the east and as he returned to find it in the west. The very south wind which now sped him back to his throne, left Campbell sitting helplessly under the lazily flapping sails of the British warship Partridge, becalmed in the harbour of Leghorn. On the fourth day of the voyage while the early afternoon sun was glowing on the terraced gardens of the French shore and glistening on the still snowy peaks of the Maritime Alps, Napoleon sailed into the wide Gulf Juan. On one side of the bay he saw the island of Marguerite. As he glanced at its castle walls in their melancholy beauty rising from the waters he must have thought — as who does not ? — of the Pris- oner in the Iron Mask, who has left his mystery clinging to them forever. Across the bay on the other side, the roofs of Antibes must have called to his recollection another prisoner — himself, for there in the old grey fort he had sat in the shadow of the guillotine after the fall of Robespierre. How often the voyage of his life had brought him to that beautiful Riviera ; how often the tide in his affairs had borne him in and out of its lovely harbours! In the west, was Toulon, whither he had come an exile from Corsica only two and twenty years before, where he fought his first battle and whence he embarked for Egypt. Only around the mountain- ous headland to his left was the port of Frejus, where he had been welcomed home from the Orient and whence he had en- tered upon his Elban banishment. 'Beyond the Antibean Cape on his right, lay Nice, where he had taken command of the Army of Italy, and farther along was Savona, out of which the Little Corporal sped in the night to burst into fame on the heights of Montenotte. On no other stage had he so often astonished the world. Now he was about to eclipse all the surprises that had gone before. The passerby along the villa-lined avenue from Cannes to Nice sees in the shade of a tree by the roadside, a simple shaft of stone rising to tell no other story than this: THE RETURN FROM ELBA 417 Souvenir of March 1, 1815 Not another word is carved upon the monument. It is simply a place mark at the opening page of an extraordinary chapter in history. Trolley cars and a procession of auto- mobiles now race by the stone, where a century ago a quiet country lane took its leisurely course, while winter hotels and their clutter of shops look upon the once lonely beach, where, with indifferent curiosity, a few charcoal burners and a few fishermen mending their nets saw Napoleon step ashore. ''Now," he chuckled, "I am about to enact a great nov- elty." He very well knew that if France were to be con- quered it was not to be done by 1100 followers, but by him- self alone. His orders to Cambronne were: "Do not fire a single shot. Remember, I wish to recapture my crown with- out shedding a drop of blood." Paper bullets were to be his only ammunition. "Frenchmen," he proclaimed in a shower of leaflets that fell before him as he advanced, "in my exile I heard your plaints and prayers. ... I have crossed the sea amid perils of every kind, and I am come to assert my rights which also are yours. . . . Soldiers, ' ' he said, turning to the one element that really felt a lively longing for him, "your general . . . who was raised upon your bucklers is restored to you. Come and join him ! Tear down those colours . . . which for twenty-five years have served to mark the rallying point of France's enemies." As the evening came he rose from the maps he had spread on the ground where the memorial stone stands and entered the village of Cannes, three miles away. It was not yet the brilliant and populous city of big winter hotels and splendid winter villas, which English sojourners have annexed to Eng- land and where in token of their conquest they have set up 418 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON statues of Lord Brougham, King Edward, and the Duke of Albany and laid out their tennis courts and golf links. The Cannes that received Napoleon in silence is still there, however, its narrow, dusky streets bending about the foot of Mt. Chevalier. Just where the modern city joins the old town, the postoffice now rises in what was an orchard that March evening when a cold night wind blowing through the olive trees chilled the marrow and the humour of the Emperor as he shivered by his bivouac fire. And the lamp posts of the Rue Bivouac sufficiently commemorate that second halt- ing place of the eagle in his flight "from steeple to steeple even to the towers of Notre Dame," as one of the proclama- tions announced. Camp was broken at midnight. Some time afterward the Emperor mounted his horse and, leaving the little village sleeping in the dark shadow of Mont Chevalier, he rode on in the night up the 1000-foot slope to Grasse, that butterfly town which draws its sustenance from the perfume flowers that cover its hillsides. Day was peeping over the Alpine heights when the imperial wayfarer came to Grasse. He chose not to halt in the town and passed by to eat his break- fast in a field above, where, enthroned on a pile of knap- sacks, he drank his coffee and munched his bread. Three cypresses mark the scene of that imperial dejeuner, the scene of that dawning of the Hundred Days. Nature could hardly set a prettier table than in that grassy meadow by the three slender, graceful trees. A beautiful cascade purls its headlong way over the brow of a sheer cliff. Far below, the old cathedral of Grasse lifts its grizzled tower while a lovely blooming vale opens a vista clear to the Gulf Juan. The reception of the returned monarch thus far had been only coldly civil. The people living on and near the coast had viewed afar the glory of his military campaigns, but they had not been witnesses to any of his victories. On the contrary, they remembered his reign chiefly as an era when their harbours were sealed, and when they could not look THE RETURN FROM ELBA 419 across their watery frontier without beholding a British sea wolf prowling along the horizon. Napoleon did not deceive himself. He knew that the peo- ple as a whole did not want him back any more than they wished him to stay when they hooted him out of Provence, less than a year before. It was in his distrust of the popular temper that he had chosen to begin his march on Paris by a narrow path through the wild and sparsely populated moun- tains rather than by the broad highway up the populous val- ley of the Rhone. He chose the hazards offered by nature rather than to contend with human obstacles. As the Emperor looked up at the Basses Alpes, which rose before him in his chosen pathway to the throne, he foresaw the difficulty of dragging his artillery over those heights and he ordered that it be abandoned. There were only four can- non all told and he knew that their little whiff of grapeshot would not conquer Paris for him this time. Not those four cannon, but the three-cornered hat and the old grey coat must be relied on to break the ranks and silence the battery of the army of 180,000 men, sworn to defend Louis XVIII on the throne of his fathers. When he left Grasse, therefore, it was to enter upon hardly more than a goat path, along which he hastened his little band in single file through snow and ice and in peril of frightful abysses. That night the imperial bed was only a bundle of straw in a wretched, solitary cottage near the village of Seranon. The next day the march was by the chateau of Castellane to Bareme, which was reached in a heavy snowstorm. All that had been saved from the money taken to Elba amounted to $350,000, and it was carried on the backs of mules. One of the animals falling had scattered over the snow $60,000 in gold, a third of which was lost beyond recovery. After a night at Bareme, the Emperor descended to the valley of the Bleone, where it grudgingly widens barely enough to accommodate the picturesque old provincial capi- tal of the department of the Basses Alpes. There, at Digne, he found a welcoming friend in the bishop, who was a 420 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON brother of General Miollis and who was only a poor cure when, at the General's request, Napoleon had elevated him to the bishopric. The bishop sleeps now behind the high altar of his cathe- dral at Digne; but he lives in the saintly character of Mon- signeur Bienvenu in "Les Miserables. " For it was upon a kindness of the bishop of Digne toward a man who had tried to rob him that Victor Hugo built the character of Jean Valjean. After rescuing the thief from crime, the cure sent him to serve in Egypt under his brother, General Miollis. According to the local legend, the veteran was in Digne again when Na- poleon came along on his march from exile and he followed the Emperor to Paris and to Waterloo, where he perished on the field. "Jean Valjean" therefore will have to be enrolled as one of the four recruits whom history records as having rallied to the imperial eagles in the course of the first five days of the march. From Digne, Napoleon marched to Sisteron, whose fortress is perched upon a rock at the head of the Valley of the Dur- ance. Nature made it so difficult to get around this citadel that modern engineers gave up the problem and the railroad to-day dodges under the fort. From its loopholes a few guns could have turned back the advancing Kmperor, but the Bour- bon army officers were watching for him over in the valley of the Rhone. There was not a musket to challenge him at Sisteron, whence he rode away on a wave of cheers and with many gifts of horses, wagons and provisions. There, at the threshold of Dauphiny, he was leaving behind him the un- sympathetic people of the seacoast and entering among the adventurous mountaineers who loved the glory of arms and who, in the safety of their fastnesses, hated the foreigners that had overrun the plains and seated their Bourbon pup- pet on the throne of France. It was on that 5th of March that the news of the escape from Elba reached the congress of sovereigns and diplomats in the midst of their jealous map making at Vienna, and that the news of the landing at Gulf Juan reached Paris. While THE RETURN FROM ELBA 421 the Austrian capital was trying to guess whither the eagle had flown, the officials at the French capital engaged in plans for his capture. The Comte d'Artois, brother of Louis XVIII, and afterward King Charles X, started at once for Lyons to stop his march on Paris, and a proclamation was issued, authorising any one to take him dead or alive. In the heart of Dauphiny, the imposing little city of Grenoble, which gloves the hands of France and millions of other hands besides, sits by the bending River Isere, gazing up at the Alps, whose snowy spurs seem to rise at the end of every street. This was the first place of any size or im- portance on the line of march and Napoleon could not have but wondered how fortune would greet him at the gate of Grenoble. That prankish goddess did not wait for him at the gate. In her eagerness to play one of her most extraordi- nary pranks she went forth to greet him when he was yet fifteen miles away, near the village of Laffrey. Laffrey itself is a mere cluster of little stone cottages that seem to have rolled like boulders from the flowered hillsides down into the narrow ravine through which the high road makes its way. On the churchyard wall a tablet records the words with which in a breath Napoleon overturned the Bourbon throne. While he was yet a mile away from the village and was riding along the ravine road, with the white mantle of the Grande Chartreuse looming before him, he saw a battalion of infantry from Grenoble blocking his way. There at last the lilies confronted the bees. The Emperor saw that the hour had struck for him to put his fate to the touch to gain or lose it all. And he sent one of his aides galloping ahead to cry out that the Emperor was approaching. As a Bourbon officer saw a little man in a grey coat and three-cornered hat, advancing afoot and alone along the road, he shouted to the soldiers, ''There he is! Fire!" But the soldiers, with bayonets drawn, stood motionless as in a tableau while Napoleon boldly walked up to them. "When he was but a few paces away, the familiar tones of his voice rang out upon the tense silence, as he cried : 422 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON "Soldiers! I am your Emperor! Do you not recognise me?" "Yes! Yes! Yes!" hundreds of voices responded with a fervent shout. Now unbuttoning his grey coat, he offered his breast to their muskets as he challenged them: "If there is one among you who would shoot his general, here I am!" "Vive l'Empereur!" rose in a shriek from the ranks. The soldiers lifted their bayonets only to place their shakos on them and wave them in the air. Rushing upon the Em- peror, they covered his hands with kisses and filled his ears with endearing names. "It is all settled!" Napoleon smiled to his staff out of the midst of the soldiers. "In ten days we shall be in the Tuileries." With the cheering battalion leading the march, the Em- peror entered Laffrey village, where he received another re- cruit. This was a rich glove manufacturer of Grenoble, Jean Demoulin, who brought in his arms a gift of $20,000 in gold. The snowball was now growing very fast. At the next village a Bourbon regiment, which was marching out from Grenoble under Colonel Labedoyere, came only to fall in with the battalion behind the Emperor. Thenceforth the perplexing question before the Bourbons was whether it were better to hurry the soldiers away from his magic and abandon the road to him or risk the loss of both the army and the country. The people of Grenoble were watching for the Emperor from their walls when he appeared before that city, and they welcomed him with ringing cheers. The Bourbon officials before taking flight had locked the gate, which the citizens within and the soldiers without quickly battered down. The Emperor rode in over the debris and went to the Inn of the Three Dauphins, where he settled himself in a room which is preserved in the present Hotel Moderne et des Trois Dau- phins. There the people soon came and called him out upon the balcony, when their spokesman explained that since they THE RETURN FROM ELBA 423 were unable to present to him the keys of his good city of Grenoble, they had brought him the gate itself! The campaign was already won. "Until Grenoble I was an adventurer," Napoleon said. "But after Grenoble I was a prince!" As he moved upon Lyons, the Comte d'Artois made ready to resist his progress. When, however, the Count found that the soldiers refused to cry "Vive le Roi, " he prudently left the command to Marshal Macdonald, who strove loyally to erect batteries for the defence of the city. When at a shout of "Vive l'Empereur" the soldiers began pulling down the works they had only just raised, the marshal put spurs to his horse and raced away as if fearing to catch the infection. Napoleon entered Lyons and sat down there to issue his imperial decrees and recast the government of France. On the same day, the Allies in the Vienna Congress were denounc- ing him as outside the pale of civilisation and delivering him up "to public vengeance as the enemy and disturber of the world's repose." Only one more barrier now lay between the Emperor and his throne. Marshal Ney had been despatched by the Bour- bon government to assemble its scattered army and capture the invader of the realm. The marshal not only promised to take him, but to bring him back in an iron cage. When some one suggested it would be safer to kill him outright, Ney insisted that it would be more exemplary to exhibit him to the people of Paris. Once among his soldiers, however, the marshal heard again the old cheer for the Emperor. Soon he received the Emper- or's command to join him, with the promise that he would greet him "as on the morn of the battle of the Moskva" — where he had invested him with his princely title. After a painful and tumultuous conflict in his bosom, the simple sol- dier plunged into the tide and announced to his army : "I am now about to take you to the immortal phalanx which the Emperor is leading to Paris." After that it was idle for the Bourbons to attempt any 424 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON further resistance. The truth of the situation was expressed in a jesting placard fastened to the Vendome column: "Na- poleon to Louis XVIII: My good brother, it is useless to send me more troops; I already have enough!" The King saw his throne for which he had waited in exile twenty years, sinking beneath him as if in a quicksand. The Emperor was near Fontainebleau, when a torchbearer lighted Louis out of the Tuileries at midnight of Palm Sun- day. For hours afterward, the great palace remained de- serted while Paris, unmoved, silently looked on at the sud- denly shifting scene. Again Napoleon drove into Cour de France, but this time to review a triumphant army where only a few months be- fore he had sat amid the wreckage of his Empire. At nine o'clock that evening a carriage, with a regiment of cavalry as its escort, dashed through the rain and fog into the court- yard of the Tuileries. The coach door was pulled open, the Emperor was snatched from his seat and, with a smile on his lips and with tears on his cheeks, was carried up the grand stairway of the palace. CHAPTER XLVIII THE HUNDRED DAYS 1815 AGE 45 THE Hundred Days stand alone in history. Historians hardly know whether to dignify that brief, but ex- traordinary, period as an epoch or dismiss it as an episode. Surely no other fifteen weeks in the chronology of the world can equal in dramatic interest those which began with the return from Elba in March, 1815, and ended with the battle of Waterloo in June. As the King ran out one door of the Tuileries and the Emperor ran in the other, it was a simple matter to tear away the lilies that had been stitched over the bees on the palace tapestries. The violet also had become a symbol of allegiance to the Emperor. It was in bloom when he left for Elba, and the legend grew that he had promised to return when the violets bloomed again. The faithful, who in secret waited and longed for the restoration of the Empire, fondly toasted the exiled monarch as "Father Violet," or "Cor- poral Violet;" songs were sung to "le Pere de la Violette," and the flower was worn when it would have been treason to wear a red, white and blue ribbon. With the return from Elba and the fulfilment of the prophecy in the legend, the women of Paris wore huge bunches of violets and trimmed their morning caps with them, while the jewellers hastened to manufacture violet pins and brooches. On the other hand, women who were un- swerving royalists dared not open a floral war and pit the lily against the violet; but they wore with impunity eighteen tucks in their skirts as a sign of their loyalty to the fugitive Louis XVIII. 425 426 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON The people who loafed about the throne recanted their solemn oaths of allegiance and their political principles as swiftly as they changed their ribbons and their boutonnieres. The Emperor himself exclaimed, as he saw the politicians and generals who less than a year before had hastened to desert his fallen fortunes equally quick now to forsake the fleeing King, "Just like mankind! One must laugh at them to keep from crying ! ' ' He knew that he had been placed on the throne again by a mere military revolution, and that only a few thousand men, all told, had taken part in the movement. The nation had been only a looker-on. "The people have let me come," he frankly admitted, "just as they let the others go." The French were no longer Bourbon or Bonapartist, and the heart of the rended nation wished a plague on both their houses. The people were sick of glory purchased with blood and longed only for liberty and peace. Amid all the rapid changes which the men who flocked about him were undergoing, the Emperor announced that he, too, had changed. He renounced his dream of conquest, and declared to the allied nations who had denounced him as an outlaw that he accepted finally and forever the narrow frontiers within which they had shut France. At the same time, he ordered that a free constitution be drawn up. The efforts of the Emperor, however, to establish relations with the nations of Europe were met on every hand with scornful rebuffs. The Congress of Vienna had only just fin- ished recasting the map of Europe when he returned to the continent, The consternation caused by his apparition was succeeded by a united determination to beat him down. The armed coalition of 1813-14 was renewed and plans adopted for reopening the campaign with 800,000 troops. France was cut off from the world, her ships being seized the moment they ventured out of port, and her trade and her mails were blockaded on every road that crossed the frontier. Not only was Europe united against Napoleon as never be- fore, but France for the first time was divided in her sup- port of him. Although it was he who had sent up the na- THE HUNDRED DAYS 427 tional securities from twelve francs to ninety-three, his re- turn to power now caused a panic in the stock market. When the corps legislatif was elected after his return, five- sixths of its members were unsympathetic and that body made haste to declare its independence of the Emperor. The coun- try responded as indifferently to his military as to his political measures. With all the efforts he put forth to raise up an army of national defence, it is doubtful if he obtained more than 50,000 effective recruits in the course of the Hundred Days. With these and the troops he inherited from Louis XVIII, he had not quite 200,000 soldiers available for service early in June. Already there were more than 200,000 of the Allies in Belgium, 150,000 Russians and 210,000 Austrians on the march across Germany, and 80,000 Austrians and Italians threatening an invasion by the Mediterranean coast. With the Russian contingent, far more than half a million men were in the field against him and his 200,000. He debated for a time whether to make an offensive or de- fensive campaign, whether to attempt a Napoleonic surprise and fall upon an unprepared and divided enemy or to take his stand at the gates of Paris and there await the invading forces. Finally the more aggressive and more characteristic policy was adopted. Probably the truth is, Napoleon dared not trust the loyalty of France in a war on her own soil, and that when he went forth to meet the Allies beyond the frontier, he sought a quick victory as much for its effect on the French people as upon the enemy. Even as he was going to the front, he was made to feel how perilous was his position at home. The English having landed some muskets and ammunition on the coast of Brit- tany, the tocsin of civil war was rung again in Bourbon Vendee. To stamp out that insurrection behind him, the Emperor had to detach some 20,000 soldiers — 20,000 men who otherwise might have been at Waterloo ! The Allies were fooled by the same old trick that Napo- leon had successfully played at the opening of nearly all his 428 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON wars. The Duke of "Wellington and Marshal Bliicher, com- manding the allied forces in Belgium, contented themselves with watching him in Paris and did not take the trouble to watch his army. As they saw him holding reviews of raw, unarmed militia in the courtyard of the Tuileries, or deliv- ering orations to the corps legislatif, they left their armies carelessly dispersed all over the Belgian country, while they waited to open a great campaign against Paris when the Aus- trians and Russians should have crossed the Rhine. "Bonaparte will not attack us," Bliicher wrote his wife early in June. Even when the French army stood at the frontier, poised for a spring upon the scattered British, Dutch and Germans, and the Emperor was fairly flying to the front, Wellington wrote, "I judge from his speech to the corps legislatif that his departure is not likely to be imme- diate." That letter was penned just five days before the Battle of Waterloo! Napoleon had already stolen out of Paris at dawn of June 12 and he was at Laon in less than twelve hours. On the 14th, he joined his army at Beaumont, the last French town on the road to Charleroi, Waterloo, and Brussels. The Belgian frontier was passed before sunrise on the 15th and the crossing of the River Sambre began at noon. Riding into Charleroi, the Emperor sat down in a chair at the fork of the Brussels and Ligny roads and fell into a sound sleep. He had been travelling from Paris night and day, and had been in the saddle seven hours that morning. Even the cheers of the passing battalions, the blaring of trumpeters and the beating of drums did not awaken him as his army marched by. While he sat there, Ney came up and presented himself for service. The Emperor had so reluctantly and tardily summoned him that the marshal could not join the army earlier. Even now he received a cool welcome, and was dis- missed with the command, "Go drive the enemy along the Brussels road and take up your position at Quatre Bras." The problem of the campaign on both sides was brutally simple. Wellington, still at Brussels, was in command of THE HUNDRED DAYS 429 35,000 British, 45,000 Germans and 25,000 Dutch and Bel- gians — an army of about 105,000 men. Blucher, now march- ing from Namur, had an army of about 117,000 Prussians. If the two armies should unite, they would have a total of 222,000 men, including 175,000 infantry and 25,000 cavalry, supported by more than 500 guns. Napoleon, on the other hand, had been able to bring up only 125,000 men, including 90,000 infantry, 22,000 cavalry and 10,000 artillery, with less than 350 guns. Plainly, Well- ington and Blucher must be kept apart if the 125,000 French were to have any chance to win. That night of the 15th while Ney, in front of Quatre Bras, was held in check only by some Dutch battalions, Welling- ton and his officers were at the Duchess of Richmond's ball, whose sound of revelry in Belgium's capital, Byron has sent echoing down the corridor of time. There in the midst of fair women and brave men, dance orders contended with battle orders until three o'clock in the morning of the 16th, when the British commander, becoming once more the Iron Duke, started for the front after gentle fingers had buckled on his sword. The first necessity of the Allies was to unite their forces. The Prussians already were hurrying along the road from Namur, when Wellington hastily proceeded to concentrate his contingent at Quatre Bras on the Charleroi-Brussels highway. For the purpose of concerting measures, the Duke and Blucher met late in that forenoon of the 16th at a windmill near Ligny. As the two allied commanders sat there on that eminence, Napoleon in the midst of his staff sat beside an- other mill on another hill only a little way across the wheat fields. Between the two mills flows a little brook, the Ligne, and on its banks was a little cluster of houses, the hamlet of Ligny. Even as Wellington galloped away toward Quatre Bras, he could see the French moving down upon Ligny for the pur- pose of stopping the Prussian advance westward. Unlike the thunderbolt he was in other and earlier days, however, 430 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON Napoleon had hesitated and withheld the blow until Bliicher was enabled to assemble nearly 90,000 men against the 70,000 he himself could put in the battle. All afternoon the French artillery poured its deadly hail upon the Prussian masses that held the slope beyond the vil- lage, while the infantry of the two armies trampled the grain fields and wrestled at bayonet length in the narrow, winding lanes, in the churchyard, in the barnyards and within the very cottage walls of Ligny. Then in the waning of a day of sulphurous heat, the warring forces of the air burst into battle. Lightning flashes shot across the dark heavens; salvos of thunder shook the heavy atmosphere; the leaden skies opened and the floods descended upon the embattled armies. Under cover of those bewildering flashes and crashes of Jove's artillery, the Emperor led forth the Old Guard and they leaped the brook and snatched the village. Bliicher 's horse was shot from under him, and he was only saved from capture by the timely appearance of a squadron of' Uhlans. The Old Guard swept on irresistibly over Ligny and up the slope to the windmill, leaving a path through the Prussian centre and the enemy's army broken in pieces. Perhaps 15,000 Prussians and 11,000 French lay dead or wounded on that field of Napoleon's last victory in battle. For as Toulon was written at the top of the red roll of his victories, so Ligny is inscribed at the bottom. The Emperor went to sleep that night in the chateau of Fleuris, congratulating himself that he had opened his cam- paign with a blow as crushing as that of Jena. But there was a fatal difference. While he was winning the Battle of Jena, Davout was winning the Battle of Auerstadt, twelve miles away. Now, while he had been winning the Battle of Ligny, Ney had lost the battle of Quatre Bras, seven miles away. There, with an irresolution foreign to his impetuous temper in his prime, the marshal had dallied with the hours until he was heavily outnumbered. He was seized with the frenzy of desperation when he saw the day slipping away from him THE HUNDRED DAYS 431 and recollected the Emperor's message to him in the morn- ing, "The fate of France is in your hands." He well knew that his own fate also was at stake. Having first deserted Napoleon in 1814, and now the Bourbons in 1815, the hap- less marshal fought "with a halter round his neck," and, waving his sword like a madman, he cried out for the Eng- lish bullets to deliver him from his despair. When night fell, Wellington still held the road to Brussels — and Waterloo ! Napoleon, however, confident that he had put the Prussians out of action and could dispose of Wellington singly and at his leisure, took his ease the next day, the 17th — the day be- fore Waterloo ! He felt sure that the Allies were hopelessly separated, and that the rended Prussian army was in a re- treat on its bases of supply at Liege and Namur. He breakfasted unusually late, and it was not until eleven o'clock that he ordered Marshal Grouchy to take 33,000 men and 115 guns and pursue Bliicher. "While I march against the English," he said, "you will pursue the Prussians." Grouchy objected that it was too late for him to take up the pursuit of an army that had started more than twelve hours ahead of him. The Emperor, however, cut him short, and sent the marshal and his 33,000 men away, never to see them again. Meanwhile Wellington at Quatre Bras was receiving word that the Prussians were by no means retiring from the cam- paign, but were moving northward by the nearest available road to Brussels. The Duke, therefore, ordered his own force to fall back in the hope of uniting with the Prussians farther north. Thus in the afternoon of the 17th, the Allies were marching by parallel roads only eight and ten miles apart. When Napoleon came in sight of Quatre Bras, Wellington was gone, and only a rear guard remained. Lord Uxbridge, the commander of the rear guard, saw him appear on the crest of a ridge, a perfect silhouette against the sky, and cried to his gunners: "Fire, and aim well." But they missed the mark. With Napoleon and his Guard at the heels of Uxbridge 's 432 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON rear guard, there began a wild chase along the Brussels road. Another afternoon storm beat down upon them as pursued and pursuers, dripping wet, raced from hamlet to hamlet. The Emperor, in a fury of impatience, shouted: "Fire! Fire ! Fire ! They are English ! ' ' For it was the first time since Toulon, twenty-one years before, that he had come in sight of a red coat. At half-past six of a cloudy, foggy evening, the Emperor, with the rain streaming down him, came to a rude, one-story roadside cottage, whose proud owner had celebrated his matrimonial alliance with the belle of the countryside by naming it "La Belle Alliance." Out of the darkness in trout of him he heard the cannon of the enemy. Was it only Uxbridge who was firing? Or were Wellington and his army out there in the night, preparing to stand for battle on the morrow? To solve the doubt he ordered several of his field batteries to open fire. And Wellington answered with a roaring cannonade. The doubt was resolved. Napoleon had arrived at the trysting place of fate, and soon he saw the camp fires of the British army flaring in the blackness of the stormy, cheerless n ig lit that covered with its pall the field of Waterloo. CHAPTER XLIX WATERLOO JUNE 15, 1815 AGE 45 NATUEE played a dreary and fitting overture the night before the battle of Waterloo. The skies opened wide, and the 140,000 soldiers of Napoleon and Wellington, without a tent to shelter them from the almost incessant downpour, slept on the sodden earth or stood in groups and drowsed on one another's shoulders. The Duke of Wellington made his headquarters in a house still seen and a room still shown opposite the church in the village of Waterloo, while his adversary stayed in a large farmhouse, Le Caillou, which continues to present its stone gables to the Charleroi-Brussels road. There, lying on his iron camp bed, beneath a gold fringed, silk counterpane and a canopy with green satin curtains, Napoleon dreamed his last dream of victory. At midnight, a courier from Marshal Grouchy came drip- ping into Le Caillou with a. despatch reporting that Bliicher, instead of retiring from the campaign, seemed to be march- ing toward Wavre, and that if this should prove to be the case, he, too, would march to Wavre in order to keep the Prus- sians from joining the British. Although the courier said that an answer was expected, he was sent away without any. Yet one inspiring suggestion then to the uninspired marshal might have made Waterloo spell success. At that same midnight hour, the Prussians, who had al- ready arrived at Wavre, were deciding in a council of war to join the British at once. In two hours more, Wellington received from Bliicher the cheering promise of help and he finally determined to make a stand at Waterloo. While the Duke was reading that welcome despatch at two 433 434 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON o'clock, Napoleon was up and visiting the camp of his rain- drenched army. Peering through the shadows of the star- less night, he traced the flaming lines of the enemy and the black outline of the Forest of Soignes beyond. The Emperor never ceased to express his amazement that Wellington should have risked a battle with his back to that forest. The Duke, on the other hand, always insisted that its tall and well separated trees, its lack of underbrush and its many woods roads offered sufficient facilities for the retreat of a beaten army. The sun of Waterloo rose at twelve minutes of four on a Sunday morning in June. But it hid its face behind the weeping clouds. The rain soon stopped, however, and "at five o'clock," so he dictated at St. Helena, "the Emperor perceived a few feeble rays of that sun which should before setting light up the destruction of the British army." It was Napoleon's habit to strike early. At Montenotte, Austerlitz, Jena and Wagram, he began at sunrise. At Waterloo, he made a fatal delay on the advice of General Drouot, who asked him to wait for the ground to dry so that the gun carriages could be more readily moved. Ever after, Drouot lamented that but for him the Emperor might have attacked Wellington at seven, won at ten, and been ready for Bllicher in the afternoon. The British were promptly in line. While they were forming in battle array, with trumpets blaring, drums beat- ing, and bagpipes wailing, a spirited cavalcade dashed upon the scene from the direction of Waterloo village. It was the Duke of Wellington seated on his war horse "Copen- hagen," and attended by his staff, including the Prince of Orange, the Duke of Richmond and several of the great nobles of Britain. They came upon the battlefield as gaily as they would ride to meet the hounds in a quiet English county. Among them was that unfailing Corsican huntsman, Pozzo di Borgo, who had chased the quarry for twenty years and all over the fields of Europe. There were yet no heroes in khaki, and as he rode his lines, the noble Duke was apparelled like a bridegroom. His cocked WATERLOO 435 hat sported four cockades in the colours of England, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands. A white cravat showed un- der his dark-blue coat. From his shoulders a short blue cloak floated in the air, and his buckskin breeches disappeared into a pair of high tasselled boots. At eight o'clock Napoleon was still leisurely breakfasting at Le Caillou on silver plate brought from the Tuileries. The sun was shining, and a wind was blowing on the marshy field. The Emperor was supremely confident that he would breakfast the next morning in Brussels. "We have ninety chances in our favour, and not ten against us," he declared. He announced that he would hurl Wellington back upon his base at Ostend or at Antwerp — drive him into the sea, as he expressed it. "I shall bring my numerous artillery into play, charge with my cavalry and then I shall march with my Old Guard." He had no thought that the Prussians, whom he had beaten at Ligny two days before, might rally and confront him again that day. Marshal Soult had pressed the Emperor the night before to call in at least some of the 33,000 men with Grouchy, and he urged the point anew at the breakfast table. The Em- peror only scorned his prudence. "Because Wellington has beaten you, you regard him as a great general," he chided his chief of staff. "But let me tell you now that Welling- ton is a poor general, and that the English are poor soldiers, and that for me this affair here is no more than eating this breakfast. ' ' Thus the Emperor sat at table, routing the foe with knife and fork, while his troops were forming on the heights of La Belle Alliance. It was about nine when he appeared be- fore them and for the last time held a review of his army. The eagle crowned standards fluttered in the breeze. The sun gleamed on sabres and lances, on helmets and cuirasses and lit up the brilliant medley of bright red, sky blue and deep green uniforms. Plumes of all the rainbow hues nodded above the shakos, the tiger helmets and huge bearskin caps. The grenadiers and chasseurs of the Old Guard, with pow- dered queues and enormous gold earrings, and with the most 436 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON ferocious moustaches they could grow or even paste on their lips, carried in their knapsacks their full-dress uniforms in readiness for a triumphant entry into Brussels the next day. Dressed in his long grey coat, the Emperor rode down the frenzied ranks in full view of the red line of England, less than a mile away. Wellington, through his field glasses, followed the imperial progress, and the cheers of the French broke in ringing waves upon the British front. Not a shot was fired to interrupt the imposing spectacle, more like a gala entry into the bull ring than the inauguration of a battle for the mastery of Europe. The stage on which Napoleon enacted that closing scene in the pageantry of his career is not greatly changed after the passing of a century. True, the Belgians have defaced the field by heaping up an enormous mound of earth 200 feet high and placing a huge lion on top of it. Half a dozen other more modest memorials rise here and there and the ground is more or less cluttered with inns and shops. The wooded background of "Wellington's army has vanished, while the sunken road has half disappeared, and now a tramway runs along it. Notwithstanding these latter-day intrusions, however, the field of Waterloo is still the same checkerboard of small, well-tended farms, dotted with the same villages, as when the battle burst upon it. One who stands to-day on La Belle Alliance, needs to put forth only a slight effort of the imagination to call back the shades of the two warring armies, victor and vanquished, and see them again facing each other in serried lines. Like Austerlitz, Waterloo was not fought in Waterloo, but two and three miles south of that village, which itself is only ten miles out of Brussels. And, unlike most battles, it was not for the possession of a fortress, a river or a mountain pass. It was a fight to capture a country wagon road, which, like a main aisle, runs through the very centre of the battlefield. From La Belle Alliance, where the French troops were drawn up, this road dips down into the narrow, tumbling valley, WATERLOO 437 which divided the two armies on the battle morning, and ascends the opposite height to Mt. St. Jean, on whose southern slope Wellington's troops awaited the advance of their foe. By being the first on the scene the night before, the Duke had won the toss for the choice of positions and he exercised his advantage with good tactical judgment. He well knew where he was going when he retired from Quatre Bras, for he had examined Mt. St. Jean while passing by, a year be- fore. The original discoverer of Waterloo, however, was, of all men, Hudson Lowe. At least he was among the first to commend its military advantages. When Wellington posted his troops, he cleverly took ad- vantage of every favourable condition in a most remarkable battlefield. Down close to the foot of La Belle Alliance, and at the western end of this tilting ground of the nations, rise the shattered walls of the old chateau of Hougoumont. They are covered with wounds and the very trees are battle scarred. Out in the centre beside the Brussels road, is a group of buildings within a high stone wall. These are the farmhouse and sheds of La Haye Sainte. At the eastern end of the field is the little hamlet of Papelotte with two other hamlets near by. Wellington seized upon all those buildings, garrisoned them, cut loopholes in them and turned them into forts. Thus the stone walls of Hougoumont and Papelotte became in effect the brass knuckles on the right and left fists of John Bull, while La Haye Sainte served him as a breastplate in his finish fight with Napoleon. For it was behind those fortified out- posts that the Briton formed his battle line, which stretched nearly three miles from west to east, from Hougoumont to Papelotte, with La Haye Sainte in the very centre. Not only did Wellington shield his troops behind that strange chain of improvised fortresses. He posted them back of the road to Wavre, which was most peculiarly con- trived to protect them. A high, thick hedge bordered the easterly reach of the highway, where it formed a good screen, and to the west the road sank fully six feet below the field, a perfect intrenchment ready made. 438 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON Back of the road, the Duke stood his soldiers on the slope of Mt. St. Jean, where in every attack the enemy had an up- hill task. He also made the hill serve him in still another way, its crest snugly sheltering and indeed quite concealing his reserves and wounded. The two armies were not very unequal in numbers. Al- though Wellington used to say that Napoleon on the battle- field was worth 40,000 men, the Iron Duke himself was no small reinforcement to any army he commanded. In the out- lines of their lives, the two chieftains were strangely matched. Both were born on conquered islands within a few months of each other; both were educated in French military schools at the same time; both received their commissions and made their first campaigns in the same years. Although their paths never had crossed until they met on the Brussels road, the Briton had for six years fought the marshals of the Na- poleonic school in Spain, and there, in 1814, the Irishman was winning his dukedom while the Corsican was losing his crown. Napoleon had a few more and Wellington a few less than 70,000 troops. The most marked disparity between the forces was in artillery, the Emperor having 260 guns against the Duke's 180. While Napoleon, however, was well satisfied with his army, which was wholly French and fiercely patriotic, Wellington described his own, even after the victory, as "the worst equipped army with the worst staff ever brought together." It is true that nearly two-thirds of his soldiers were untrained. The rest had seen more or less active sendee in the Spanish campaign, but the best of the Peninsular veterans were lost or still absent on the New Orleans expedition. There were only 23,991 British, all told, at Waterloo, just about one-third of the total fighting force. More than 20,000 of Wellington's men were from Holland and Belgium, and more than 20,000 were Hanoverians and mercenaries from other German states. With such a hodge-podge army, Wellington would not have dared fight Napoleon at AYaterloo had he not been as- WATERLOO 439 sured that another army larger than his own was less than ten miles away and hurrying to his assistance. While Grouchy, with his 33,000 French, was actually marching farther away from Napoleon, Marshal Bliicher, "that old devil," as the Emperor called his most persistent and troublesome foe in arms, had been dragging his weary Prus- sians through the mud and making straight for Waterloo. Wellington accepted battle, therefore, on the confident ex- pectation that before the end of the day, he would outnum- ber his adversary two to one. Even while the battle was beginning, Grouchy was sending a message to the Emperor, announcing that he hoped to ar- rive at Wavre in the evening, where he would place himself between Bliicher and Wellington, "who is, I presume, re- treating before Your Majesty!" And he asked what he should do to-morrow. He did not know, poor plodding mar- shal, that Bliicher was fast placing himself between him and Napoleon and that there would be no to-morrow for the army of France. It was almost noon when one of his "beautiful daughters," as Napoleon fondly called his twelve-pounders, tossed the ball that signalised the opening of a battle of untold, unending consequences. That first outburst of thunder from the batteries on La Belle Alliance was for the purpose of covering an attack upon Hougoumont, which Prince Jerome Bonaparte led with reckless daring. Out of the loopholes in the garden walls of the chateau, flames of fire shot into the faces of the ad- vancing French from the muskets of the invisible British garrison. Twice Jerome and his 12,000 men dashed heads down into the blinding storm. When retreat was sounded, after a costly sacrifice, the bodies of the dead who had died in vain lay in heaps about the stubborn walls. The Emperor had ordered the attack merely to divert Wellington's attention from the British centre where he had meant to deal his hardest blow. But while he was yet making ready for that deadly thrust, he discerned a cloud of dust on the eastern horizon, which soon took the shape of an advanc- 440 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON ing column of troops. Soon a scouting party brought in a captured Prussian courier, with a message to the British from General Billow of Bliicher's army announcing that he was marching with 30,000 men to attack the right wing of the French. Biilow, however, was yet a Long way off and when the Em- peror had scut a courier to Grouchy, ordering him to come iu behind Biilow, who would thus be caught between two French armies, he merely revised the gambling odds. "This morning we had ninety points in our favour.'* he said; "we still have sixty against forty." He did not calculate that Bliicher, too, was comin<_ r niton him. Nor did he know that his order to Grouchy would not be delivered until five o'clock, too late to be of any use even had the absent marshal not been hotly engaged at that hour with a division of Prussians left behind ;it Wavre. Returning to his duel with Wellington, Napoleon now launched hi* bolt at the British centre. It was one-thirty when 20,000 French, under a protecting shed of flames from eighty guns, raced across the field, the standing rye falling before them as before a reaping machine. A detachment turned aside to storm La Have Sainte and attempt the cap- ture of that stronghold, while the great body of advancing troops started up the slippery side of St. .ban. Some Dutch and Belgians, whom Wellington had posted in front, broke and fled across the Wavre road and broke upon the British Lines. As the French mounted the muddy slope in pursuit of the fleeing enemy, however, they themselves became a confused mass. Suddenly the British sprang up from their ambuscade behind the roadside hedges and fired at forty paces. Then came a savage hand to hand encounter which ended in the rout of the French column. At the same time another attacking column met its sur- prise farther along where the road suddenly sank below the surface of the field. There the cuirassiers, leading the right of the column, unexpectedly found themselves at the brink WATERLOO 441 of the strange declivity. The undaunted horsemen took the leap down into the road, but as they were spurring their horses up the opposite bank, they saw only thirty feet before them a body of British Foot Guards, descending at a furi- ous pace The French wheeled and fled along the treacher- ous ravine to the Brussels road, whence they escaped from the ^Everywhere up and down the field, the blue line of France was rolled back, and Ponsonby's brigade made a return charge up the side of La Belle Alliance. There the traces of forty of Napoleon's cannon were cut before the audacious Britons could be beaten back by the French lancers, one of whom thrust a fatal spear into the breast of the gallant Pon- S °The Emperor's first blow had utterly failed. After three hours and a half of fighting the contending armies were in their original positions. The rye field, its golden yellow crimson-dyed, had become a graveyard. But the red line of Britain and the blood-drenched walls of Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte had all withstood the onset. Napoleon, nervously pinching his snuff, was fully aroused now to the perils that were fast closing in upon him He knew that the Prussians already were forming behind the screen of the Wood of Paris and another message from Grouchy had dashed his hope that the marshal was at their Retreat might have been prudent. But whither? Face Paris, with its coldly unsympathetic corps legis latif ? * ace France, with its disaffected and rebellious population No- Napoleon's only refuge was victory. He must hasten to break the British centre before the Prussians came. Un- der a cannonade that shook the earth and cracked the skies, 5000 French horsemen plunged down La Belle Alliance, loped across the valley and spurred up the still muddy slope of Mt. St. Jean. There they rode over the British gunners but broke like an ocean wave against the squares of British infantry. Again and again they were beaten off. Another 442 IX THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON drove of 5000 horses swept up the hill and still another drove of 5000 dashed through the hurricane of iron and fire and spent itself upon the steel girt squares. "Will those English never show us their backs?" Napo- leon impatiently exclaimed, as he lowered his field glasses. Four times [Marshal Ney, with increasing madness, sent his horsemen upon Mt. St. Jean and four times they recoiled as from an oven door. They were the must magnificent charges in the spectacle of warfare, and the most futile, since they were neither preceded dot supported b\ infantry. Meanwhile Hongoumont was enveloped in smoke. Its defenders had been driven from the garden into the chateau. Soon its walls were ablaze Prom the fire of the French howit- zers, and the British tied to some small detached buildings, which they held to the last against sword and flame. The fire spread to the chapel, but stopped at a statue of the Virgin which is reverently shown there to this day. The French captured La Have Sainte, that citadel in front of the British centre. It was then, if ever, that Wellington pleaded with fortune. "Bliicher or nighl !" His red line was sagging from the successive blows that had been rained upon it. Here and there were yawning 'japs hewn by the lances of France, and disorder ruled in the British rear, where the stragglers from the front filled the Forest of Soignes with a babel of tongues. Ney's attack was even worse spent than the British re- sistance. He hurried a courier up to La Belle Alliance not far from six o'clock with an appeal for infantry. "Infan- try." the Emperor exclaimed. "Where shall I get any? Would you have me make them?" The battle between Napoleon and Wellington really had come to an end an hour before. And the Duke had won. For he had undertaken to do no more than stand his ground until the Prussians came. When, some time before four o'clock, the head of Billow's column emerged from the Wood of Paris and marched against the French right, Napoleon had abandoned the British to Ney and left him with only 40,000 men to face the more than WATERLOO 443 50,000 soldiers that Wellington still had. For the Emperor had to take a large body of men from his front to save his flank from the Prussians at Planchenoit. The spire of the church of Planchenoit still looks out over the field of Waterloo. In the morning of that battle Sunday, the priest had said mass at its altar. In the afternoon, its yard was reddened with the blood of Gaul and Teuton, the combat raging fiercest about its walls. As early as four thirty, this second battle began with 30,000 Prussians against the 20,000 French, whose vanguard was the Fifth of the line, the battalion that the Emperor had conquered with a glance in the defile of Laffrey as he marched back from Elba. Planchenoit changed masters with lightning rapidity as the village was taken and retaken. At last the French held it so well in hand that the Emperor could turn upon Welling- ton again at seven o'clock. The early summer sun still granted him a respite of two hours when he rode down into the valley, where from La Have Sainte, his eye swept the thin and jagged British line. But there remained to him only 3500 of his Guard. Behind that fragment of his invincible corps, he gathered the wreckage of his army, putting in his last man for one supreme, desperate effort to turn the tide. While he was preparing for the attack, a captain of carabi- neers deserted his ranks and raced ahead through the hail of shot and shell straight toward the enemy. Raising his right hand as he drew near the British, the traitor cried out: "Long live the King of England!" The redcoats lowered their guns before their strange visitor, who now shouted: ' ' Get ready ! Napoleon, the scoundrel, will be upon you with his Guard in less than half an hour ! ' ' The British line closed up and braced itself for the assault. Even Napoleon himself might come, for Blucher, too, was coming, as every bulldog in the pack well knew. Forward moved the little band of French. Even as they went, the van of Blucher 's Prussians burst upon the scene from Papelotte. A thrill of panic ran through the slender ranks of the advancing column of French as they looked into 444 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON the barrels of Wellington's muzzles in front of them, heard Biilow still pounding upon their flank and saw Bliicher mov- ing upon their right. The ringing tones of the master's voice rallied them and aroused their Gallic spirit. Couriers were sent over the field to spread the cheering delusion that Grouchy, too, was com- ing. Now the Guard went forward as steady as if on re- view, led by Ney, his face begrimed with powder, his sword broken, his hat and coat rent by bullets. As he went, the marshal's horse was shot from under him for the fifth time that afternoon and the marshal rolled on the ground; but, struggling to his feet and waving his broken sword, he marched on afoot. When the French came within 200 yards, the British can- non flamed in their faces. Yet the charging battalions did not bend before the yawning guns, but drowned their roar with shouts of "Vive ['Empereur." Sweeping over the Brit- ish batteries, and, sniffing victory at last, they rushed on with quickening pace. Division commanders cried out to Wellington for reinforce- ments to save their troops from destruction. But he had none to give. "Let them all die," the Iron Duke replied as he stood by the elm tree beside the Brussels road. "Hold on to the very last man, so as to give the Prussians time to come up." The French now, near eight o'clock, were close upon the Duke himself when he gave the memorable command, "Stand up Guards and make ready!" The British Foot Guards, who had been lying in wait, sprang from the earth like dragons' teeth and opened a murderous fire at sixty paces. Still, leaping over their own dead and wounded, on came the Gauls to hurl themselves against the pitiless steel, and then stagger back. In that instant when the Old Guard recoiled, the name of Waterloo became forever a synonym not of victory but of defeat. The death cry of the Empire rang out on the evening air : "The Guard gives way!" "The Guard gives way!" For WATERLOO 445 the first time on any field, that lamentation ran through the ranks of France, as the stricken Guard reeled back, caught in a demoralising cross fire from the victorious foes who swarmed about it. Blucher's Prussians were now getting into action and fast working in behind the French, when Wellington rose in his stirrups and waved his cocked hat. At that signal, the whole British army poured down Mt. St. Jean and fell upon the staggering foe. Not far from the spot where France has planted a memorial sculpture of a wounded eagle, Napoleon, sitting on his little white horse by the wall of La Haye Sainte, strove once more and for the last time, to form a martial line. He had only one round of shot left for his battery. But he pieced to- gether a few broken fragments of the Guard and ranging them in three squares for an orderly retreat, he took his place in the centre of one of them. As those frail squares retreated across the valley, with the huge British squares pounding against them like batter- ing rams, they grew thinner and thinner. Soon Napoleon left them, and with a few chasseurs fled the lost field, bitterly to lament in after time, "Waterloo! Waterloo! It is there I should have died!" A British officer yelled to the Guard to surrender. Its commander, Cambronne, was a rude, uncouth son of Mars, who, as a fighting man, had succeeded La Tour d'Auvergne in the honourary post of the first grenadier of France. His reply to the Briton was not at all the polite and even noble observation, "The Old Guard dies, but never surrenders!" which a Parisian journalist substituted for the unprintable original. Yet that was what Cambronne should have said, for that was his spirit. He and the Guard slashed a path to the height of La Belle Alliance. Then he fell from a ball that struck him in the face and became a captive in the hands of the foe. As Marshal Ney had been the first to advance, he was de- termined to be the last to retreat. In the midst of the wild rout, he implored the soldiers as they raced by him to stop 446 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON and turn their faces to the enemy. But life still held its lure for others, though not for him. "If you and I escape," Ney warned Count d'Erlon, "we shall be hanged." Even his hat and his epaulettes were gone now, when, brandishing his broken sword, he rallied his men for one more stand. "Come, my friends," he shouted, "come on, and see a marshal of France die!" But an unkind fate had decreed that he should not die like a marshal of France. In vain he wooed death beside the Brussels road, but only to be caught in the undertow of the ebbing tide of the Empire and swept on to an ignominious fate. The British moved across the valley and mounted La Belle Alliance, where the Prussians joined them. There Welling- ton and Prince Blueher rejoiced together in victory. The Duke's forces were too badly winded to continue the pursuit of Napoleon, and the hard-hating old Prince welcomed the task of bagging the eagle of Jena. Besides he had left his pipe in Paris on the last campaign and lie wished to recover it. As Wellington passed over the field on his way to his sleep- ing quarters at Waterloo, the moon burst through the clouds and lit up the pallid faces of the fallen, who lay in windrows at the foot of Mt. St. Jean. The gardens and houses of Ilougoumont and La Haye Sainte were crowded with the dead, and the well of the old chateau was all but filled with the bodies that had been tumbled into it to clear the ground for the fighting. The losses in the battle were fairly equal. The French killed, wounded, and captured aggregated about 25,000, or one-third of the force engaged. The British, themselves, lost 8500; the Hanoverians, Dutch and Belgians, 7500, and the Prussians 7000, or a total of 23,000 for the Allies. Among the wounded was Pozzo di Borgo, whose slight in- juries, however, did not restrain his rejoicing, "I have thrown the last shovelful of earth on Napoleon's coffin." With the shadow of Waterloo on his brow and in the silence of despair, Napoleon rode through the night, his bridle reins WATERLOO 447 fallen from his hand and lying on the neck of his horse. At midnight he passed over the battlefield of Quatre Bras, where the moon rested like a spotlight upon the bodies of the dead, stripped naked by the ghouls of war and denied either a grave or a shirt to cover them. Arriving at Charleroi at daybreak, he freed himself from the wretched mob of 40,000 to hasten to Paris. His treasure wagon was cast aside, and the populace and the drunken sol- diery plundered its bags of gold. The imperial coach was abandoned and in it a lot of diamonds, which a Prussian major claimed as his booty. As Napoleon re-entered France and left the night of horror behind him, he took heart to argue, ' ' All is not lost. ' ' But a rumour of the catastrophe sped on before him, and a strange hush rested upon the people as the fallen Colossus passed by. CHAPTER L THE CAPTIVE EAGLE 1815 AGE 45-46 ARRIVING in Paris the third morning after Waterloo, with the pallor of a great calamity in his face and a tumult of emotions in his breast, Napoleon alighted be- fore the Elysee palace. He was still covered with the dust of the battle and the rout. His staff were excited and red eyed, their clothes blood-stained and torn by bullets and sabres. There was no appeal from the verdict of Waterloo. Napo- leon complained that if he had been the King of England in- stead of Emperor of the French, he could have lust the battle without losing a vote in parliament. Waterloo was more than a battle lost. It was a catastrophe, a debacle. It was no mere misadventure, no unlucky accident. It was not lost so much by Bliicher's chancing to join Welling- ton as by the junction of those ever invincible allies, cause and effect. On that fatal field, Napoleon reaped the whirlwind. All the mistakes and faults of his life rose before him, as be- fore a drowning man, and inflicted upon him their inexorable penalty. Waterloo was more a moral than a military dis- aster. The Emperor never felt more fit than on the morning of the battle. Never on any field had he more gladly, more con- fidently drawn his sword. As he himself enthusiastically testified, his army surpassed itself in valour. For twelve hours of daylight, he had the heaviest battalions on his side, with more men, more cannon, and more horses than Welling- ton. But in the blindness of self-confidence, he who had laughed at the Pyrenees and the Alps, at rivers and deserts, idled away nine hours because of a little mud that would not have been suffered to delay a football game. 448 THE CAPTIVE EAGLE 449 If he had to fight three battles at once, it was only because he neglected his opportunity to fight them one at a time. From sunrise until four-thirty in the afternoon, Wellington alone stood before him. Billow's Prussians did not come up until four-thirty. It was seven-thirty and later before Bliicher's army appeared on the field. Now, when, for the fourth time in four years, the Emperor returned to Paris in defeat and without an army, patriots despairingly turned away from him and time-servers shunned the victim of ill luck. "Why," Fouche complained, "the gamester can 't even win a play any more ! ' ' While that im- mortal sleuth crept about, plotting to make himself the Tal- leyrand, the manager of this second downfall, the corps legistatif listened to the disinterested councils of Lafayette and undertook to assume the control of the government. All factions sought by disowning and discarding Napoleon to appease the Allies and arrest their march on Paris. At noon of his second day in Paris, the one-time master of Europe received the blunt notice that the legislative bodies gave him an hour to lay down the sceptre. Once more he took up his pen to write an act of abdication. A pro- visional government of five was established by the legisla- tors, with Carnot and Caulaincourt among its members and the feline Fouche as its president. While that body sat in state at the Tuileries, the dethroned monarch lingered on in the Elysee, almost a stranger at the seat of his Empire. Fouche could not sit easy in his chair while the master whom he had so often betrayed remained only a few hundred feet away. He must exorcise the ghost in the Elysee, and it was Marshal Davout who accepted the delicate task of order- ing away from Paris the man who had made him the Prince of Eckmiihl. The captor of the capitals of Europe retreated from his own capital the Sunday after the Battle of Waterloo. As he went, he passed by the Arch of Triumph, the arch of his star, which looked down upon him only to deride his fallen for- tunes. The late lord of the Tuileries, of Fontainebleau, of Com- 450 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON piegne, of Rambouillet no longer had a roof that he could call his own. No doubt there were still friends who would welcome him to their homes. lie knew, however, that their hospitality to him probably would mean their ruin under the returning Bourbons. In that plight he thought of only one refuge. If he went to Malmaison, which he had given to Josephine, surely no one would punish Ilortense for opening its doors to him. When he left Paris, therefore, he drove to that chateau of the bril- liant days of the Consulate, when all the world was young. But he knew that even that shelter would be denied him in a few days. He was not only subject to Fouche's orders, but the Allies were moving down the valley of the Oise on their march to Paris, far more intent on capturing him than on taking the city. Marshal Blucher thirsted for his blood and longed to shoot him at the head of his Prussian columns. The Duke of Wel- lington objected to any such summary action. "Napoleon does not belong to you nor to me," the Duke argued, "but to our sovereigns, who will decide his fate in the name of Europe. Should they require an executioner, I shall re- quest them to seek some other than me, and I advise you, for the sake of your fame, to follow my example." Captivity or flight was the choice presented to Napoleon. He rejected suicide as a means of escape, and scorned a char- acteristic suggestion from Fouche that he sneak off in dis- guise. Most of his advisers urged him to seek asylum in the United States; Queen Hortense suggested that he should trust himself to his father-in-law, the Emperor of Austria. Caulaincourt proposed that he should choose Russia and accept the protection of his old friend, the Czar Alexander. Napoleon himself strongly preferred England. "Give my- self up to Austria?" he said. "Never. She has seized upon my wife and my son. Give myself up to Russia? That would be to one man only. But to give myself up to Eng- land — that would be to throw myself upon a people." He had reason enough not to seek the hospitality of any of the countries he had conquered. Caulaincourt feared that THE CAPTIVE EAGLE 451 even the English were too embittered by their long struggle against him to give him a generous welcome. "Then, as I am refused the society of men," he replied, "I shall betake myself to the bosom of nature and enjoy the solitude that suits my last thoughts." Thus he expressed his decision to go to America, which he seemed to regard as a semisavage wilderness. As the banished monarch prepared to depart with the little company that had volunteered to share his exile, Queen Hor- tense, who had presided over his home throughout the Hun- dred Days and who was his hostess at Malmaison, insisted on his receiving from her a diamond necklace as the last tes- timonial of her devotion. The necklace could- be easily car- ried and concealed, and in case of need, its stones would bring him $40,000. Cardinal Fesch and Mme. Mere came, as to the cell of the condemned, to say good-bye. The memory of Josephine, which had haunted him throughout his stay at Malmaison, received the exile's last farewell. Alone in her room he held com- munion with the spirit of the dead as he himself was about to enter into a living death. Out on the lawn at Malmaison, a stone has been cherished now for a century. Upon that carriage block, Napoleon took his last step at the chateau and his first step into exile, when, in the waning of the tenth day after Waterloo, he entered the carriage that was to bear him away from scenes so happily associated with his vanished hopes and his vanished glory. Driving to the imperial chateau of Rambouillet, he slept for the last time beneath a palace roof. The next day he re- sumed his journey, which led him through Tours and Niort to the naval port of Rochefort, on the Bay of Biscay. Now as ever when he turned his face to the water, he was confronted with the wooden walls of England, whose ubiqui- tous ships lay at the harbour mouth. Driven forth from the land, even the ocean refused him a haven. Various and equally doubtful projects were presented for running the British blockade. Napoleon's pride rejected the proposal of a Danish captain to conceal him in a barrel 452 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON aboard a merchant vessel, and he hesitated to risk a running fight through the blockading fleet, which a French naval cap- tain offered to undertake. Joseph Bonaparte besought him to profit by their close resemblance and take the cabin he had engaged aboard an American ship, sailing from Bordeaux. Napoleon, however, would not consent to seek safety for him- self at the sacrifice of his brother 's. In the midst of that confusion of counsels, he received peremptory orders to move on once more. On the very day when Louis XVIII re-entered the Tuileries at Paris, the de- throned sovereign went to the village of Fouras, which sits on the outermost headland of the coast. There on the pier of Fouras, some loyal hand has carved the name of Napoleon to mark the last spot on the mainland of France which the outcast Emperor trod before he boarded the French frigate Saalc, and accepted the only refuge left him beneath his flag. Presumably the Bourbons, if he had fallen into their hands, would not have been any more lenient than the Prussians. They did not hesitate to stand Marshal Ney up against the garden wall of the Luxembourg and shoot down that "brav- est of the brave ' ' in the Grand Army because he had followed his soldiers in their break to the Emperor. Labedoyere, the enthusiastic young officer who delivered his regiment over to the Emperor as he was marching on Grenoble, met the same extreme punishment for breaking his oath of allegiance to Louis XVIII, and Lavalette, Napoleon's old-time staff of- ficer, whom he married to one of Hortense's schoolmates at Mine. Campan's, was saved from a like fate only by the clev- erness and courage of his beautiful wife. Mme. Lavalette, having smuggled herself into her husband's prison and changed clothes with him, took his place in the cell while he made good his escape. But the ordeal quite upset the reason of the plucky and devoted woman and left her hope- lessly mad the rest of her days. Another tragedy of the downfall was the death of Murat. The fugitive King of Naples, rebuffed by Napoleon from the shores of France, tried to emulate the Emperor's return from Elba. But he had no sooner landed on the coast of his former THE CAPTIVE EAGLE 453 kingdom than he was arrested. Being tried on the spot and sentenced to death, he stood before the firing squad with an appeal that was characteristic at once of his weakness and his strength: "Spare my face and fire at my heart." All the while Napoleon's own original choice of throwing himself upon the British nation was only gaining in strength. He had always known England as the inviolable sanctuary of unfortunate monarchs and patriots. He had seen it shelter the Bourbons from the storms of the Revolution and of the Empire. In his Corsican youth he had revered it as the pro- tector and host of Paoli, and had his mother not resisted his father's wish to accompany that island chieftain, he himself would have been born under its protection. He knew, of course, that Paoli or Louis XVIII had not, like himself, been an enemy of England. But he would not go to her as the warrior and monarch who had fought her for twenty years. He would even change his name and call himself Colonel Muiron or General Duroc after one or the other of those friends who had fallen by his side. If, how- ever, England should turn him away, he could still adopt his second choice and go to America. Two of his retinue, Savary and Las Cases, were sent to the British ship Bellerophon to sound its commander, Captain Maitland. In his natural eagerness to have the credit of delivering Napoleon over to the government at London, the captain was most cordial if not specific in his assurances. He did not make it his business to tell his visitors that he had been ordered to "take Bonaparte" if he could and "bring him to the nearest English port in all possible haste and secrecy." But Napoleon himself very well knew that his fate did not rest in the hands of a naval captain, and before he went aboard the Bellerophon, he made this eloquent appeal to George IV, Prince Regent of England: Tour Royal Highness: Exposed to the factions which divide my country and the hatred of the principal powers of Europe, I have terminated my political career, and I come, like Themistocles, to seat myself beside the hearth 454 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON of the British nation. I place myself under the protection of its laws, which I claim from your Royal Highness as the most power- ful, the most constant and the most generous of my enemies. Napoleon - . Having despatched that message by a special vessel, which Maitland provided, he lingered only one more day beneath the tricoloured flag. It is fitting that his last day in France should have been the 14th of July, the fete day of the nation. For the fall of the Bastille six and twenty years before opened an era which had closed with the fall of his Empire. On the day after the national holiday, one last cry of "Vive TEmpereur" rang out sadly from the crew of the French ship as Napoleon grasped the ladder of the Bellerophon and, with brow unclouded, passed under the British flag. Al- though he was not received with a salute by the guns, Captain Maitland greeted him as Emperor and gave him his cabin. The captive was not long in conquering the sympathies of his captor. Maitland appears to have found him a delight- ful and fascinating guest, and he heard not a complaining word from him. He walked the deck a good deal. Often he stood alone and silent, his followers respectfully standing apart and at a distance while he gazed upon the unconquered and conquering sea. He seemed, however, to have difficulty in keeping awake, and the only book the captain saw him reading was a biography of the son of another revolution — Washington. After voyaging northward a week, the Bellerophon sighted the lonely, heather-clad tors of Dartmoor. Soon the beauti- ful, outstretched arms of Torbay received the monarch who was sailing away from a throne, even as a century and a quar- ter before they had welcomed William of Orange to a throne. The bay is so Italian in its soft loveliness that it seems alien to the stern Devon coast, and it took Napoleon by surprise. As his eye roved entranced from Brixham to Torquay, he remarked, "It is like a Mediterranean harbour — as beautiful as the harbour of Portoferrajo. ' ' He was to see little enough thenceforth in his second exile to remind him of the beauties of his first. THE CAPTIVE EAGLE 455 After lying at anchor for two days the Bellerophon pro- ceeded to Plymouth. As Napoleon found himself sailing westward and farther away from London he could not miss the probable meaning of this movement. At the Plymouth anchorage, the Bellerophon was sur- rounded and guarded by armed picket craft and the harbour was almost covered with the boats of the curious. People eagerly swarmed from distant parts of the kingdom to the old town by the Plym. Sometimes there were as many as 1000 boats with 8000 occupants crowded about the Bellerophon, struggling, clamouring, and even risking their lives to catch a glimpse of the foremost man of the world walking the deck in captivity. There was an ominous absence of official callers and official information aboard. A dread of imprisonment in the Tower of London arose among the French. Out of the dark cloud of mystery there came whispered hints of St. Helena. The government harshly interpreted the darkest passions of the hour. It is doubtful if any cabinet, however magnanimous its sentiments might have been, would have dared to dally with so high an explosive as Napoleon still was supposed to be. As his custodian, England not only owed a duty to her- self but also had to consider her Allies, one of whom, at least, would have joyed in shooting him down like a mad dog. No one could have known then, as all should be able to see now, that he was an extinct volcano. His power to shake the earth had come from the people and he had lost it. His race was run, his course of conquest was finished and he had but a few years to live. All that is hindsight. And it would have been unreason- able to expect any foresight in the Tory lords, who con- trolled the British ministry of the day. The monarchs of Europe had from time to time made terms with Napoleon, but the aristocracies never had relented in their rage against the scourge of feudalism and class privilege. When they unhorsed the giant and bound him, therefore, they imagined they had overthrown and caught the French Revolution itself. 456 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON After four days of suspense aboard the Bellerophon in Plymouth harbour, a suspense which the central figure bore without any outward sign of the strain, Admiral Lord Keith appeared. Entering Napoleon's cabin, Keith read to him the order that "General Bonaparte" should be conveyed to St. Helena. The distinguished condemned made his protest quietly and in a few sentences. Apparently he did nothing to render the task of his visitor more difficult, for after the interview Keith exclaimed: "Damn the fellow! If he had obtained an in- terview with His Royal Highness (the Prince Regent"), in half an hour they would have been the best friends in Eng- land." The orders of the government allowed the captive to choose three officers to be his companions and a physician to attend him in his captivity. "While the little company that had come with him on the Bellerophon awaited his selection, there never was a more anxious rivalry for his favour when he sat on the throne of France than there was now for the privilege of sharing his exile. When the time came for him to pass to the Northumber- land, which was detailed to carry him to St. Helena, those whom he had been obliged to omit from the list parted from him with demonstrations of grief. Savary burst into tears and threw himself at the feet of his master. He and General Lallemand, for supposed offences of their own, had been ex- cluded from the St. Helena party by the London cabinet and condemned to imprisonment in the island of Malta. "You see, my lord," said Las Cases to Admiral Keith, "that the only persons in tears are they who remain behind." Las Cases had gained a coveted place by accepting the post of secretary, and was added to the group of three officers, who were Bertrand, Montholon and Gourgaud. Before sailing, the members of the party, like any other prisoners about to be booked, were required to surrender their arms and valuables. No one insisted on taking Napo- leon's sword, however, and while the baggage of all was ran- sacked, there was no search of the person. The exiles were THE CAPTIVE EAGLE 457 enabled thus to conceal on themselves some gold coin and jewels. For full ten weeks the Northumberland and her fleet of lesser vessels sailed southward. As they were passing down the coast of France, the French eagerly watched for a glimpse of their native land. Several times a vague shadow appeared before their gaze, but only to vanish before it took form. At last the clouds parted and their eyes were gladdened by the sight of the sun shining on the shore of Brittany. As France faded and finally disappeared forever from his horizon, Napo- leon stood with bared head. Although his officials and servants bore themselves toward him as if he were still in the Tuileries and wearing the crown of Empire, Admiral Cockburn and his subordinates of the Northumberland studiously observed the instructions of their government and took great pains tc ignore the fact that he had ever been more than a general. The former Emperor, who had sat at table with nearly every reigning monarch, did not disdain to dine each day with the admiral and the ship's officers, where he alternately interrogated them on all manner of subjects and recounted his own experiences by flood and field. He walked the deck a good deal, often with the admiral, whose arm steadied him when the sea rolled. He was also in the habit of sitting on one of the guns, which the sailors christened "the Emperor's cannon." Most of the day was passed by him in his cabin, where he at once began to dictate his recollections to Las Cases. "Labour is the scythe of time," he said to his amanuensis, as they thus relieved the tedium of the long trip. His evenings were given over to cards with the admiral or his fellow trav- ellers in the general cabin. The ship paused at Madeira, but no one went ashore. Thenceforth land was not sighted again until one day a dark speck appeared in the sky. The larger it grew the blacker it became. It was St. Helena. At last the islander from the Mediterranean was at his journey's end in the wide solitude of the South Atlantic. CHAPTER LI ST. HELENA 1815-1821 AGE 46-51 AS the Northumberland drew near the end of her long trip, Napoleon watched the billows of the southern sea breaking upon the lonely shores of the last of the chain of islands that so fatefully mark the voyage of his life. Born on an island in the Mediterranean and crowned on an island in the Seine, he took his first wife from an island in the West Indies and won his second in a battle which he launched from an island in the Danube. For the possession of the island of Malta, he quarrelled with the island king- dom of Great Britain and lost a continent. Exiled first to the Island of Elba, he returned to challenge again his insular foe and, losing the battle once more, he now saw from the quarter deck of the Northumberland, the barren and black- ened sides of the island of St. Helena waiting to shut him in forever as within the grim walls of a prison. If he had found it consoling in his Elban exile, the year before, to overlook Europe from the windows of his retreat, St. Helena offered him no such consolation. It is like a raft anchored in mid-ocean. Its nearest neighbour, the island of Ascension, is 500 miles and more away, while it is 1200 miles west of Africa at the mouth of the Congo, 1700 miles east of South America and the coast of Brazil, nearly 4000 miles from Europe at the Strait of Gibraltar, and almost 5000 miles from Paris. Remote and alien as it seemed to him from the moment it first swam into his vision until at the end of five and a half years, his eyes were closed upon it in death, there was yet 458 ST. HELENA 459 a ceitain kinship between him and the rock of his captivity. Even as the irresistible force of a violent social convulsion had lifted him above the level of mankind, so in some awful up- heaval of nature, the fire-scarred stone that forms the island of St. Helena had been torn from the ocean bed and heaped in a mountainous mass, whose jagged peaks pierce the clouds. A more solitary and melancholy eyrie could not have been chosen for the captive eagle. "With an area of forty-seven square miles, the island is only ten miles in length at the longest and seven miles wide at the widest. When the fallen monarch, who had ruled 60,000,000 people came, its popula- tion was less than 3000, mostly African slaves, Chinese, and East Indians, only one face in four being white. Napoleon went ashore on the twentieth anniversary of his entry into a post of command. For it was on the 16th of October, 1795, that he was appointed general-in-chief of the army of the interior in control of the city of Paris. And it was on the 16th of October, 1815, that he landed at James- town, the diamonds in the star of the Legion of Honour glit- tering through the dusk from the breast of his grey overcoat as, with Admiral Cockburn on one side of him and Bertrand, grand marshal of the palace, on the other, he walked to his lodgings in the village. Seated on the back of a little cape pony and escorted by the admiral, he rode away in the morning by a winding road hewn in the rugged side of the mountain, up out of the ravine in which Jamestown sits. When he had mounted to the sum- mit, the village port was lost to view and he looked upon the boundless spaces of the Atlantic. Before him lay the heath- ery plateau with its few squalid slave huts and its gnarled and stunted gum trees and the wild grey steeps of the south- ern slope of St. Helena. It was within that drear horizon that he was condemned to life imprisonment. After visiting and silently inspecting Longwood, a group of farm buildings which the British government had chosen for his residence, he turned back to wait until it could be repaired and furnished for his occupancy. On his outward ride he had seen from the road a little bungalow in a vale, 460 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON surrounded with shady trees and blooming flowers, where the Balcombes, an English tradesman's family, had provided a pretty refuge from the torrid heat of Jamestown. It had seemed to him an oasis in a stony desert, and, with the con- sent of the admiral, he stopped to inquire if he could be sheltered there. The homeless Emperor, who had given laws to Europe from the palaces of Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Milan, Vienna and Mos- cow, asked only for the privilege of living in a summer house or garden pavilion out on the lawn at the Briars, as the Bal- combes called their place, and he was permitted to settle there at once. And although Jamestown was only a little more than a mile away, it never again saw him after he rode out of it that morning following his arrival in the island. December and the tropic summer had come when Long- wood was at last in readiness for him, and he entered upon his life tenancy of the place. This group of one-story buildings, mostly of stone, which his host, the British nation, had pro- vided for the comfort of its most celebrated guest, was only a big cow shed in the beginning and the manure still lay heaped beneath its wooden floors. From a trellised porch, one entered a rather large front room and passed through into what was called the salon, back of which was the dining- room, badly lighted only by a glass door. Opening out of the dining-room on one side was the library, and on the other was the study, off which was Napoleon 's bedroom, with a bathroom behind it. The little bedroom became the exile's sanctuary. There he set up his camp bed and there he placed his portraits and sculptures of the King of Rome and Marie Louise. The most intimate and pathetic touch was lent by the presence on the mantel of a tiny slipper that belonged to the little King. As a reminder of the days of conquest, there hung by the chim- ney a silver watch of Frederick the Great, taken from Pots- dam. No strain had been imposed on the British treasury for the decorations and furnishings. The walls, stained by their former base uses, were covered with brown nankeen. Muslin ST. HELENA 461 curtains hung at the windows, and the chairs, tables and sofas are said to have been such as could be picked up on the island at second-hand. The landscape was nearly as bare as the house. In one direction lay the sea; but the prospect was made somewhat disagreeable by the high trade winds which blew in from the southeast almost continually. In all other directions, the scant verdure and small twisted trees of the valleys wearied, or the huge, bare mountains repelled the eye. And the only neigh- bours in sight were the red coats of the 53d regiment of the British army in their encampment a few hundred yards away, just beyond a ravine. Nor could the captive find solace in the bosom of his house- hold, for that was really more uncongenial than Longwood and St. Helena. If the Tory ministers, when they were choosing his prison isle and his prison house, had chosen his companions, they could hardly have found a group of per- sons better calculated to torment him than the selection made by fate. He himself had scarcely more volition in the matter than he had in the designation of his place of exile. He had to take such as offered to accompany him, for even he could not command men to follow him into a tomb. Three were men with families, and two had dragged their unwilling wives and their , children with them into their vol- untary captivity. Mme. Bertrand went with her three chil- dren only after vainly striving to swerve her husband from his purpose and after failing to drown herself by jumping overboard into Plymouth harbour. The Countess de Mon- tholon, who was accompanied by one child, had still less rea- son for sharing her husband's devotion to the unfortunate Emperor, he having forbidden from the throne her mar- riage to Montholon because she chanced to have two husbands living. Count de Las Cases took his son with him, but he left behind him a wife who seems, in the Count's language, to have been unable to "conceive either the merit or the charm of heroic resolutions and sacrifices." The fourth member of the suite, Dr. Barry O'Meara, was the strangest of all the followers, for that Irish surgeon in the British navy never 462 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON had seen Napoleon until the prisoner came aboard the Belle- rophon. It will be seen that the captive was by no means condemned to solitary imprisonment. On the contrary, the British gov- ernment permitted him to surround himself with an imperial establishment. "When the staff at Longwood was fully organ- ised it comprised no fewer than forty-one persons. Yet Napoleon found himself frightfully lonely in the midst of that great crowd of retainers. He had been doomed from birth, however, to a life-long loneliness and never was lone- lier at St. Helena than when he was on the throne. "The Emperor is what he is, my dear Gourgaud," General Ber- trand sighed. "It is because of his character that he has no friends, that he has so many enemies and, indeed, that he is here in St. Helena." His imperious nature brought him courtiers but denied him friends. He persisted in holding aloof even on a rock in the midst of the ocean, and in the cow shed of Longwood he persisted in maintaining a mockery of court ceremonials, under the direction of a grand marshal of the palace. All his suite were required to array themselves as if for attend- ance upon him at the Tuileries. Even his physician in his last illness had to put on court dress before entering the chamber of death. Every head must be uncovered before him, and all his courtiers were commanded to remain stand- ing in his presence, hour after hour, Gourgaud having to lean against the door to keep from falling, and Bertrand and Montholon nearly fainting under the strain. The imprisoned Emperor was no less exacting in the tasks he set his followers than when he could reward his servitors with great titles and rich estates. His pent-up energies burst forth in a torrent of letters and memoirs. For fourteen hours, Montholon wrote and wrote at his dictation until utterly exhausted, and Las Cases read and wrote for him until his overtaxed eyes failed. He took long English lessons from the Count, but while he learned how to read the extremely unpleasant things the London papers were saying about him, he did not acquire the ST. HELENA 463 difficult strategy of English grammar, as one may see from the only English composition by him which has survived: " Count Lascases — Since sixt week y learn the English and y do not any progress. Sixt week do fourty and two days. It might have learn fivty words, for day, i could know it two tousands and two hundred. It is the dictionary more of fourty thousand ; even he could most twenty ; hot much of tems. For know it or hundred and twenty week, which do more two years. After this you shall agree that the study one tongue is a great labour who it must do into the young aged. ' ' Longwood, this morning, the seven march thursday one thousand eight hundred sixteen after nativity the yors Jesus Christ. "Count Lascases, Chamellan of the S. M. Longwood; into his palac; very press." Even as in his barrack days, so at St. Helena, Napoleon made friends only with books, which always lay thickly strewn about him. Sometimes he sat up all night with them. At other times he lay on his couch and read for hours with- out interruption. In the beginning he prided himself on the fortitude with which he bore his exile. He seemed indeed disposed to make the best of his lot. He commended the very simple prepara- tions Admiral Cockburn had made for his comfort at Long- wood and as he had captivated Admiral Ussher, who took him to Elba, and Captain Maitland, who took him to England, he won over the British officials at St. Helena in his first half year there. The many dignitaries of Great Britain, round- ing the Cape in their voyages to or from India and the east, paid court to him at Longwood as eagerly as if he were still at the Tuileries and felt highly honoured to dine at his table. No doubt he was then cherishing some pleasing illusions about his future, hoping that a new ministry in London might relent and permit him to live in England, or even that the allied sovereigns might find it necessary to recall him in order 464 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON to still the rising waves of another great revolution. But it was his misfortune to have remained a live and exciting politi- cal issue throughout Europe. Thus he continued to arouse the fear and hate of his enemies when otherwise he might have excited their compassion and appealed to their magnanimity. Although he was utterly overthrown and marooned in the ocean, the crowned heads could not lie easy on their pillows while party factions at home championed his cause. In England, Lord Holland and some of the foremost men in the opposition party were his stout defenders. But the more his case was agitated the more rigorous his treatment became. While St. Helena was not a paradise without a serpent be- fore the advent of its new governor, it quickly took on an unhappy resemblance to a penal colony after the arrival of Sir Hudson Lowe, in April, 1816. For reasons of their own, the Tory ministers had singled out this honest but narrow person to be Napoleon's custodian and given him a salary of $60,000 a year. Coming directly from those who chose him, presumably Sir Hudson brought specific instructions to tighten and shorten the chains of the imperial prisoner. Napoleon's instincts were aroused against the governor the moment he glanced at his unprepossessing countenance and looked into an eye that seemed to him "like the eye of a hyena caught in a trap." As their interviews grew stormier, Napoleon grew more and more averse to exposing himself to those provocative encounters, and after their sixth meeting, in August, he announced that he would never in the future receive the governor. And he kept his vow. Al- though the two men continued to dwell on the same little speck in the sea for nearly five years more, no word ever passed between them again. Thenceforth Lowe enforced without gloves the increasingly harsh orders from London. That the fallen Emperor might hold his court no longer and freely practise his magnetic art upon the too susceptible British voyagers, no one was per- mitted to visit Longwood without the governor's permission. That the prisoner might not seduce with his wiles the inhabit- ants of the island and by their aid overthrow the British ST. HELENA 465 naval fleet and army garrison, he was forbidden to enter any house or speak to any one on the road except in the presence of a British guard. At the same time the white residents were warned that if one among them should speak or write to any person in the Longwood colony he would be deported, and any black person so offending was threatened with 100 lashes on his back. All letters to or from Longwood must pass through the governor's hands and be read by him. The British ministry and the governor were constantly pursued by the fear that Napoleon would escape his double prison walls, formed by the sea and the mountains. It is true he could have made his way from Longwood only by a causeway twenty feet wide across a deep ravine, where half a dozen sentries could stop him, and he could have left the island itself only by embarking at some one of the three or four natural harbours on the precipitous coast, where gun- boats always were on guard. Nevertheless Lowe lined those little harbours with land batteries and drew around Longwood a wall of bayonets and howitzers. At sunset the guards closed in upon the door- yard, and through the night, sentinels stood about the house itself. On the heights overlooking the country, watchmen were posted with a code of signals that enabled the governor to know of every move Napoleon made from the moment he stepped out of his door. Yet no evidence has been found that he had any thought of attempting to escape or gave a word of encouragement to the several fantastic plans for liberating him, which were mostly hatched in the United States and which kept the British in a continual state of alarm. In the first place, he never, even while he lingered in France, fancied the idea of going to the United States. America was too far from Europe in those days to favour his sudden reappearance on the scene, such as he made from Elba, and probably it seemed too soundly demo- cratic to appeal to his imperial ambitions. And no doubt his ego shrank with terror from the prospect of sinking into the condition of a free but undistinguished inhabitant of the re- public. 466 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON It is certain that he would rather be the first prisoner in the world if he could no longer be the first sovereign. As he lost hope of clemency, he took on the hope of becoming a mar- tyr in the eyes of Europe and of posterity, and he made the most of the liberal opportunity the British ministers gave him to appear in the light of a persecuted man. Thenceforth it was a duel between him and his jailor. "My martyrdom," he really rejoiced, "will do more than all else to restore the crown to my son." And it is within the pale of possibility that the uninspired Tories who inspired Sir Hudson Lowe were the creators of the Second Empire. As a protest against the restrictions and espionage pre- scribed for him, Napoleon shut himself up in Longwood. For four years he did not mount a horse. As his health began to fail, he stayed indoors for long periods, when he could not be seen by his British guards. He not only de- clined to see Lowe, but when the commissioners of France, Austria and Russia came to take up their residence at St. Helena, for the purpose of keeping their governments in- formed, he also refused to exhibit himself to them. Count Balmain of Russia thought indeed that he caught a long-dis- tance glimpse of him one lucky day, and Baron Sturmer of Austria and Count Montchenu of France were sure that on another fortunate occasion, as they were hiding in a ditch, they saw through their telescopes a small man in a three- cornered hat. The poor commissioners never were able to get a close view of him to reward them for their years of exile on the island. The great powers being thus baffled and mocked, Pozzo di Borgo found an opportunity to thrust his stiletto once more into his old Corsican foe. Pozzo urged the outwitted govern- ments to insist that Napoleon should be compelled to show himself to his keepers twice a day, and Europe took up the demand and thundered it. Nevertheless, the lone prisoner of Longwood, standing at bay in his hut, defied the nations. He was ailing and keep- ing to his room at the time, and he sent out the warning to Lowe that rather than submit to this new ignominy he would ST. HELENA 467 die at the threshold of his chamber. Nor did he ever yield the point, and a British army captain was charged with the duty of peeping in at him through the windows. Notwithstand- ing he peeped day after day, some days keeping his eyes glued to the panes for twelve hours, the captain could not be posi- tive that the naked figure he saw coming from the tub was Napoleon's or that the hand he saw stropping a razor another time was the veritable hand that once ruled Europe. More- over, there were weeks when the peeper could not even offer a surmise as to the presence of the prisoner, and Montholon taunted Lowe with not knowing positively for two months that Napoleon still was at Longwood. When his health improved, the recluse emerged from his retirement in the winter or tropical summer of 1819-20 and, with a spasm of his old energy, took to gardening. Appear- ing at sunrise every morning and ringing a big bell, he sum- moned the entire household to the new task, in which they were aided by a gang of Chinese labourers. Under a broad- rimmed straw hat and in his dressing gown, he commanded the workmen with his walking stick, and sometimes himself took in hand a spade or a watering pot. Fortifications were thrown up to defend the garden plot from the fierce winds of the sea and cisterns dug to catch the rains. An orchard was set out and an avenue of willows projected. He also indulged again in a little horseback exercise. Devoid alike of a sense of humour and a sense of propor- tion, the governor and his restless taskmasters at London in- sisted no more sternly on keeping Napoleon from returning to his throne than that he should not be the titular Emperor even of the cow shed of Longwood. The prisoner offered to adopt the name of Colonel Muiron or Baron Duroc, but the London government seemed to think it was the prerogative only of royalty to wear an incognito. A book inscribed to him by the imperial title was confis- cated and some chessmen, which were sent to him as a gift, were threatened with the same fate for a time because an N and a crown were carved on them. Even some green and white beans, which Montholon gave to the French commis- 468 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON sioner, fell under Lowe's suspicion and he gravely debated in two letters to his superiors in London whether they were not a dangerous allusion to the colours of the Bonapartes and the Bourbons. The government surely was not without some justification in objecting to the yearly expenses of Longwood out-running the liberal limit of $50,000 a year. When, however, a mem- ber of the suite reported that a resident had expressed his envy of the exiles, who had beef every day while the poor islanders could indulge their appetite for it only three or four times a year, Napoleon laughingly replied, "You ought to have told him that it cost us several crowns!" Upon Lowe insisting that the excess above the $50,000 allowance should be met out of Napoleon's own purse, the prisoner broke up his silver plate and sent hundreds of pounds of the frag- ments in baskets to be sold at Jamestown. The governor went more directly at what was perhaps the real object of his superiors in this agitation when he began to arrest and deport the members of the Longwood house- hold. First he arrested Las Cases on the charge of having attempted to smuggle a letter out of the island and the Count was deported. Finally he took away the prisoner's physi- cian, Dr. O'Meara, whose habit of double dealing gave the governor the desired pretext. O'Meara's successor, Dr. Stokoe, another surgeon in the British navy, quickly fell un- der Napoleon's spell and, arousing the governor's suspicion, he was court-martialed and dismissed from the navy after nearly twenty years' service. One of the charges preferred against the doctor was that he had refused to employ the words "General Bonaparte" in his reports from the sick room, for now Napoleon was a painfully sick man, and had designated him simply as "the patient." Meanwhile General Gourgaud, after vainly trying to get up a duel with Montholon, voluntarily sailed away to Europe, but with a secret communication from Napoleon in the soles of his boots. The Countess de Montholon also returned home. Before three years of the exile had passed, a full half of the little Longwood colony had succumbed to homesickness and The Last Days of Napoleon, by Vela The Camp Bed ox Which He Died (Now cherished at Malmaison ) ST. HELENA 469 gone away. The prisoner fancied that in the end no one but Marchand would remain and he said to his valet: "You will read to me and you will close my eyes. ' ' So it might have been had he lived a little longer. For Montholon keenly felt the absence of his wife, and he and the Bertrands, too, were appealing for substitutes to relieve them when happily death came to the relief of the exile him- self. In much of the latter half of his more than five years of exile, Napoleon was in the painful throes of cancer, although his disease was not discovered by his physicians. The bitter- ness of the duel that never ceased to rage between him and London cut him off from the sympathy and consideration of the British government, and even to the last it was supposed that he was only shamming. A political motive was sus- pected in his every action. When complaint was heard of a swarm of rats that invaded Longwood, running about the Emperor's feet, jumping out of his hat when he picked it up, attacking other members of the party and racing and squealing all night, the colonial secretary in London hon- estly persuaded himself that Napoleon must be encouraging and marshalling the rodents in order to give him another grievance. Among all his brother sovereigns the only one to speak a word of pity was he who had the most to forgive. With Christian charity, Pius VII listened to the prayers of the afflicted mother of the prisoner and appealed to the prince regent of England and the allied monarchs for the alleviation of the banished Emperor's hard lot. The British government consented to permit a friendly physician and two priests to go to St. Helena, and Cardinal Fesch chose three Corsicans, Dr. Antommarchi and Fathers Vignali and Buonavita. While Father Vignali heard his confession and at the last gave him the sacraments of the church, the newcomers did not prove to be agreeable com- panions for Napoleon. He remained indifferent to the simple priests and could not give his confidence or his respect to the doctor. 470 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON Doctors O'Meara and Stokoe had diagnosed his ailment as a disease of the liver and he regarded himself as a victim of the St. Helena climate. Antommarchi, however, did not view the symptoms with much gravity. In the levity of his char- acter, this new doctor actually mocked the frightful suffer- ings of his patient, which he fancied were only stimulated in the hope of gaining the sympathy of the world and a return to Europe. When Napoleon told him of the stabbing pains in his side, where cancerous ulcers were cutting their way unsuspected by the five physicians who first and last had attended him, Antommarchi only laughed at him and gave him a drastic purge of tartar emetic that caused the sick man to writhe on the floor. Even in the month before the end, when Napoleon reclined in his chair, stricken and cold, his memory gone and his mind wandering, an English doctor doubted the seriousness of his condition and told him to get up and shave, his beard being long and giving his face an uncanny appearance. The dying man could only feebly plead his helplessness. Lord Bathurst, the colonial secretary in London, was seized most inopportunely with a new alarm and warned Lowe that he had strong reasons for believing that "General Bonaparte" was seriously cherishing an idea of escaping from St. Helena. It was true. The prisoner of Longwood well knew that the hour of his deliverance was fast approaching. "England calls for my corpse," he said three weeks before his spirit sur- rendered it; "I will not keep her waiting." In the sixth year of his captivity, he limped into the draw- ing room to pass his few remaining days. There, while Mon- tholon watch&d by him at night, he heard him murmur in his delirium, "France tete d'Armee!" — head of the army — and saw him suddenly spring up from his cot, the cot on which he had slept at Austerlitz — and at Waterloo. The Count laid a restraining hand on him, but with a fitful burst of that en- ergy which had shaken thrones, the delirious man seized him and dragged him to the floor. It was Napoleon's last struggle, and thenceforth throughout the day, he lay motionless on his little camp bed, thirty inches wide. ST. HELENA 471 It was May 5, 1821. About the dying Emperor, stood his grand marshal and Mme. Bertrand, with their children; Count de Montholon, Marchand and St. Denis, with others of the servants. In the next room, Father Vignali knelt at the altar. The sun was setting behind black clouds which had rolled in from the wind-swept Atlantic and burst upon St. Helena. The furious storm like the roar of mighty batteries, terrified the islanders, who were almost unacquainted with the sound of thunder. The tents of the British Guards at Longwood were blown away and the cordon of picket ships made for the open sea. At eleven minutes before six, when the tempest was beating loudest against the walls of Longwood, the exile made his final escape. As the tormented soul took flight, the calmness and beauty of youth overspread the classic countenance on the pillow, leaving no trace of the restless ambitions and tur- bulent passions that so long had troubled it. Napoleon himself had framed the letter of notification which was despatched to the governor. An autopsy was held by the physicians who had failed to diagnose the fatal disease. They found that the liver was only slightly enlarged but that the stomach was terribly ravaged by a cancerous growth. The heart, which proved to be remarkably small, was removed in accordance with the request of Napoleon, who directed that it should be delivered to Marie Louise. The governor, how- ever, refused to let it be carried from the island until it had been duly released by the British government. A grave was dug in a spot chosen by the Emperor beside a spring and beneath the shade of two willows in a deep ravine, then called the Devil's Punchbowl, but thenceforth more agreeably known as Geranium Valley. Some slabs of stone, torn from the kitchen floor at Longwood, were selected for the covering of the tomb, and the mourning followers wished to carve upon it merely the name, Napoleon. The governor, however forbade the inscription as too imperial, un- less the surname Bonaparte were added, and the stone was left bare. 472 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON The sword of the conqueror and the cloak he wore at Ma- rengo were laid on the coffin, which, on the fourth day after death, was borne from Long-wood in a rude funeral car, and as the Great Captain was laid to rest in the melancholy vale, British guns volleyed across his nameless grave. CHAPTER LII L'AIGLON AND THE BONAPARTES AFTER marching through blood and fire from Cadiz to Moscow, in his ambition to found a Bonaparte dynasty, Napoleon bequeathed to his race only a crown of sor- row and a heritage of misfortune. While he lingered in captivity within the gigantic walls of St. Helena, his son was not less a prisoner in his grandfather's palace at Vienna, and his brothers and sisters, whom he had thrust into the sacred circle of royalty, were branded as outcasts by the old reign- ing families of Europe, who condemned them to wander over the earth with their trunks for their thrones. If those parvenu princes and princesses were despised by the triumphant sovereigns, the four-year-old King of Rome inspired a dread in every palace and cabinet of Europe. For he was the eagle's own fledgling and half a Hapsburg besides. Wherefore the little eagle languished a captive in his gilded cage. In imitation of Napoleon, the allied monarchs determined to make themselves the masters of Europe. He had attempted to unite the nations in a great federation, under his sole rule, and they determined to revive the federation under their joint rule. To that end, they formed the celebrated Holy Alli- ance, which was inaugurated by Czar Alexander I and which was joined by virtually all the sovereigns on the continent. With the establishment of that league, the kings thought they had secured for all time the reign of peace under their authority. Only the fear that the French volcano might again burst forth troubled the counsels of the Allies. They were sure there was no danger as long as Louis XVIII lolled on the throne; but they well knew that the King could be ejected 473 474 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON from the Tuileries as readily now as when Napoleon returned from Elba. At the thought that the exiled Emperor might even scale the walls of St. Helena and swim across the ocean, they furiously demanded in their meeting at Aix la Cha- pelle in 1818 that he should show himself to his custodians twice a day. Even when the welcome news came that the prisoner of Longwood lay in the nameless grave beneath the willows, they still could not rest at ease. For there was another Napoleon at Vienna, and all the while they had been hardly less fearful and watchful of him. Their suspicion and alarm obliged his grandfather to immure the boy within his palace walls and his timid mother was frightened into abandoning him. A faint and pathetic shadow on the pages of history is poor l'Aiglon, the pale shade of his mighty sire. That he might be born, an Empress was dethroned and the proudest imperial race in the world gave its daughter to a Corsican plebeian, whereat Emperors quarrelled, Russia was invaded, Moscow burned, and the Cossacks raced across Europe and broke down the gates of Paris. His first wail was heard round the earth; kings kneeling by his crib of gold acclaimed him the inheritor of the loftiest throne and the widest domain of modern times, and the crown of Rome was placed upon his infant brow. Now, while yet in his lisping childhood, his crown and his inheritance were gone, his father was taken from him and he was all but deserted by his mother. Snatched from his home, he was deprived of his French courtiers and servants and carried into a foreign country. There he was not per- mitted to see a familiar face but was surrounded by strangers who spoke a strange language, under orders to wean him from his mother tongue. Living in his grandfather's palace at Schonbrunn at the edge of Vienna, he seems to have had no playmates for fear they would, with boyish frankness, remind him of the destiny to which he had been dedicated in his cradle. Even his little toys were put away lest they keep alive a recollection of his nursery in the Tuileries. His very name was denied and he was no longer Napoleon L'AIGLON AND THE BONAPARTES 475 Francis Charles, but Joseph Carl Franz, being addressed as Franz in the family circle of the Hapsburgs. The proud title of Roi de Rome was likewise changed to Herzog von Reichstadt. In the official patent creating his Austrian duke- dom, his paternity was ignored as if he were the unlawful child of Marie Louise by an unknown father. And, after the manner of illegitimate children of princes and princesses, he did not rank as a member of the imperial family. Even all that remorseless obliteration of the identity of the young Napoleon did not suffice to allay the anxieties of the Grand Alliance. That body demanded that he must be cut off from the succession to his mother's little duchy of Parma and not be permitted even to live with her, where his pres- ence might enlist the sympathy and support of Marie Louise's subjects. The Allies insisted that there must be no possi- bility left for the son of Napoleon to inherit the smallest sovereignty anywhere. Nor was that enough. When the Emperor Francis of Aus- tria announced that he would make his grandson the Duke of Reichstadt and confer certain estates on him and his heirs, that mere suggestion of posterity inspired the Grand Alliance with a new terror. Pozzo di Borgo took the lead among those who demanded that the Napoleonic race should be exter- minated. The Duke must be thrust into the church under a vow of celibacy, or at least be forbidden ever to marry. The grandfather, however, did not yield to that extreme demand. But when he issued the ducal patent he omitted all disturbing references to the heirs of the Duke. With the nations dreading and his own maternal kindred regretting his existence; amidst plots for his assassination, which were fomented by a hatred of his blood, and plots for his abduction, which were concocted by enthusiastic Bona- partists in France ; breathing an atmosphere of mystery and suspicion; detecting concealment in every face and awkward avoidances in every conversation, the little eagle grew up. The creature and the victim of his extraordinary environ- ment, he passed from shyness to taciturnity, from fear to deceit, and became the baffling problem of the corps of solemn 476 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON pedagogues who were chosen to eradicate any dangerous atavistic traits in his nature while they moulded him into an Austrian and a Hapsburg. Notwithstanding the oblivion in which his origin was studi- ously wrapped, he continued for a time to talk of "when I used to be a king," and he persisted in the habit of including his father in his prayers, since no one appeared to have the hardihood to forbid him. When those who constantly watched him were gratified to find his childish thoughts of his exiled parent growing dim, his interest would be revived by some passing boy shouting, "Look at the little Napoleon!" The child knew that his father had been the Emperor of the French, but with a secret shame he suspected that he had been "sent away" as a criminal for something he had done. It was not until he was nearly seven that he made bold to question one of his teachers directly, and this pathetic dia- logue took place: "My father is in the East Indies, I think?" "Ah, no, it is not so." "Perhaps he is in America?" 4 4 Why should he be there ? " " Where is he then ? " "I can- not tell you." "It seems to me I have heard it said he was in exile?" "What? In exile?" "Yes." " How could that be possible?" Thus put off, the little Duke retired within himself again, but only to emerge in a few days with the comment, "Napo- leon must have been a famous general!" And he added the question, "Why is he no longer Emperor?" The teacher re- plied that all the powers had made war against him because he tried to usurp the whole world. Then the boy returned once more to the subject of his consuming curiosity with the remark, "I have always heard he is in Africa." In despair of his forgetting his father, his guardian ap- pealed to Emperor Francis, who commissioned Metternich, of all men, to have a long talk with the youth about Napo- leon. By an equally ironical choice, the Duke was to hear, when he was older, a review of his father's campaigns by Marmont, the first marshal to betray the Emperor. When the report came to Vienna that the exile of St. Helena had been liberated, l'Aiglon was a handsome boy of L'AIGLON AND THE BONAPARTES 477 ten, and had now fully succeeded in penetrating the mystery which had enveloped his paternity. The teacher who broke to the Duke the news of Napoleon's death was surprised that he should shed so many tears for a father whom he had not seen since as a child of three the Emperor took him in his arms and kissed him good-bye, before departing on the dis- astrous French campaign of 1814. But Metternich advised the father-in-law that it would not do to permit mourning for one who had been civilly dead six years. Marie Louise did not pay to the dead exile the tribute of a widow's tears when the Emperor Francis notified his daugh- ter that ''General Bonaparte" was no more. The reply of the ex-Empress who now reigned at Parma as the sovereign of a little Italian duchy, is a strange document: I confess I was extremely shocked. Although I never had any deep feeling for him, I cannot forget that he is the father of my son, and that far from treating me badly, as the world seems to think, he always showed me the greatest consideration, which, after all, is all that one should expect from a political marriage. I was, therefore, very much grieved, and although there is reason to be glad that he ended his unhappy life as a Christian should, I would have wished him many more years of happiness and life — provided they were lived apart from me. That concluding sentiment may sound unnecessarily harsh, but it was the very truth. It would have been most annoy- ing had Napoleon returned to live again with his wife, for in anticipation of widowhood she had given her left hand to Count Neipperg and taken a second husband the year before. Never in his tortuous career did Metternich make a shrewder choice of an agent than when, at Napoleon's -first downfall, he commissioned the Count to alienate the thoughts of Marie Louise from her husband. When Dr. Antommarchi appeared at Parma she declined to see that messenger from St. Helena and asked him to give her first husband's dying message to the second husband. The exile had wished to send her a still more substantial token of his affection and had requested Antommarchi to "place 478 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON my heart in spirits of wine and take it to my beloved Marie Louise." Fortunately for her, Sir Hudson Lowe had vigi- lantly prevented the escape of that organ, but Dr. Antom- marchi wished her to demand it from the Holy Alliance. She was naturally quite upset by this awkward situation. She implored her father to see that the heart was left in St. Helena, because if it should be brought to Parma it would give her a "fresh shock" and besides attract crowds of pil- grims. For two years at a time l'Aiglon did not look upon his mother, and she became to him a stranger whom he met and parted from without emotion. His childhood and boyhood were passed almost wholly among men, charged to take every care that he should not moult into a full-fledged eagle. "While he silently peered out upon a world that had seemed to ban him, musing in the paths of Schonbrunn, or reflect- ing alone in his little log house in the palace park, the Bona- partists rallied around his name and sedulously kept alive his memory in France. When it was suspected that Gourgaud was coming on a mission to the young Napoleon, Metternich ordered that he should be turned back from the frontier. Again, a French emissary tried to open communication with him by tossing into his passing carriage a letter which an- nounced, "Sire! 30,000,000 subjects await your return." But the boy's watchful custodian grabbed the letter so quickly that he thought the Prince had not even noticed the incident. Poets smote their lyres to "The Son of the Man," and, although the Bourbon police raided the Paris shops time and again, perfumery bottles, drinking glasses, snuff boxes, knives, handkerchiefs, pipes and all manner of personal articles bear- ing l'Aiglon 's portrait found their way into French pockets and French homes. Even in Vienna, Metternich was dis- turbed by the appearance of gloves, on which the boy's like- ness had been stamped, and the police seized them. While one faction thus was trying to thrust a crown upon the Duke, another faction was supposed to be planning his assassination, and Savary sent a warning to Metternich that Pozzo di Borgo was a member of a conspiracy to murder the heir of Napoleon. L'AIGLON AND THE BONAPARTES 479 When the French national spirit had sufficiently revived to throw off the Bourbons, and the nation was on the eve of the Revolution of 1830, the Bonapartists besought the Aus- trian government to free the captive eaglet and let him fly to the waiting throne. Many dispassionate observers were convinced that l'Aiglon needed only to appear in France to receive the crown ; but the Hapsburgs dared not consult their own family interests and gain the French throne. Thus in spite of all the dreams and schemes of the Bonapartists, not l'Aiglon but Louis Philippe of the House of Orleans profited by the Revolution and became the Citizen King of the French. At that time the Duke was preparing to enter upon a mili- tary career under the Austrian flag. As he impatiently ap- proached the end of his tutelage, his teachers sounded many alarms and apparently were extremely apprehensive about his future. His chief tutor described his character as weak and his education imperfect, speaking of his "want of bal- ance," his "unbridled passions and obstinacy," and his "crude and distorted ideas." The pedagogue did not how- ever, make all the entries on the debtor side of the Duke's ledger. On the contrary, he conceded his "engaging appear- ance," his "fascinating and often impressive observations" and "all that stamps him as belonging to a special order." The Duke himself once or twice dropped his reticence con- cerning his inner thoughts and left us a fleeting view of the ambition that glimmered within his prisoned body. When he was sixteen he received a letter from Count Neipperg urging him more diligently to study the French language, which he had all but lost. The Duke replied approvingly to the Count, whom he probably never suspected of being his stepfather: "It (French) is the language in which my father gave the word of command in all his battles, in which his name was covered with glory and in which he has left us unparalleled memoirs of the art of war, while to the last he expressed the wish that I should never repudiate the nation into which I was born." Again he vowed, "The chief aim of my life must be not to remain unworthy of my father's fame." On another occa- 480 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON sion he said to a man in tones of deepest gratitude, "You defended my father 's honour at a time when all men vied with one another to slander his name. I have read your 'Battle of Waterloo,' and in order to impress its every line on my memory I translated it twice — into French and Italian." At twenty the Duke was removed from the custody of his teachers, but only to be placed under the surveillance of a group of army officers. Yet the Hapsburgs pretended to be- lieve that amid all those fetters they were really rearing an eagle, another Napoleon who, at the head of the Austrian army, would prove himself the first soldier in the world. His sour old preceptor-in-chief was sure that his pupil could be made "the worthy heir of his father's fame," and "a pow- erful upholder of the Austrian state." On every hand un- bounded hopes were professed of the soaring heights which he would achieve. Yet the Emperor and Metternich dared not let him go to Prague or leave Vienna for fear the little eagle might homeward fly ! At court balls his appearance aroused curiosity such as no Hapsburg excited. His beautiful face and ready wit con- quered men and women alike. As he went to his barracks, the Viennese stood at their windows to see the tall, distin- guished, and nobly seated horseman gallop by. The soldiers broke the decorum of the drill ground to greet him with ring- ing cheers whenever he presented himself before them. The young officer displayed so much zeal and generally such a fiery temperament in his military duties that he neglected to rest and slighted his meals. His physician counselled pru- dence and warned him that he had a spirit of iron in a body of crystal. For the youth had grown too fast and he had the too narrow chest of the Hapsburg race. After an ailing time in bed, when his physicians failed to detect his tubercular symptoms, he went driving on the Prater. It was a raw cold day in the spring of 1832 and, his carriage breaking down, he started to walk home but sank fainting in the street. When he returned to his sick bed he quickly fell a prey to tuberculosis. Week after week he strove for life with rapidly increasing L'AIGLON AND THE BONAPARTES 481 feebleness. Still his mother, presumably absorbed in her new family at Parma, did not come to see him. Afterward when she did visit Austria, she tarried with her father at Trieste and long deferred the remaining short journey to Vienna. When Metternich visited the Duke and saw what a "terrible wreck" he was, he wrote to the Emperor insisting that Marie Louise must hasten to the side of her son. Only then did she awaken to her maternal duty, so much had she grown apart from her old life and from her boy. The last night came, when the soul of l'Aiglon beat against the wasted and broken bars of its bodily cage. He lay in the great frescoed room where, after the victory of Wagram, his father had dictated terms of peace to his grandfather and had dreamed of demanding a daughter of the Caesars to give him an heir to his empire and his glory. Marie Louise slept, and only a valet, not even a doctor, watched and heard the de- lirious murmurings of the dying youth. "Call my mother! Call my mother!" he hoarsely whis- pered as the dawning summer day lit up the big, empty room, and he felt himself sinking with no hand but a valet's to grasp. It was not thus that he had come into the world. Then the dignitaries of an empire crowded about the bed; Paris anxiously listened for the 100 guns of the Invalides and all Europe hearkened to his birth cry. Now he was sighing away his poor, fruitless life in a deserted chamber. The valet called a member of the Duke's staff and a physi- cian. They, however, hesitated to break in upon Marie Louise's sleep and the mother was not summoned until her boy 's lips were silent and his eyes fixed. Kneeling by his bed- side at the administration of the sacrament of extreme unc- tion, she rose only when told that l'Aiglon had taken flight and was free at last. She had hardly more than gone when the palace crowd began to stream into the chamber and seize upon souvenirs of the dead. In an hour they had almost stripped his room, carrying off his sticks and whips and ruthlessly snipping his yellow curls until his head was shorn of most of its hair. When death thus claimed the son of Marie Louise it brought 482 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON a strange revenge to the memory of the divorced Josephine. For now her grandson, Louis Napoleon, the only surviving son of Hortense, became the heir to the overturned throne of the Empire and the hope of the proscribed and scattered Bonapartes. At the fall of Napoleon, Mme. Mere in her refuge at Rome had become the real head of the family. In prosperity her children had smiled at the prudent counsels of this simple, thrifty woman who in poverty, had reared them by patching and scrubbing. When adversity came once more they turned to her again and placed themselves under her stern maternal rule. She had saved more than any of them from a disaster which she had always foretold, and they no longer were ashamed of her parsimony. To Napoleon she offered all she had, because she said she owed it all to him. "What does it matter?" she argued. "When I shall have nothing left, I shall take my stick and go about begging alms for Napoleon's mother." Mme. Mere was seventy-one when called to mourn the death of the Emperor. It was her sorrowful fortune to survive many who were dear to her. Her daughter Elisa, the former Grand Duchess of Tuscany, died the year before, and her daughter Pauline, the Princess Borghese, four years after Napoleon. Death next claimed l'Aiglon, her heir, the rose and expectancy of her old age. Then Saveria, the long- time companion who in plainer days had shared the house- hold labours at Ajaccio, was taken from her. As unbending before the frowns as she had been before the smiles of fortune, sustained by her maternal pride in having given to the world a master, Mme. Mere remained an active and familiar figure in the streets and parks and churches of Rome until, at 80, she tripped and broke her hip. For six years more she tarried, a cripple in a world of graves. Ly- ing at full length on a mattress in her carriage, she persisted for a time in driving about the noble city. At home in her old palazzo on the Corso, which still is marked out on the guide books of Rome, her favourite post was by a window, and Romans and travellers from all parts of the world L'AIGLON AND THE BONAPARTES 483 paused in the Piazza Venezia to gaze up at the mother of Napoleon. Blindness was added to her afflictions, but with a motherly smile she turned her sightless eyes still to the bust of the Emperor, always by her side. "lam indeed a Mater Dolorosa," she sighed, as she called again and again the roll of her dead, until at last the hand of mercy wrote her own name upon it. Four sons and a daughter outlived this mother of kings. Caroline and Lucien, who are believed to have died, like Napoleon and like their father, of cancer of the stomach, and Joseph and Louis fol- lowed her in the course of ten years ; but Jerome lagged super- fluous, well into the Second Empire. Perhaps Marie Louise's closing years were no less tragic than her mother-in-law's, if the story of them could be read with the eye of sympathy rather than mocked by a sense of the ridiculous. Count Neipperg, dying three years before l'Aiglon, the widow's grief seemed inconsolable, although two of their three children remained to comfort her. For several years the Count's place at the head of the ducal government was filled by a temporary selection. When it became neces- sary for Metternich to choose a permanent successor, his choice fell upon Count Bombelles, whom he described as "a man strong enough to influence the weak character of the Archduchess Marie Louise." Again the discrimination of the great statesman was abun- dantly verified. For Bombelles, who had been a French emi- grant in revolutionary and Napoleonic days, and was now a widower of forty-nine, was fairly dragged to the altar by the enamoured Marie Louise, six months after entering her service. The Count was amazed by the Duchess' proposal and only obeyed it because it had the force of a command from his sovereign. Since it is not possible to make a romance of Marie Louise 's life, it were well not to dwell upon it longer. She died at Parma in her fifty-seventh year, having survived the first of her three husbands twenty-six years. The story of Napoleon's dynastic ambition fittingly closes in a melancholy dusk, which wraps with its gloom the couches 484 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON of the ill-fated Hapsburgs. From a long, narrow, bare hall beside the Capuchin church in the midst of Vienna, a blue- eyed, blond-bearded monk in sandals leads the waiting pil- grim down a dark cellar stair to a drear vaulted chamber where Austria's imperial dead for 300 years lie in sim- ple bronze coffins. Many of them are scattered about the floor as if but pausing on their way to the grave. Only here and there a monument rises dimly in the twilight specially to mark the resting place of some emperor; but the most con- spicuous tomb of all is that of the woman who proved herself more of a man than any of her race, Maria Theresa. Maximilian is there among his kindred, thanks to the Aus- trian warship which lay by the Mexican shore, helplessly waiting to bear him home when he should have paid the pen- alty of his imperial dream at Queretaro. So, too, are the Empress Elizabeth, the guiltless victim of an assassin, and her son, the Crown Prince Rudolph, enshrouded in the tragic mystery of his death. In an elevated sarcophagus sleeps the Emperor Francis, with four metal coffins lying on the floor beside him. Those compan- ions of the Emperor are not, however, the four wives, who, in succession, shared his throne. At his head and feet lie two children, and on either side of him Marie Louise and l'Aiglon, the latter booted and spurred, and in his Austrian uniform. In death the little eagle's paternity was not disdained or denied. The Hapsburgs were not ashamed to confess on his coffin plate that the blood of Rudolph and the Corsican mingled in his veins, and the inscription boasts that he was King of Rome before he was the Duke of Reichstadt. On Marie Louise's plate Napoleon alone is acknowledged among her husbands, for no other title to remembrance had she. It was not there among the Hapsburgs but among the Bour- bons that the Emperor meant his Empress and his heir to find their sepulture. Yet even at St. Denis they would not be in prouder or more ancient company than beneath the old church in Vienna. And those glory-loving Frenchmen who would bring l'Aiglon back to place him beside his father in the Invalides would do better to let him alone in his captivity. CHAPTER LIII ACROSS A CENTURY WHILE the body of Napoleon lay in its lonely, un- marked grave at St. Helena his spirit conquered Europe anew and mounted again the throne of France. The peoples who had overthrown his Empire soon found to their sorrow that they had exchanged a brilliant for a stupid despotism. The more they saw of the little heredi- tary tyrants who supplanted him the more they lamented the downfall of the great tyrant. The pledges they had received from their monarchs in the wars of liberation were ruthlessly broken and something like a royalist reign of terror was in- augurated by the Holy Alliance. That federation, that United States of Europe, under the presidency of the Em- peror of Austria and with Metternich for its premier, really became a league against popular rights and progress every- where, and the armies of the continent were converted into an international police force for the suppression of liberty. In his will Napoleon had said, ''It is my wish that my ashes may repose on the banks of the Seine, amid the French people whom I loved so well." That the body of the exile might be rescued from alien soil and rest by the Seine was a growing national desire among the French when, as a last resource, the Orleanist King, Louis Philippe, resolved to bring it back in the hope that his fading crown might borrow some glory from the imperial dust. And England having gra- ciously consented to release her captive, the King sent his brother, the Prince Joinville, to St. Helena to escort the Em- peror home. In the Prince's party were Generals Bertrand and Gour- guad ; Marchand, the valet ; St. Denis, and three others of the old servants at Longwood. With them also was the son of Las Cases, who was now to revisit in manhood the sombre scenes 485 486 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON of his boyhood. Still another member of the pilgrimage was the son of Bertrand, who was born in exile, when his mother boasted at his birth that she had received one visitor without asking permission of the British government. The sight of their prison house only deepened the unpleasant memories it had left with the one-time prisoners of St. Helena. They returned to Longwood as to a shrine of their hero, but they found that it had reverted to its original use and again become a stable. Horses, cows, and pigs had been turned into the Emperor's study and bedroom and in the death chamber a farmer winnowed his grain. The grave of Napoleon, however, still was guarded by his zealous captors, as if determined that even his ghost should not escape them. When the visitors made their pious pilgrimage down into Geranium Valley, they found a British soldier posted there on a sentry duty that never had been omitted night or day in the more than nineteen years that the captive had slept beneath the willows. Reverently the bare, uninscribed gravestones were removed and the coffin was lifted out of the brick grave. "When it was opened, they who had thought to see imperial Caesar dead and turned to clay, drew back in astonishment and awe at sight of the Emperor, with his Jove-like brow, lying at ease and lifelike, in the green coat of the chasseurs of the Guard, the cross of the Legion gleaming on his breast with undimned lustre. On a December day in 1840, Paris opened wide her gates to receive Napoleon, as if he were the still living conqueror re- turned from a victorious campaign. Mounted upon a stately funeral car and escorted by the aged veterans of the Old Guard, his body was borne in triumph under his Arch of the Star and down the Champs Elysees, across the Place de la Concorde and over the Seine to the Hotel des Invalides. Beneath the gilded dome of the Invalides, the King and the royal family, in full court splendour, awaited the arrival of the heroic dead. The hush was broken at last by a chamber- lain who dramatically entered and thrilled the distinguished assemblage with the announcement, "L'Empereur !" ACROSS A CENTURY 487 Instantly monarch and princes, generals, statesmen and courtiers rose to their feet; but one among them feebly sank into his chair again beneath the weight of his nearly ninety years. This was Moncey, governor of the Invalides, who was the last marshal of the Empire to give up the defence of the capital when the Allies surged against its walls in 1814. And now when no drop of Bonaparte blood courses beneath a crown, the Emperor still is enthroned there under the golden dome of the Invalides. That vast soldiers' home has lost the purpose to which Louis XIV dedicated it when he opened it to the wrecks of his battles. It has become instead a great shrine of war, whose chief deity is the martial Emperor of the French. The magnificent tomb is in one of the two chapels of the immense pile, which is mainly given over to the exhibition halls of a museum, crowded with the jumbled relics of ages of warfare. Always the visitors to the museum throng thickest about some Napoleonic souvenir : the rude funeral ear which bore him to his St. Helena grave, a gift from Queen Victoria; a simple wooden settee, which was the favourite seat of the throneless monarch in his exile ; the walking stick which supported him who once had carried the weight of em- pire on his shoulders; the rough, frightfully rough, draft of his appeal to the Prince Regent before going aboard the Bellerophon, and other of his undecipherable scrawlings; the writing table upon which he poured out his dreams while a hungry lieutenant at Auxonne ; his camp bed, camp desk and camp bookcase and the whip and sword and gun of the King of Rome. But the grey overcoat, the green undercoat, the white breeches and the black chapeau of the conqueror draw the curious closest and hold them longest. In the chapel of St. Louis a silvery bell tinkles the half hours among the tombs in the Aisle of the Brave, where the soldiers of France sleep in a timeless eternity. There lie Mar- shals Bessieres, Moncey, Serurier, Oudinot and Jourdan. There also is the heart of Kleber, which the unerring knife of an Egyptian assassin found, and so, too, is the heart of that first grenadier of France, La Tour d'Auvergne. 488 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON It is strange that of Napoleon's twenty-six marshals only- three, Lannes, Bessieres, and Poniatowski, should have met a soldier 's death and that all but eight should have died in their beds. Four were killed in the period of their master 's down- fall, Ney by the Bourbons, Murat by the Neapolitans, Brune by a mob and Berthier by falling from his window, while Mortier was struck down by a bomb thrown at King Louis Philippe in 1835. Massena, Augureau, Perignon, Kellerman and Lefebre did not long survive the Empire, and died before Napoleon. But thirteen, or precisely one-half of the marshals outlived the Emperor, and Grouchy, Victor, Oudinot, Marmont, Soult, Moncey and Bernadotte were still living when his remains were brought back from St. Helena. The Chapel of the Dome, in which Napoleon lies, was erected by the Grand Monarque as the Royal Church in the Invalides, 150 years before the usurper of the Bourbon throne found his grave in front of its high altar. It was the Em- peror himself who converted it to a mortuary purpose, when he brought to the chapel the body of Turenne and the heart of Vauban, those two marshals of Louis XIV, and gave them sepulture there. The lofty wooden dome, with its now neglected and shabby gilding, rests like a gigantic helmet on the tomb of Napoleon, which sits beneath the very cupola and in an open circular crypt, twenty feet below the floor of the church. As if to armour him against invaders of his quiet realm, he lies in no less than six coffins of oak, mahogany, ebony, lead, and tin, which in turn are guarded within a massive fortress in the form of an imposing sarcophagus, standing nearly fifteen feet high. The rare red porphyry of the sarcophagus came from that Finland, which, at Tilsit, Napoleon permitted Russia to take from Sweden. The Czar Nicholas I cheerfully consented to the quarrying of it with the remark that since Russia had overthrown him, it was only fair that she should entomb him. But the son of the blue sea is shielded from those alien stones cut on the frozen shores of the White Sea, by a lining of the ACROSS A CENTURY 489 warm-tinted granite of his own native Corsica, while the base of all is a block of that green granite with which nature has fortified the Gaul against the Teuton in the mountains of Vosges. Like sentinels about the tomb stand twelve colossal Vic- tories in Carrara marble. Even as the Empire made the fatal mistake of exalting force above justice, so Napoleon's vic- tories of peace are celebrated in the dim shadows behind his victories of war, where in bas relief on the wall of the crypt are carved symbolical representations of his undisputed titles to the gratitude of posterity — the Code Napoleon; the execu- tion of great public works; the founding of the University of France ; the establishment of the Legion of Honour ; the pro- tection of commerce and industry ; the regulation of the public finances ; the Concordat ; the creation of the council of state ; the reform of the civil administration and the restoration of public order. Only four personages of the Empire were specially chosen to be their Emperor's attendants in death. His brothers, Joseph and Jerome, have their tombs in chapels on either side of the entrance to the church, while downstairs on either side of the bronze doors of the crypt the bodies of two of his most devoted followers are entombed in the walls. One of these is Bertrand, who followed him in his two exiles and to his two graves. The other is Duroc, who followed him in peace and war until he fell by his side in the Saxon campaign of 1813, when the Emperor in his bitter contempt for the in- gratitude of man, praised his fallen servitor for having the faithfulness and affection of a dog. Like a dog, then let it be, the grand marshal of the palace still keeps watch at the door while the master rests in untroubled sleep. Nothing in the Invalides better emphasises its monumental grandeur than three slabs of stone in one of the small rooms off the church. They are the uncarved covering of the un- marked grave beneath the willows at St. Helena. Yet this grave at the Invalides, too, has been left nameless. After all, whether with sword or pen, with axe or scythe, a man cuts his own epitaph. 490 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON Following Sedan there was a violent reaction from the Na- poleonic idolatry of the Second Empire. Scepticism and con- demnation swiftly ran to an extreme as great as the blind credulity of the idol worshippers. The Napoleonic legend was furiously torn to tatters and its central figure was transformed from a mythological deity into the scapegoat of modern times ; from an impossible demigod he was distorted into an impos- sible demon. Time has checked that reaction and softened the rage of the iconoclasts, who no sooner overcame the base habit of looking up to Napoleon than they fell into the opposite baseness of flattering themselves by looking down on him. It is difficult to take a horizontal view of one whose life and character touched heights so lofty and sounded depths so abysmal. As the world increases in understanding, men will be enabled to look a Napoleon in the eye and view him on a level with them- selves, when, perhaps, he will lose their awe but gain their charity. As history grows democratic, it will become more and more like nature herself, careless of the single life and careful of the type. We are now too prone to magnify a man and to minify mankind, to forget that no one stands — or falls — alone, and that not merely some men but that all men are creatures of circumstances. We have seen Napoleon at twenty-four, a drifting, unam- bitious man, apparently of the common mould ; mediocre in school ; an indifferent soldier ; unkempt and awkward in the salon, emitting not a flash of that genius which he was so soon and suddenly to radiate before a dazzled world. We have seen him unstirred by the Great Revolution, when it had been rag- ing about his head for a half dozen years ; and deaf to the loud knockings of opportunity, which had aroused so many of his comrades. We have seen him shunning military serv- ice, running away from France and trying all the while to stay in his native island. We have seen him aimlessly loiter- ing in the streets of Paris, where, like a juror at a coroner's inquest, he was suddenly called out of the crowd. Surely 500, maybe 1000, army officers had more experience and reputation than he when he was placed on horseback. He ACROSS A CENTURY 491 was nobody, not even a Frenchman ; but authority and law, rank, wealth, and seniority had all been swept away in the Revolution and the whole structure of society was turned up- side down. The slate had been wiped clean when the mighty social forces, clamouring for an agent, seized on this chance passer-by and flooded him with their overwhelming energy. "Thousands of ages will elapse before the circumstances ac- cumulated in my case draw forth another from among the crowd to reproduce the same spectacle," Napoleon himself said, at St. Helena. "The moment the boy put on a general's hat, he seemed to have grown two feet," said Massena. The shiftless, dawdling Corsican flew above the Alps. He leaped the Mediterranean. He dashed across the desert. He threw himself against the gate of the Orient, and its hinges, rusted by 500 years of dis- use, were shattered. He smote slothful Europe, and its mediaeval systems crumbled to dust. He infused armies, lawyers, artists, builders with the elec- tric force of the Revolution, and at his command, codes were formulated, arches and bridges were built, roads were made and canals were dug. His young head grew dizzy as he tread the peaks of great- ness. "I saw the world spinning beneath me, as if I were being carried through the air. ' ' The ruler of Italy at twenty- six; the despot of Egypt at twenty-eight; the dictator of France at thirty; the master of Europe at thirty-two, his youth was a grievous misfortune. The constitution of the United States bars men even from the senate until they are thirty, and from the presidency until they are thirty-five. Caasar was forty when he really began his career. This man had run his course before most rulers gain supreme power. The politicians of Europe, naturally enough, thought his power came from himself. "The world invited me to govern it. Sovereigns and subjects vied with one another in hasten- ing beneath my sceptre." Inevitably he came to share the general belief that he was the source and not merely the medium of the might with which he was invested. He thought he must be the favourite 492 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON of fortune. He was the child of destiny. A lucky star must have shone at his birth. Assuming that he must have been born to rule, he crowned himself. Believing that his omnip- otence must be in his blood, he crowned his brothers and sis- ters, and divorced his wife that he might surely transmit the divine spark. He found himself the superman, set above and apart from his kind, and condemned to solitary imprisonment in a splen- did but pitiable isolation. His fanatical egotheism, his self- worship repelled his wives, his brothers, his sisters, his asso- ciates, whom he loaded with coronets and domains without making a friend among them all. Awe, dread and envy cut him off from the affections of men and women and left him filled with the bitterness of Byron 's cynical lines : He who surpasses or subdues mankind Must look down on the hate of those below. He despised men and challenged the impossible. "I may find the pillars of Hercules in Spain," he boasted, "but I shall not find the limits of my power." But he had struck down the Revolution, silenced the people and chained the forces that had filled him with the strength of a Colossus. He was still borne on, it is true, but only by the original momentum. Where once he had won campaigns with 50,000 and 60,000 republicans, he now led 600,000 imperialists to disaster. At last no military genius was required to over- throw him, either at Leipsic or at the gates of Paris. Wel- lington only stood still at Waterloo while the greatest soldier of the age spent himself. Nevertheless, France brought him back from the grave after a quarter of a century and stirred his ashes in the vain hope that she might find a live cinder wherewith to kindle her glory anew. She transfused his living blood from the veins of Napoleon III into the anaemic body politic, but only to col- lapse at Sedan. Then at last she turned from the tomb, to discover in the red blood of her people the true source of her power, as it had been of Napoleon's. But the exile has his wish. His ashes repose on the banks ACROSS A CENTURY 493 of the Seine, where the earth-hungry conqueror who felt him- self pent and stifled within the wide boundaries of Europe rests in the narrow empire of the grave — G^x!^ feet. There, facing the altar of the King of Kings and of that other victor of Mt. Tabor whose invincible sword, however, is not of the flesh and whose everlasting Kingdom is not of this world, he is enthroned with the vain, almost theatrical pomp and splendour of his brief imperial days. Five after- noons a week he holds his crowded court, with all the races of men for his courtiers. While they lean and muse on the marble balustrade, gazing down upon his majestic tomb, the slanting rays of the sun, transmuted into pure gold by the stained glass windows of the Chapel of the Dome, light up his violet red throne with a glory not of war nor of earth. Spite of all efforts to banish him from memory and con- sign him to an eternal exile, this man who was picked out of the street to embody common men, to be anointed, crowned, sceptred, empurpled and enthroned above the monarchs of long descent; this son of the people who made a mockery of the divinity of kings and the sacredness of ancient systems and customs, never has lost his dominion over the imagina- tion of men. His latest bibliography, compiled by a German, contains the titles of no less than 80,000 books that have been printed about him. In the catalogue of the British Museum, he distances every other man of action, only Jesus and Shakes- peare receiving more space on the shelves of that great library. He remains supreme in the admiration and the disappoint- ment, in the applause and the reproach of men : The glory, jest and riddle of the world. Had he not lost his touch with the people he would rule the globe from his grave. Had he kept his face to the future and not turned it to the past, the earth would be his empire and the human race his subjects. Had he only seen and welcomed the dawning of this age of democracy, he would be its prophet, and the Invalides would be more than a brilliant spectacle ; it would be the shrine of mankind. CHRONOLOGY OF NAPOLEON 1769 August 15, Napoleon Bonaparte born at Ajaecio. 1778 December 15, went to France. 1779 March 15, entered school at Brienne. 1784 October 31, entered Ecole Militaira at Paris. 1785 September 28, graduated — October 30, joined his regiment at Valence. 1788 June 15, joined his regiment at Auxonne. 1791 June 1, promoted to first lieutenant and returned to Valence. 1792 February 6, dropped from the French army — March 31, elected lieutenant-colonel Corsican national guard — July 10, restored to the French army — August 30, appointed captain. 1793 June 10, banished from Corsica — October 18, chief of battalion at siege of Toulon — December 19, fall of Toulon — December 22, Napo- leon brigadier general of artillery. 1794 August 12, arrested — August 20, released. 1795 March 11, sailed on Corsican expedition — May 2, ordered to Army of the West — September 15, ordered to Turkey; dropped from list of generals — October 5, suppressed revolt in streets of Paris — Octo- ber 16, general-in-chief of the Army of the Interior. 495 496 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 1796 March 2, general-in-chief of the Army of Italy — March 9, married Josephine Beauharnais — April 9, joined army at Savona — April 12, defeated Austrians at Montenotte — April 13, defeated Sardinians at Millesimo — April 14, separated Sardinians and Austrians — April 15, defeated Austrians at Dego — April 22, defeated Sardinians at Mon- dovi — April 28, made peace with Sardinia — May 10, won Battle of Lodi — July, founded Cisalpine and Transpadane republics — August 3, won Battle of Lonato — August 5, Castiglione — September 5, Ro- verado — September 8, Bassano — November 12, defeated at Caldiero — November 15, 16, 17, won Battle of Arcole. 1797 January 14, won Battle of Rivoli — January 16, La Favorita — Feb- ruary 3, captured Mantua — March 24, won Battle of Tarvis — March 29, captured Klagenfurt — April 18, arranged armistice with Austria at Leoben — May, founded Ligurian and Venetian republics — Octo- ber, united Transpadane with Cisalpine republic — October 17, made Peace of Campo Formio — December 5, returned to Paris. 1798 May 19, sailed for Egypt — June 11, captured Malta — July 2, cap- tured Alexandria — July 21, won Battle of the Pyramids — August 1, lost his fleet at Battle of the Nile — September 11, Turkey declared war against him — October 21, Cairo revolted against him. 1799 February 10, began his Syrian campaign — March 7, captured Jaffa — March 17, began siege of Acre — April 16, won Battle of Mt. Tabor — May 17, retreated from Acre — June 14, returned to Cairo — July 25, won Battle of Aboukir — August 23, took flight for France — Oc- tober 9, landed in France — November 10, at the head of a pro- visional government in France — December 25, First Consul for ten years, 1800 January, reorganised the judiciary and the government, reformed tax system and established Bank of France — May 14, began his march over the Alps — June 14, won Battle of Marengo — September 30, made a treaty with the United States — October 1, secretly pur- chased Louisiana from Spain — December 22, Moreau defeated Aus- trians at Hohenlinden — December 24, Napoleon escaped infernal machine. CHRONOLOGY OF NAPOLEON 497 1801 February 9, made peace with Austria at Luneville — June 27, the French surrendered Cairo — July 15, Napoleon concluded the Con- cordat — October 1, sent expedition to conquer Santo Domingo. 1802 March 27, made peace with England at Amiens — August 1, First Consul for life. 1803 March 5, decreed the Code Napoleon — May 21, ratified sale of Louisiana to the United States the day war with England began — June 29, pitched his camp at Boulogne — August 23, royalist assassins landed in France. 1804 March 24, Duke d'Enghien shot — March 25, electoral colleges in- vited Napoleon to found a dynasty — May 18, the senate proclaimed him Emperor of the French — November 30, religious marriage to Josephine — December 2, crowned. 1805 May 26, crowned King of Italy — August 29, broke camp at Bou- logne and abandoned invasion of England — September 25, Grand Army crossed the Rhine — October 20, captured Ulm — October 21, Battle of Trafalgar — November 13, Napoleon entered Vienna — De- cember 2, won Battle of Austerlitz — December 26, Peace of Press- burg; Napoleon promoted the Elector of Bavaria to be King. 1806 January 1, promoted the Elector of Wiirtemberg to be King — February 18, made Joseph Bonaparte, King of Naples — June 6, Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland — July 12, formed the Confed- eration of the Rhine — October 14, overwhelmed Prussians and Sax- ons at Jena and Auerstadt — October 28, entered Berlin — November 21, issued Berlin Decree — December 11, promoted the Elector of Saxony to be King. 1807 Februaiy 7-8, Battle of Eylau — May 4, death of Napoleon's fa- vourite nephew and probable heir — June 14, Napoleon won Battle of Friedland — July 7-9, Peace of Tilsit — November 18, Napoleon made Jerome Bonaparte, King of Westphalia — December 17, issued Milan Decree. 1808 May 2, Spanish Revolution began — June 6, Napoleon made Jo- 498 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON seph Bonaparte, King of Spain — July 19, French army in Spain surrendered at Baylen — July 21, French army in Portugal defeated by Wellesley — July 28, King Joseph fled from Madrid — August 1, Napoleon made Murat, King of Naples — September 27, met the Czar at Erfurt — December 4, entered Madrid. 1809 April 13, opened campaign against Austria — May 12, entered Vi- enna — May 17, annexed Rome — May 20-21, defeated at Aspern-Ess- ling — July 6, arrested Pope Pius VII — July 6-7, won Battle of Wagram — October 14, made treaty of peace with Austria — December 15, divorced Josephine. 1810 March 11, married Marie Louise by proxy — July 1, King Louis fled from Holland. 1811 March 20, birth of the King of Rome. 1812 June 24, Napoleon entered Russia — June 28-July 16, at Vilna — July 26-August 13, at Vitebsk — August 16-24, at Smolensk — Sep- tember 7, Battle of Borodino — September 15, Napoleon entered Moscow — September 15-18, Moscow burning — October 19, Napoleon began his retreat — October 27, the first frost — October 30, bread and beef exhausted — November 4, first snow — November 17, Napoleon won Battle of Krasnoi — November 27, crossed the Beresina — De- cember 6, left the army — December 18, arrived in Paris. 1813 April 15, left Paris for the German campaign — May 2, won Bat- tle of Liitzen — May 20-21, won Battle of Bautzen — June 21, King Joseph fled from Spain — August 26-27, Napoleon won Battle of Dresden — October 16-18, overthrown at Leipsic — November 9, re- turned to Paris. 1814 January 21, released Pope Pius VII — January 26, left for cam- paign in, France — January 29, won Battle of Brienne — February 1, lost Battle of La Rothiere — February 10, won Battle of Champau- bert — February 11, won Battle of Montmirail — February 14, won Battle of Chateau Thierry — February 18, won Battle of Montereau — March 7, fought Battle of Craone — March 20, narrowly escaped at Arcis sur Aube — March 29, Marie Louise and King of Rome fled CHRONOLOGY OF NAPOLEON 499 from Paris — March 30, fall of Paris — March 31, Napoleon at Fon- tainebleau — April 6, abdicated — April 11, attempted to commit sui- cide — April 20, started for Elba — May 29, death of Josephine. 1815 February 26, Napoleon sailed from Elba — March 1, landed in France — March 20, entered Paris — June 14, began the Belgian cam- paign — June 16, won Battle of Ligny — June 18, overthrown at Waterloo — June 21, returned to Paris — June 22, abdicated — July 15, went aboard the British warship, Bellerophon — August 9, sailed on the Northumberland for St. Helena — October 16, landed on St. Helena — December 10, took up his residence at Longwood. 1816 April 14, Sir Hudson Lowe arrived at St. Helena — August 18, his last interview with Napoleon. 1818 September 28, British government ordered Napoleon to show him- self to an officer twice a day. 1821 May 5, death of Napoleon. 1832 July 22, death of the King of Rome. 1840 December 15, the body of Napoleon placed in the Hotel des In- valides in Paris. THE BONAPARTES Carlo Maria Bonaparte, b. 1746, d. 1785; married Letizia Ramo- lino, b. 1750, d. 1836. Eight of their children lived to maturity. I Joseph, King of Naples and Spain, b. 1768, d. 1844; married Julie Clary and had two daughters; one married a son of Louis Bonaparte but left no children, and the other married Prince Charles Bonaparte, a son of Lucien ; one of their sons became Cardinal Bonaparte and one of their grandchildren the wife of the Prince of the Moskva, great grandson of Marshal New II Napoleon, Emperor of the French, Kin l;- of Italy, b. 1769, d. 1S21 ; married Josephine Taseher de la Pa.Lrerie Beauharnais; di- vorced: married Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria; their only son, iiic Kin-- of h'oine, died without children. III Lucien, Prince of Canino, b. 1775, d. 1840; married Chris- tine Boyer; deceased; married Alexandrine Jouberthin; four sons and three daughters; one bod married a daughter of Joseph, as al- ready noted; two other sons died without children; the fourth son became the father of Prince Roland Bonaparte who married the daughter of M. Blanc of Monte Carlo, and their daughter is the Princess Marie, wife of Prince George of Greece. IV Elisa, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, h. 1777, d. 1820; married Felix Bacchiochi; one son and one daughter. V Louis, King of Holland, b. 1778, d. 1846; married Hortense, daughter of the Empress Josephine; three sons, the third of whom ascended his uncle's throne as Napoleon III. VI Pauline, Princess of Guastalla, b. 1780, d. 1825; married General Leclerc; deceased; married Prince Borghese of Rome, but left no children. \ II Caroline, Queen of Naples, b. 1782, d. 1839; married Murat, King of Naples; two sons. VIII Jerome, King of Westphalia, b. 1784, d. 1860; married Elizabeth Paterson of Baltimore; one son; Charles Joseph Bona- parte, formerly Attorney General of the United States, is a grand- son, and Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte of Washington a great grandson; the American marriaare having: been declared void under ^500 CHRONOLOGY OF NAPOLEON 501 the French law, Jerome married Princess Catherine of Wiirtemberg; two sons and one daughter; one of the sons, Napoleon Joseph Charles, "Plon Plon," married the Duchess Clothilda of Savoy, daughter of Victor Emmanuel II, King of Italy, and their elder son, Victor Napoleon who married Princess Clementine of Belgium, is the head of the house of Bonaparte and pretender to the throne ; the second son, Napoleon Louis, formerly was a general in the Rus- sian army, and a sister of these two, the Princess Letizia, is the widow of Amadeo, Duke of Aosta, who in 1872 was elected King of Spain but who abdicated the throne. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA INDEX INDEX Aboukir, Egypt, Battle of, 108, 109. Acre, Syria, Siege of, 97-106. Adams, John Quincy, on the cause of the Russian war, 320. Alexander I of Russia, ordered mourning for the Duke d'En- ghien, 166; mistook Napoleon's appeals for confession of weak- ness, 194; eager to see a battle, 195 ; at the Battle of Austerlitz, 199-201 : his flight after the bat- tle, 204; his pledge to Frederick William III over tomb of Fred- erick the Great, 219; with King and Queen of Prussia at Memel, 236; at Tilsit, 240-245; his re- union with Napoleon at Erfurt, 269; paltering with Napoleon over marriage proposal, 299 ; his refusal to shut out American ships and estrangement from Napoleon, 320, 321; at the fron- tier when Napoleon invaded Russia, 331; his defiance, 3^6; his medal commemorating the repulse of Napoleon, 349 ; the leader of the people's revolt against Napoleon, 361, 362; re- treating at Bautzen, 367 ; at the Battle of Leipsic, 379; in the campaign of 1814, 385; his insistence on making a drive at Paris, 391; entering Paris, 395; his visits to Josephine, 400, 401 ; his inauguration of the Holy Alliance, 473. 505 Alvinzi, General, repulsed Napo- leon at Caldiero, 56; defeated by Napoleon at Arcole, 57-59; at Rivoli, 60, 61. Antommarchi, Francesco, Dr., phy- sician to Napoleon at St. He- lena, 469, 470'; rebuffed by Marie Louise, 477, 478. Arcole, Italy, Battle of, 57-59. Aspern-Essling, Austria, Battle of, 275-277. Auerstadt, Prussia, Battle of, 224. Augureau, General, at Battle of Eylau, 234 ; his death, 488. Augusta, Princess of Bavaria, be- trothed to Eugene Beauharnais by Napoleon, 206. Austerlitz, Austria, Battle of, 193- 205. Austria, her campaign against France in 1796, 47; returning to attack of Napoleon fifth time, 60; brought to terms, 64; ceded Belgium to France, 72; received Venice from Napoleon, 72; the Austrian campaign of 1800, 119; in the third coalition, 185 ; over- whelmed at Ulm, 186-191; con- quered at Austerlitz and surren- dered last foothold in Italy and on the Adriatic, 204 ; her treaty with Napoleon in 1S09, 280, 281 ; seeking matrimonial alliance with Napoleon, 299, 300; rejoic- ing over the marriage of Marie Louise, 302 ; permitted violation of treaty pledges to Napoleon at 506 INDEX his abdication, 413, 414; her commissioner to St. Helena re- buffed by Napoleon, 466. Balmain, Count, Russian commis- sioner at St. Helena, 466. Bathurst, Lord, his untimely fear of Napoleon's escape from St. Helena, 470. Bautzen, Saxony, Battle of, 367. Bavaria, raised to a kingdom by Napoleon, 213. Bavaria, King of, with Napoleon on eve of Russian campaign, 329. Beauharnais, Alexandre de, mar- riage to Josephine, 39, 40: his death, 41. Beauharnais, Eugene, his birth, 40; asking Napoleon for his fa- ther's sword, 42; with his step- father at Acre, 104; his mar- riage with Augusta, 206; Vice- roy of Italy and heir to Italian crown, 216; Napoleon's instruc- tions to, on domestic relations, 283 ; at the divorce of his mother, 296-297; with Napoleon on eve of Russian campaign, 330; his presentiment of the Moscow disaster, 338; on the retreat, 354-358. Beauharnais, Fanny, approved Josephine's marriage to Napo- leon, 44. Beauharnais, Hortense, her birth, 40; her loveless marriage to Louis Bonaparte, 157-158; death of her eldest son, 216, 217; Na- poleon's tribute to her, 283; at the divorce of her mother, 296; her tomb, 401; at Napoleon's final overthrow, 450; her part- ing gift to him, 451. Beauharnais, Stephanie, betrothed to Prince of Baden by Napoleon, 206; the spoiled child of the Empire, 283. Beaulieu, Marshal, outwitted by Napoleon, 48. Beethoven, Ludwig Van, recalled a dedication to Napoleon, 259. Belgium, taken from Austria by France, 72 ; England determined to expel Napoleon from, 388. Bernadotte, Marshal, at the Battle of Austerlitz, 200; in the Jena campaign, 220; his antecedents, 247, 248; at Wagram, 278; his selection as crown prince of Sweden, 323, 324; in arms against Napoleon, 371. Berthier, Marshal, at Battle of Eylau, 234; with Napoleon in Spain, 269; with Napoleon in Austria, 273; at the first abdica- tion, 397; his death, 488. Bertrand, General, with Napoleon at Elba, 403 ; joined him in his St. Helena exile, 456; his at- tendance on him at Longwood, 462; returned to St. Helena to escort Napoleon's body to France, 485, 486; his tomb at the Invalides, 489. Bertrand, Mme., attempted suicide rather than go to St. Helena, 461; by Napoleon's deathbed, 471. Bessieres, Marshal, his ante- cedents, 247, 248 ; in the Danube campaign, 276; his death, 367; his tomb in the Invalides, 487. Blticher, General, recalled to the Prussian army, 365, 366; in the campaign of 1813, 373; in the campaign of 1814, 385; at the Battle of Brienne, 386; at the Battle of La Rothiere, 387; hurled back by Napoleon, 389; repulsed Napoleon, 390; fooled in the Hundred Days, 428; his INDEX 507 army, 429; at the Battle of Ligny, 430, 431; his assurance to Wellington on the eve of Waterloo, 433; marching to Waterloo, 439; at Waterloo, 443-446; wished to shoot Napo- leon, 450. Bombelles, Count, third husband of Marie Louise, 483. Bonaparte, Betsy Paterson, her marriage to Jerome Bonaparte, 206-212; son born, 209; her de- scendants, 211; political effect of the Pope's refusal to annul her marriage, 322. Bonaparte, Carlo, wished to fol- low Paoli to England, 6 ; entered Napoleon at school in Brienne, 13; his character, 13, 14; noble deputy at Versailles, 14; his death, 20. Bonaparte, Caroline, left behind in flight of Bonapartes from Ajac- cio, 29; her marriage with Mu- rat, 157; the most ambitious of Napoleon's sisters, 214, 215; her death, 483. Bonaparte, Charles Joseph, attor- ney-general of the United States and grandson of King Jerome Bonaparte, 211. Bonaparte, Elisa, flight from Aj ac- tio, 29; her passion for power, 215; her death, 482. Bonaparte, Jerome, left behind in flight of Bonapartes from Aj ac- tio, 29; his heirs excluded from imperial succession, 168 ; his marriage with Betsy Paterson of Baltimore, 206-212; son born, 209; his marriage with Princess Catherine of Wurtemberg, 209; King of Westphalia, 210; his ex- travagances, 214; with Napoleon in the invasion of Russia, 331; his kingdom engulfed, 370; at Waterloo, 439; his tomb at the Invalides, 489. Bonaparte, Jerome Napoleon, born to Betsy Paterson, 209 ; ignored in father's will, 210; declined dukedom in Second Empire, 210; graduated from Harvard, 210; married American girl, 211; left two sons, 211. Bonaparte, Colonel Jerome Napo- leon, son of Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte and grandson of King Jerome Bonaparte, 211. Bonaparte, Jerome Napoleon, great grandson of King Jerome, 211. Bonaparte, Joseph, birthplace, 5; at school with Napoleon in France, 14; accompanied Jose- phine to Italy, 54; negotiated Treaty of Mortefontaine with the United States, 143 ; his heirs in line of imperial succession, 168; a prince of the Empire, 169; made King of Naples, 213; appointed King of Spain, 266, 267; confronted by revolution, 267-270; his flight from Spain, 370; chief adviser of Marie Louise as regent, 385; offered Napoleon his cabin in a ship bound to the United States, 452; his tomb at the Invalides, 489. Bonaparte, Letizia, in the Corsican revolution, 5; described, 6; op- posed husband's desire to follow Paoli to England, 6; her tomb described, 10; her visit to Na- poleon at school, 15; in poverty, 25; fleeing from the Paolists, 29; handsomely remembered by Napoleon in the first hour of victory, 68; the trials and fears of Mme. Mere in the Empire, 215, 216; her lack of affection, 291; with Napoleon at Elba, 508 INDEX 410; the only one in the secret of the projected flight, 415; her parting call before Napoleon's surrender to England, 451; her life after the fall of the Empire, 482, 483; her death, 483. Bonaparte, Louis, educated by Na- poleon, 26; flight from Ajaccio, 29; to the rescue of Napoleon at Arcole, 58; his loveless marriage with Hortense Beauharnais, 157, 158; his heirs in line of imperial succession, 168; a prince of the Empire, 169; made King of Hol- land, 214; death of his eldest son, 216, 217; his flight from the throne, 323. Bonaparte, Lucien, President of the Five Hundred, 113; his heirs excluded from imperial succes- sion, 168; rejected crowns in loyalty to his wife, 214; his death, 483. Bonaparte, Pauline, flight from Ajaccio, 29; created Duchess, 215; only sister with any affec- tion for Napoleon, 283; with him at Elba, 410; her death, 482. Bonaparte, Victor, receiving pil- grims from Ajaccio, 30; pre- tender, 211. Borodino, Russia, Battle of, 337, 338. Bourrienne, Louis Antoine Fauve- let de, Napoleon's schoolmate at Brienne, 17; with him in the Revolution, 27 ; became his sec- retary, 69; settling Josephine's bills, 155, 156; his betrayal of Napoleon and his dismissal, 162, 163; conniving at the resto- ration of the Bourbons, 396. Brazil, her empire founded by Portuguese royal family in flight from Napoleon, 266. Brienne, France, Battle of, 386. Browning, Robert, his poem on Napoleon, 273. Brune, Marshal, his antecedents, 247, 248. Biilow, General, in the campaign of 1814, 385; at Waterloo, 440, 442, 444. Buonvita, Father, one of Napo- leon's priests at St. Helena, 469. Caldiero, Italy, Battle of, 56. Cambaceres, Chancellor, appointed arch chancellor of the Empire, 169; dread of Napoleon's mar- riage with Marie Louise, 301. Cambronne, General, with Napo- leon at Elba, 403; Napoleon's orders to him on return from Elba, 417; "The Old Guard dies but never surrenders," 445. Campbell, Colonel, warned British government that Napoleon would leave Elba unless treaty were fulfilled, 413; fooled by Napoleon, 415, 416. Campo Formio, Italy, the Peace of, 72. Carteaux, General, Napoleon's commander at Toulon, 32; pen- sioned by First Consul, 148. Castiglione, Italy, Battle of, 55. Catherine, Princess of Wiirtem- berg, married to Jerome Bona- parte, 209; Napoleon's kindness to, 283. Caulaincourt, Armand de, with Na- poleon in Spain, 269; on Napo- leon's forgiveness, 317; on the Russian retreat, 357; with Na- poleon at the fall of Paris, 394, 395. Champaubert, France, Battle of, 389. Charles, Arch Duke of Austria, his retreat before Napoleon, 62- INDEX 509 64; his retreat in 1809, 273; at Aspern-Essling and Wagram, 275-279; proxy of Napoleon at marriage of Marie Louise, 304. Charles X of France, sent to repel Napoleon on his return from Elba, 421; abandoned his com- mand, 423. Chateau Thierry, France, Battle of, 389. Cockburn, Admiral, in charge of Napoleon on the voyage to St. Helena, 457. Code Napoleon, 140. Colombier, Mile., Napoleon's first sweetheart, 23; remembered by him in days of his power, 282. Concordat, The, 138-140. Consalvi, Cardinal, negotiated the Concordat, 139. Constant, married by Napoleon, 286 ; dressing him to meet Marie Louise, 306; neglected to give him waterproof boots at Boro- dino, 337; abandoned his fallen master in 1814, 398. Davout, Marshal, in the school at Brienne, 19; at Ulm, 190; at the Battle of Austerlitz, 201, 202; won the Battle of Auerstadt, 224; at Battle of Eylau, 235; his antecedents, 247, 248; cut off by the Danube, 276; at Wag- ram, 279; on the Russian re- treat, 354-358; ordered Napo- leon out of Paris in 1815, 449. Demidoff, Prince, his museum in Elba, 408; his yearly memorial service for Napoleon, 412. Demoulin, Jean, presented $20,000 to Napoleon on return from Elba, 422. Denmark, Napoleon and Czar de- termined to close her ports against England, 244 ; renounced her alliance with Napoleon in 1814; ceded Norway to Sweden and Heligoland to England, 384. Desaix, General, saving the day at Marengo, 129; his death, 130. Dresden, Saxony, Battle of, 373- 375; the field to-day, 374-376. Drouot, General, at the Battle of Lutzen, 366; with Napoleon at Elba, 403 ; his fatal advice at Waterloo, 434. Dupont, General, surrendered Na- poleonic eagles in Spain for first time, 268. Duroc, General, appointed grand marshal of the palace, 169; at Tilsit, 241 ; returning from Spain with Napoleon, 271; on Napoleon's absolutism, 316, 317; on the Russian retreat, 357; his death, 368 ; Napoleon thought of taking his name after Water- loo, 453; his tomb at the Inva- lides, 489. Enghien, Due d', kidnapped by Napoleon's soldiers, 164; shot, 165. England, war with France in 1793, 28; her forces defeated at Toulon, 33, 34; the one uncon- quered foe of France in 1799, 73; subsidised the Austrian campaign of 1800, 119; made peace with Napoleon in 1802, 133; reopened war with France in 1803, 178-180; "The Great Terror" at time of Napoleon's threatened invasion, 181 ; in the third coalition, 185; her recog- nition of equality of flags at sea demanded by Russia, 244; her restrictions on neutral com- merce, 264; her alliance with Spanish revolutionists, 270; her wares boycotted by Napoleon, 510 INDEX 286; her struggle against con- tinental system, 321, 322; most constant foe, 370, 371; received Heligoland from Denmark, 384; her determination to expel Na- poleon from Holland and Bel- gium, 388; permitted violation of treaty pledges to Napoleon at his abdication, 413, 414; warned by Col. Campbell, her commis- sioner in Elba, that Napoleon would leave unless treaty were fulfilled, 413, 414; her contin- gent at Waterloo, 438 ; her min- istry determined to take revenge on Napoleon, 455. Eugenie, Ex-Empress, owner of Napoleon's birthplace, 8. Eylau, East Prussia, Battle of, 233-235. Egypt, conquered by Napoleon, 77-85; conquered by England and restored to Turkey, 179. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, on Napo- leon's army at Eylau, 235; on Napoleon's memoirs, 260. Ferdinand VII, of Spain, surren- dered to Napoleon, 266; liber- ated, 384. Fesch, Joseph, Cardinal, his tomb at Ajaccio, 10; taught Napoleon the alphabet, 14; flight from Ajaccio, 29; performing reli- gious marriage of Napoleon and Josephine, 173; married Napo- leon and Marie Louise, 307; his vain appeal to Napoleon for moderation, 326; his parting call before Napoleon's surrender to England, 451; chose phy- sicians and priests for St. He- lena, 469. Finland, Napoleon consented to Russia taking it from Sweden, 245. Flammarion, Camille, his villa on the site of a Napoleonic inn, 394. Fouche, Joseph, warning Napoleon against the Bourbons, 161; spy- ing on the First Consul, 102; plotting the downfall of the Re- public, 166; his sharp retort on the Emperor, 169; at Napoleon's final overthrow, 449, 450. France, her conquest of Corsica, 5-6; opening of the Revolution, 25; revolutionary scenes in Paris, 27, 28; war with Eng- land in 1793, 28; the attempted revolution of Vendemiaire, 35- 37 ; her campaign against Aus- tria in 1796, 47; took Belgium from Austria, 72; her struggle to conquer England, 73, 74; opened war with England the day Louisiana treaty was rati- fied, 145; conditions under the Consulate, 159, 160; restored statue of Napoleon to Vendome column, 254; her war weariness and refusal to rally to Napoleon in the Hundred Days, 426, 427; her commissioner to St. Helena rebuffed by Napoleon, 466; the Revolution of 1830 and the King of Rome, 479; found at last her redemption in democracy, 492. Francis I of Austria, mistook Na- poleon's appeals for peace as confession of weakness, 194; im- patient to recapture Vienna, 195; at the Battle of Austerlitz, 199-201; his meeting with Na- poleon after Austerlitz, 203; at the front in 1809, 274; his peace treaty with Napoleon in 1809, 280, 281; anxious to sacrifice his daughter to Napoleon, 299; implored by her, 301; with Na- poleon on eve of Russian cam- INDEX 511 paign, 329; in the campaign of 1813, 372, 373; at the Battle of Leipsic, 379; in the campaign of 1814, 385; commissioned Metternich to explain to King of Rome the downfall of Napo- leon, 476; his tomb, 484. Frederick William III of Prussia, ordered mourning for the Duke d'Enghien, 166; playing fast and loose with Napoleon, 218-220; his pledge to the Czar over the tomb of Frederick the Great, 219; his retreat from Napoleon, 227-237 ; snubbed at Tilsit, 240 ; interrogated by Napoleon, 241; received Napoleon's ultimatum, 244; a vassal of Napoleon, 245; with him on eve of Russian cam- paign, 329; swept away on a tide of patriotism in 1813, 363; at the Battle of Leipsic, 379; in the campaign of 1814, 385; entering Paris, 395; his visit to Josephine, 401. Friedland, East Prussia, Battle of, 236, 237. Fulton, Robert, vainly offered steamboat and torpedo to France and England, 180. Garibaldi, Giuseppe, at Elba, 405. George IV of England, Napoleon's appeal to him, 453. Georges, Cadoudal, leader in a Bourbon plot against First Con- sul, 163; his death, 164. Germany, her condition at opening of 19th century, 218; the realisa- tion of Queen Louise's vision, 246; the rising of her people against Napoleon, 361-363. Gladstone, William E., on Napo- leon as an administrator, 261. Gourgaud, General, joined Napo- leon on his St. Helena exile, 456 ; his attendance at Longwood, 462; returned to Europe, 468; suspected of a mission to King of Rome, 478; returned to St. Helena to escort Napoleon's body to France, 485, 486. Grouchy, Marshal, his antecedents, 247, 248; sent in pursuit of Bliicher, 431 ; on the day of Waterloo, 433, 439-441. Holland, bestowed upon Louis Bon- aparte by Napoleon, 214; an- nexed, 323; England determined to expel Napoleon from, 388. Holland, Lord, a defender of Na- poleon in England, 464. Holy Alliance, inaugurated, 483; a league against liberty, 485. Hugo, Victor, at Elba, 405; the original of his character of Jean Valjean followed Napoleon to Waterloo, 420. Ilari, Camilla, Napoleon's foster mother, 6; pensioned by First Consul, 148; at Napoleon's cor- onation, 175. Italy, her war of liberation, 56; the corner stone of her union laid by Napoleon, 69, 70; Na- poleon crowned King of, 176. Jaffa, Palestine, the capture of and massacre of prisoners in, 94-96; Napoleon in its plague hospital, 107. Jefferson, Thomas, his purchase of Louisiana, 144-146; troubled by the Bonaparte-Paterson mar- riage, 207. Jena, Saxe Weimar, Battle of, 221-224. Jews, The, emancipated by Napo- leon, 259. 512 INDEX Joinville, Prince, brought Napo- leon's body from St. Helena, 485. Jomini, General, abandoned Napo- leon in 1813, 372. Josephine, Empress, her girlhood in Martinique, 38-40; her voy- age to France and marriage to Alexandre de Beauharnais, 39, 40; return to Martinique, 40; in the shadow of the guillotine, 41; death of her husband, 41; her meeting with Napoleon, 42; her lawyer's protest against her marriage, 44; the marriage, 44, 45; amused by her bridegroom's ardour, 49; joins him in Italy, 53, 54; chiding letters from him, 59; her life at Malmaison and her social leadership, 149-155; her extravagances in the Con- sulate, 155-157; her early dread of a crown and a divorce, and her wifely warnings, 157-158; her tearful appeals for the Duke d'Enghien, 165; her re- ligious marriage with Napoleon, 172, 173; her coronation, 173— 176; her last journey with Na- poleon, 272 ; her doom knelled, 281; more extravagances and debts, 293 ; her usefulness to Na- poleon, 293-295 ; her divorce an- nounced, 295, 296; Napoleon's settlement on her, 295, 296; the divorce and parting, 297, 298; her last duty to Napoleon, 299- 300; her attitude toward him after his second marriage, 307, 308; her gift and visit to King of Rome, 312; her last days and her death, 400, 401 ; Napoleon's parting tribute to her memory before surrendering to England, 451. Jourdan, Marshal, his antecedents, 247, 248; his tomb in the Inva- lides at Paris, 487. Junot, General, with Napoleon at Toulon, 33; accompanied Jo- sephine to Italy, 54; in battle at the Horns of Hattin, 100; his expedition to Lisbon, 266 ; surrendered to Wellington, 268. Junot, Mme., her vengeful mem- oirs, 153. Kellermann, General, his charge at Marengo, 130. Kleber, General, in the campaign in Galilee, 100, 101 ; leading the last attack on Acre, 104; his tomb in the Invalides at Paris, 487. Keith, Lord, read to Napoleon the sentence of banishment to St. Helena, 456. Kutusof, General, at the Battle of Borodino, 337, 338; abandoned Moscow, 340; his pursuit of Na- poleon on retreat, 351 ; his death, 366. Lab£doyere, Colonel, surrendered his regiment to Napoleon near Grenoble, 422; his death, 452. Lafayette, Marquis de, his pro- test against the consulate for life, 142; at Napoleon's final overthrow, 449. Lallemand, General, parting from Napoleon on the Bellerophon, 456. Lannes, Marshal, wounded at Ar- cole, 58; wounded at Acre, 104; at Ulm, 190; in Jena campaign, 220; at Battle of Friedland, 236; his antecedents, 247, 248; at Essling, 275; his death, 277. Lannes, Mme., her dialogue with Napoleon, 289. INDEX 513 La Rothiere, France, Battle of, 387. Las Cases, Emmanuel, Count de, his remark to Lord Keith on the Bellerophon, 456; receiving the dictation of Napoleon's "Mem- oirs" on the Northumberland, 457 ; accompanied by his son to St. Helena, 461 ; teaching Eng- lish to Napoleon, 462, 463; ar- rested and deported, 468; his son returned to St. Helena to es- cort Napoleon's body to France, 485, 486. La Tour d'Auvergne, first grena- dier of France, "dead on the field of honour," 188; his tomb in the Invalides at Paris, 487. Lavalette, General de, his escape from prison, 452. Lavalette, Mme. de, niece of Fanny Beauharnais, at Jo- sephine's coronation, 175; de- livered her husband from prison, 452. Lefebre, Marshal, husband of Mme. Sans Gene, won to Napoleon's plot against the Directory, 112; captured Dantzic, 236; his an- tecedents, 247, 248; at the first abdication, 397; his death, 488. Leipsic, Saxony, Battle of, and its field to-day, 376-381. Leon, Count de, son of Napoleon, 290. Ligny, Belgium, Battle of, 430. Livingston, Robert R., negotiat- ing for the purchase of Louisi- ana, 144-146; in a stormy scene at the Tuileries, 179; declined to interfere in Bonaparte-Paterson marriage difficulty, 207. Lodi, Italy, Battle of, 50-51. Lonato, Italy, Battle of, 55. Louise, Queen of Prussia, rallied the war party in 1806, 219; her flight before Napoleon from Jena to Memel, 226-229, 231, 232; her statue at Tilsit, 238; her house at Tilsit, 239; her visit to Til- sit, 242-244; years of poverty and sorrow, 245; her death, her children, her tomb, 246; her daughter married to Nicholas I of Russia, 246. Louisiana, its sale to the United States by Napoleon, 143-146. Louis Philippe, King of France, restored statue of Napoleon to Vendome column, 253; en- throned by the Revolution of 1830, 479; brought Napoleon's body from St. Helena and buried it in the Invalides, 485-487. Louis XVI of France, on whose bounty Napoleon was educated, 13; Napoleon present when King was mobbed, 28, 29. Louis XVIII, his attempt to bribe Napoleon, 160, 161; wished to remove Napoleon from Elba, 414; his flight from Paris at the approach of Na- poleon, 424. Lowe, Hudson, in the campaign of 1813, 371; commended Water- loo as battlefield, 437 ; chosen to be Napoleon's custodian at St. Helena, 464; his iron rule, 464- 472; refused to permit Napo- leon's heart to be sent to Marie Louise, 471. Liitzen, Prussia, Battle of, 366. Macdonald, Marshal, his ante- cedents, 247, 248; at Wagram, 279; swam to safety at Leipsic, 381 ; at the first abdication, 397; fled from Napoleon at Lyons, 423. Mack, General, defeated by Na- poleon at Ulm, 190-191. 514 INDEX Maitland, Captain, his reception of Napoleon on the Bellero- phon, 453-455. Malta, conquered by Napoleon, 76; the cause of the great Anglo- French war in 1803, 179. Mantua, Italy, captured by Na- poleon, U2. Marchand, Napoleon's valet at St. Helena. 469j by Napoleon's deathbed, 471; returned to St. Helena to escort Napoleon's body to France, 485, 486. Marengo, Italy, Battle of, 127-134. Marie Louise, Empress, her first fligbt from Napoleon, 64; in flight again from Napoleon, 191; her third flight from Napoleon, 274; her betrothal to Napoleon, 299-304; her marriage and jour- ney to Paris, 304-309; birth and christening of King of Rome, 310-313; surprised by Napo- leon on his return from Russia, 360; invested with the regency in 1814, 385; her flight from Paris, 392 ; carried off to Aus- tria, 400; easily alienated from Napoleon, 409; her letter on Na- poleon's death, 477; her mor- ganatic marriage to Count Neip- perg, 477; her opposition to the reception of Napoleon's heart, 477, 478; her neglect of her son, 480, 481 ; her third marriage, 483; her death, 483; her tomb, 484. Marmont, Marshal, rescued Na- poleon at Arcole, 58; at Ulm, 190; his antecedents, 247, 248; on Napoleon as a lover, 282; at the fall of Paris in 1814, 393; at the first abdication, 397; de- scribed to King of Rome Na- poleon's campaigns, 476. Massena, Marshal, his first meet- ing with Napoleon, 46; his ante- cedents, 247, 248; at Aspern, 276, 277. Melas, General, defeated by Na- poleon at Marengo, 129. Meneval, Baron de, succeeded Bourrienne, 162. Metternieh, Mme., receiving Jo- sephine's proposal that Marie Louise marry Napoleon, 299, 300. Metternieh, Prince, plotting to marry Marie Louise to Napo- leon, 299-302 ; his famous inter- \ iew with Napoleon at Dresden, .".tilt, 370; plotting to alienate Marie Louise from Napoleon, 409; commissioned by Francis I to explain to the King of Rome the downfall of Napoleon, 476; master of the Holy Alliance, 485. Moncey, Marshal, his antecedents, 247, 248; at the fall of Paris in 1814, 393; at the burial of Napoleon in the Invalides, 487; his tomb, 487. Monroe, James, negotiating for the purchase of Louisiana, 144-146. Montalivet, M. de, a count of the Empire, 282. Montchenu, Count, French com- missioner at St. Helena, 466. Montenotte, Italy, Battle of, 48. Montereau, France, Battle of, 389. Montesquieu, Mme. de, governess of the King of Rome, 313. Montholon, Count de, joined Na- poleon in St. Helena exile, 456; his attendance at Longwood, 462; by the death bed, 470, 471. Montholon, Countess de, her mar- riage objected to by Napoleon, 461; returned to Europe from St. Helena, 468. INDEX 515 Montmirail, France, Battle of, 389. Moore, Sir John, his expedition against Napoleon, 270. Moreau, General, his victory at Hohenlinden, 133; declined to enter Bourbon plot against Na- poleon, 163; banished to the United States by Napoleon, 164; in the campaign of 1813, 372; his death, 375, 376. Mortier, Marshal, his antecedents, 247, 248; at the fall of Paris in 1814, 393. Moscow, Russia, the burning of, 342-344. Mt. Tabor, Palestine, Battle of, 101-103. Muiron, Colonel, with Napoleon at Toulon, 33; died in defence of him at Arcole, 58 ; scene com- memorated on Arch of Triumph, 254; Napoleon thought of tak- ing his name after Waterloo, 453. Murat, Marshal, with Napoleon in the desert, 92 ; his marriage with Caroline Bonaparte, 157 ; at the Battle of Austerlitz, 200, 201; created Prince, 215; at Battle of Eylau, 235; his antecedents, 247, 248; appointed King of Naples, 267; seized Rome, 279; at meeting of Napoleon and Marie Louise, 306; with Napo- leon in the invasion of Russia, 331; on the Russian retreat, 357; at the Battle of Dresden, 374; betrayed Napoleon, 384; his death, 452, 453. Naples, Kingdom of, brought to terms by Napoleon, 53 ; bestowed upon Joseph Bonaparte by Na- poleon, 213; its crown trans- ferred to Murat, 267. Napoleon Birth and Youth Birth, 3, 4; Corsican revolu- tion, 4, 5; the subjugation of Corsica, 6; Napoleon's mother, 6; his foster mother, 6; his boyish temper, 7 ; his birthplace and Ajaccio described, 7—11; boy- hood battles, 11, 12; at school in Ajaccio, 14; at school in Brienne, 13-17; learning French, 14; his hatred of France and his Corsican patriotism, 16; Brienne to-day, 17-19; at the Ecole Militaire, Paris, 19-21; Bourrienne, his schoolmate at Brienne, 17; Peccadeuc and Phelippeaux, his schoolmates at Ecole Militaire, 20; influenced by revolutionary philosophy, 20; examined by La Place, and his low standing, 21. In the Army and the Revolu- tion Going to his regiment on bor- rowed money, 22; Valence, his first post, described, 22; as sub- lieutenant, living on $20 a month, 22, 23 ; his first sweet- heart, Mile. Colombier, 23 ; his reading and studies, and liter- ary efforts, 23-25; his devotion to the doctrines of Rousseau, 24 ; meditated suicide, 24 ; on duty at Auxonne, and his privations there, 25; advocating the revo- lution in Corsica, 25; promoted to first lieutenancy, 26; secre- tary of a revolutionary club, 26 ; lieutenant colonel, Corsican na- tional guard, 26; beginning of a life long quarrel with Pozzo di Borgo, 26 ; dismissed from the French army, 26: at Paris in 516 INDEX the Revolution, 27; restored to the army and appointed captain, 28; his first active service, 28; his breach with Paoli, 28; a Frenchman at last, 29; ban- ished from Corsica, 29, 30; Cor- sican loyalty to his memory, 30. The Man on Horseback A penniless refugee in France, 31; at the siege of Toulon, 32- 34; brigadier general, 34; im- prisoned and released, 35 ; or- dered to Turkey and dropped from the army the same day, 35; the revolution of the 13th Vendemiaire, 35-37 ; his meet- ing with Josephine, 42; general- in-chief of the Army of the In- terior, 43; his marriage, 44, 45; general-in-chief of the Army of Italy, 4G ; his plan of campaign, 47; with the army, 47; his first victory, 48; his first treaty of peace, 49 ; a love-sick bride- groom, 49; by the bridge of Lodi, 50, 51 ; acclaimed "Little Corporal," 51; in the cockpit of Europe, 52; his treaties with the Pope and the King of Na- ples, 53; rejoined by Josephine, 54; battles of Castiglione and Lonato, 55; his narrow escapes from capture, 55; defeated the Austrians in the Tyrol, 56; re- treated from the Austrians at Caldiero, 56; Battle of Arcole, 57-59; Battle of Rivoli, 60, 61; capture of Mantua, 62; invasion of Austria, 62-64 ; armistice at Leoben, 64; his first court at Milan and Montebello, 65-69; handsomely remembered his mother in the first hour of vie tory, 68; his dislike of the name Napoleon, 69; appointed Bour- rienne his secretary, 69; tear- ing down thrones and setting up republics, 70, 71; the loot of Italy, 71; the Peace of Campo Formio, 72. In the Orient His expedition to Egypt, 73, 74; the voyage, and the capture of Malta, 75, 76; eluded Nelson, 76; landed in Egypt, 77, 78; at Alexandria, 78, 79; the march to Cairo, 79-81; the Battle of the Pyramids, 82-85; his fleet lost in the Battle of the Nile, Sti; his rule in Egypt, 87-90; his project for a Suez Canal, 88; Sultan of Turkey declared war against him, 89; across the desert, 91-94; capture of Jaffa and massacre of prisoners, 94- 96; advance into Syria, 97-99; Siege of Acre, 97-106; Battle of Mt. Tabor, 101-103; in Naz- areth, 103; his retreat from Acre, 107 ; in the plague hos- pital at Jaffa, 107; the poison- ing story, 108; his return to Cairo, 108; Battle of Aboukir, 108, 109; his flight from Egypt, 109; landed in France, 110; tri- umphal progress to Paris, 110, 111. The Consulate The situation in France on Napoleon's return from Egypt, 111; the plot for the overthrow of the Directory, 111, 112; Na- poleon mobbed, 113; cleared the legislative hall with grenadiers, 113; a provisional consulate, 113; the scene at St. Cloud, 113; reorganising the government, 114, 115; mourning for Wash- ington, 116; stealing into the INDEX 517 Tuileries, 116, 117; a legacy of war, 119; fooling Europe, 120; crossing the Alps, 118-126; planning the Battle of Marengo, 127; a defeat turned to victory, 128-131; Austria brought to terms, 133; England made peace, 133, 134; habits and char- acteristics of the First Consul, 135-138; reuniting the country, 138; restoring religion and mak- ing the Concordat with Rome, 138-140; formulating the Code Napoleon, 140; elected Consul for Life, 141; elected President of Cisalpine Republic, 142; La- fayette's protest, 142; sale of Louisiana, 143-146 ; remember- ing old friends, 147-149; the consular court at the Tuileries and at Malmaison, 149-155; the man described, 154, 155; "1 am not like other men," 157 ; his advance to the throne, 159- 166; Bourbon bribes, and plots against him, 160-166; an at- tempt to assassinate him, 161; betrayed by Bourrienne, 162, 163; more Bourbon plots and death of Duke d'Enghien, 163- 166; death of the Republic, 166. Emperor Proclaimed Emperor, 168; "Putting gold braid on repub- licans," 169; choosing Charle- magne as imperial ancestor, 170; preparing for coronation, 170, 171; religious marriage with Josephine, 172, 173; the coronation, 173-176; crowned King of Italy, 176; remodelled Switzerland into modern repub- lic, 179; stormy scene with Brit- ish ambassador, 179, 180; plan of invading England, 180-183; received offer of steamboat and submarine from Fulton, 180; long struggle to conquer Eng- land on the land, 184; cause of the Napoleonic wars, 185; cam- paign of Ulm, 186-191; the Grand Army described, 187-190; entry into Vienna, 191, 192; how Napoleon chose the field of Aus- terlitz, 193-195; his plan of battle, 196; the night before, 197, 198; the Sun of Austerlitz, 198; the victory, 199-202; meet- ing with Francis of Austria, 203; received Venice from Aus- tria, 204; imperial matchmak- ing and separation of Jerome and Betsy Pater son, 206-212; king making, 213-217; founded Confederation of the Rhine, 219; conquest of Prussia in 1806-1807, 220-237; Battle of Jena, 221-224; at Sans Souci and the tomb of Frederick the Great, 224, 225; freed Polish serfs, 230; Battle of Eylau, 233- 235; Battle of Friedland, 236, 237; the Peace of Tilsit, 238- 245; his marshals, 247-251; how he rewarded them, 249, 250; marshals contrasted, 251; his ambition and plans for Paris, 252-253; laying out streets and setting up monuments, 253-256; dealing with poor and unem- ployed, 256; constructing canals and highways for the Empire, 257-259 ; emancipating the Jews, 259; neglecting popular educa- tion, 259; attitude toward art and the opera, 259, 260; his im- mense correspondence, 260; his handwriting, 260; dismissed Talleyrand, 261; abolished the Tribunate, 261 ; his finances, 518 INDEX 261; his economies, 262; his re- wards for all kinds of merits, 262 ; his consuming energies, 263; his despotism, 263. The Empire Waning Napoleon's first downward steps, 264; his decrees against American ships, 265; his over- throw of Portuguese throne, 265, 266; his seizure of Rome, 266; appointed Joseph Bona- parte King of Spain, 266, 267 ; Murat, King of Naples, 267; his delusion, 267 ; challenged by revolution in Spain, 267-270; his reunion with the Czar at Erfurt, 269; entered Madrid, 270; pursued Sir John Moore, 270, 271 ; returned to Paris, 271 ; caught between two foes, 272; his Wagram campaign, 272- 279; wounded at Ratisbon, 272; his soliloquy before the Castle of Dernstein, 273, 274; his cap- ture of Vienna, 274; arrested and deported Pope Pius VII, 279, 280; his peace treaty with Austria, 280, 281; his court, his opinions about women and his relations with them, 282-291; son born to him by Eleonore Revel, 290; son born to him by Mme. Walewska, 290; his reso- lution to seek an heir; his trou- bles with Josephine's creditors, 293; her usefulness to him, 293- 295; announced divorce plan to her, 295, 296; his settlement on her, 296, 297; the divorce and parting, 297, 298; selecting Marie Louise for second wife, 299, 300; the marriage, 304- 309; at the birth and christen- ing of the King of Rome, 310- 313. The Russian Disaster Evil influence of divorce and second marriage, 315; his dress and manners, 315, 316; his au- tocracy, 316, 317; his work fin- ished, 318, 319; his women ene- mies, 320; his seizure of Olden- burg, 320; his estrangement from the Czar, 320, 321; baffled by American ships, 321; evil ef- fects of his continental system, 321, 322; his attitude toward the church, 322, 323; his an- nexation of Holland, 323; his embarrassment over the selec- tion of Bernadotte to be crown prince of Sweden, 323, 324; his annexation of Swedish Pomme- rania, 324; his successful rule in his Empire, 324, 325; his moral deterioration, 325-327 ; his fatalism, 326, 327; again caught between two foes, 328 ; his departure for the Russian campaign, 329 ; his congress of sovereigns at Dresden, 329; his army of invasion, 330; crossing the frontier, 330-332; no longer the man of Austerlitz, 333; greeted by disasters at the out- set, 333-335; before Smolensk, 335, 336; plunging deeper into the wilds, 336; at the Battle of Borodino, 337, 338; before Mos- cow, 339-341; the burning of the city, 342-344; souvenirs of his stay at the Kremlin, 344- 349 ; his retreat from Moscow, 350-360; "It is but a step from the sublime to the ridiculous," 359. Overthrow and Abdication "All Cossack or all republi- can," 361 ; his futile struggle with the Pope, 363, 364; raising INDEX 519 a new army in 1813, 364, 365; his Saxon campaign, 366; at the Battle of Liitzen, 366; at the Battle of Bautzen, 367; his grief at the death of Duroc, 368; the fatal truce, 368; his interview with Metternich at Dresden, 369, 370; England his most constant foe, 370, 371; end of the truce, 371; at the Battle of Dresden, 373-375; overthrown at the Battle of Leipsic, 376- 381; his unavailing efforts to raise another army in 1814, 382- 385; liberated the Pope and Ferdinand of Spain, 384; his last hours with his son, 385, 386; at the Battle of Brienne, 386; at Battle of La Rothiere, 387; at the Battles of Champ- paubert, Montmirail, Chateau Thierry and Montereau, 389; repulsed by Bliicher, 390 ; nearly overwhelmed by Schwarzenburg at Arcis sur Aube, 390; his last card, 390, 391 ; his command to save the King of Rome from capture, 392; racing to the de- fence of Paris, 393; at Cour de France, 393-395; at Fontaine- bleau, 396; abandoned by mar- shals and servitors, 397, 398; his abdication, 397, 398; at- tempted suicide, 398, 399; his farewell to the Guard, 399; his journey to Elba, 399-400; his exile and reign at Elba, and Elba to-day, 402-412. The Hundred Days The Allies violate Treaty of Fontainebleau, 413, 414; his flight from Elba, 414-416; his landing in France, 416-418; his march through the Maritime Alps, 418-420; joined by "Jean Valjean" at Digne, 420; "Who will shoot his General?" 421, 422; his entry into Grenoble, 422, 423; into Lyons, 423; de- nounced as an outlaw, 423; won Marshal Ney, 423; again in the Tuileries, 424; the lightning change among the courtiers, 425, 426; his army, 427; fooling Bliicher and Wellington, 427, 428; going to the front, 428, 429; his fatal hesitancy, 429- 431; at the Battle of Ligny, 430; his first sight of a British soldier in twenty years, 431, 432; at the Battle of Waterloo, 432-446 ; his flight from the dis- aster, 446, 447. In Captivity His final dethronement, 448- 449; his retirement to Malmai- son, 449-451; debating his fu- ture, 450, 451 ; preferred to sur- render to England, 451; his re- jection of plans for his escape, 451, 452; his last step on French soil, 452; his reasons for pre- ferring to throw himself upon England, 453; his appeal to George IV, 453; his surrender to Captain Maitland of the Bellerophon, 455; his arrival in Torbay, 455; in Plymouth har- bour, 455; received sentence of banishment to St. Helena, 456; his companions, 456; his trans- fer to the Northumberland, 456; his last glimpse of France, 457; his life on the Northumberland, 457; his first view of St. He- lena, 457; the islands in the voyage of his life, 458; St. He- lena described, 458, 459; his life at "The Briars," 460 ; Longwood described, 460, 461 ; his strange 520 INDEX court, 461, 462; his struggles with the English language, 462, 463; his good relations with the English at first, 463; his feud with Sir Hudson Lowe, 464-470 ; the efforts to prevent his escape, 465, 466; his defiance of the governments of Europe, 466, 467 ; his gardening, 467 ; his dis- ease mistakenly diagnosed, 470; his last hours and death, 470, 471; cancer disclosed by the au- topsy, 471; his burial in an un- marked grave, 471, 472; his body conveyed to France and en- tombed in the Invalides, 485- 487 ; his tomb described, 487- 489; souvenirs of him at the Invalides, 487; his life reviewed, 490-493. Napoleon II, see Rome, King of. Napoleon III, at the Battle of Solferino, 56; imprisoned in Jerome Bonaparte's country pal- ace, 214; restored statue of Na- poleon to Vendome column, 254; his memorial to his mother, 401. Narbonne, Mme. de, her disdain of Napoleon, 285. Nazareth, Palestine, visited by Napoleon, 103. Neipperg, Count, aided to alienate Marie Louise from Napoleon, 409 ; became her morganatic hus- band, 477; his death, 483. Nelson, Horatio, lost an eye at Calvi, 30; eluded by Napoleon on the Mediterranean, 76, 77; destroyed Napoleon's fleet in the Battle of the Nile, 86; lured away from Toulon, 182; his vic- torious death at Trafalgar, 191. Ney, Marshal, at Ulm, 190; at Battle of Friedland, 237; his antecedents, 247, 248; on the Russian retreat, 354-358; mis- understood orders at Bautzen, 367; at the first abdication, 397; ordered to capture Napo- leon on return from Elba, but surrendered, 423; at Quatre Bras, 428-431; at Waterloo, 442, 444^45; his death, 452. Nicholas I of Russia, married daughter of Queen Louise, 246; his sarcasm on the tomb of Na- poleon, 488. Nile, The, Battle of, 86. Norway, annexed to Sweden, 384. Oldenburg, Duchess of, her bitter grievance against Napoleon, 320. O'Meara, Dr. Barry, Napoleon's physician at St. Helena, 461, 462; removed from Longwood, 468. Oudinot, Marshal, his antecedents, 247, 248; at the first abdication, 397 ; his tomb in the Invalides at Paris, 487. Palestine, Napoleon's campaign in, 93-96. Paoli, Pasquale, Corsican general- in-chief, 5; exiled to England, 6; his breach with Napoleon, 28. Peccadeuc, Picot de, Napoleon's schoolmate at the Ecole Mili- taire, 20; fighting Napoleon in 1813, 372. Perignon, Marshal, his antecedents, 247, 248. Phelippeaux, Napoleon's school' mate at Ecole Militaire, 20; op- posed Napoleon at Acre, 99; his death, 103. Pichegru, General, in the school at Brienne, 19; in a Bourbon plot against Napoleon, 163; com- mitted suicide, 164. INDEX 521 Pius VI, Pope, his truce with Na- poleon, 53. Pius VII, Pope, makes Concordat with Napoleon, 138-140; com- ing to coronation, 172; insisted on religious marriage between Napoleon and Josephine, 172, 173; at the coronation, 173-176; declined to annul Bonaparte- Paterson marriage, 209 ; his car- dinals deported by Napoleon, 266; he is arrested and deported by Napoleon, 279, 280; political effect of his refusal to annul Bonaparte-Paterson marriage, 322; his retaliation on Napo- leon, 322, 323; at Fontaine- bleau, 363, 364; liberated, 384; appealed to powers in behalf of Napoleon at St. Helena, 469. Poland, war in, 1807, 229; her serfs freed by Napoleon, 230; a little strip of, gained by Russia at Tilsit, 245 ; grand duchy of Warsaw formed by Napoleon and bestowed on the King of Saxony, 245 ; a part of Austria's Polish province transferred to Grand Duchy of Warsaw, 280. Poniatowski, Marshal, his ante- cedents, 247, 248 ; with Napo- leon on eve of Russian cam- paign, 330; drowned at Leipsic, 381. Portugal, Napoleon and Czar de- termined to close her ports against England, 244; her royal family banished by Napoleon, 265, 266; but are rescued by Sidney Smith, 266. Potocka, Countess, on Marie Louise's appearance, 304. Pozzo di Borgo, Carlo Andrea, the beginning of his life long quar- rel with Napoleon, 26; his twenty years' war upon him, 327; in the campaign of 1813, 372; proposed his removal from Elba to St. Helena, 414; at Waterloo, 434; wounded, 446; his last thrust at Napoleon, 466; demanded that the King of Rome be forbidden to marry, 475; accused of plotting mur- der of King of Rome, 478. Prussia, disappointed her allies in 1805, 185; indifferent to Ger- man patriotism, and trafficking with Napoleon, 218, 219; her an- nexation of Hanover, and war with England, 219; conquered by Napoleon, 220-237; dis- trusted by him, 243, 244; her dismemberment at Tilsit, 244, 245. Pyramids, Battle of the, 82-85. Quatre Bras, Belgium, Battle of, 430. Rapp, General, at the Battle of Austerlitz, 201 ; his blunt retort to Napoleon, 317. Remusat, Mme. de, her character- isation of the First Consul, 152. Renaudine, Mme., aunt of Jose- phine, who arranged her mar- riage to Beauharnais, 39; ap- proved her marriage to Napo- leon, 44. Revel, Eleonore, presented a son to Napoleon, 290. Rhine, Confederation of the, formed by Napoleon, 219; its abandonment of Napoleon, 370. Richmond, Duchess of, her ball on the eve of Waterloo, 429. Rivoli, Italy, Battle of, 60, 61. Robespierre, Maximilien, at the height of power, 31. Rochefaucauld, Mme. de la, at Josephine's coronation, 175. 522 INDEX Rome, King of, his birth, christen- ing and childhood, 310-314; his last hours with his father, 385, 386; his flight from Paris, 392; carried off to Austria, 400; sepa- rated from his mother, 409 : dreaded by the monarchs after Napoleon's fall, 473; a prisoner in his grandfather's palace, 474; his name changed, 474, 475; cut off from succession to his moth- er's duchy, 475; plots and coun- ter plots, 475; his inquiries about his father, 476; the news of his father's death, 476, 477; the efforts to seat him on his father's throne, 478, 479; his tributes to his father's memory, 479, 480; entered Austrian army, 480; his death, 480, 481; his tomb, 484. Roustan, Napoleon's mameluke body servant, with him in Spain, 269 ; on the Russian retreat, 357 ; abandoned his fallen mas- ter in 1814, 398. Russia, in the third coalition, 185 ; demanded England recognise equality of flags at sea, 244 ; received a little strip of Poland from Napoleon, and permission to take Finland from Sweden, 245 ; pushing her boundary west- ward, 331, 332; her monument of Napoleon's campaign, 332; her memorials, at Moscow, of Napoleon's repulse, 344-349 ; her losses in the Napoleonic cam- paign, 359; permitted violation of treaty pledges to Napoleon at his abdication, 413, 414; her commissioner to St. Helena re- buffed by Napoleon, 466. Sardinia, Kingdom of, made peace with Napoleon, 50. Savary, General, reporting to Na- poleon at Marengo, 129; watch- ing Bourbon plotters, 163, 164; returning from Spain with Na- poleon, 271; his despairing let- ter to him in 1814, 391; parting from him on the Bellerophon, 456. Saxony, raised to a kingdom by Napoleon, 213; received grand duchy of Warsaw from him, 245. Saxony, King of, host of Napo- leon on the eve of Russian cam- paign, 329; at the Battle of Dresden, 375. Scliwar/.enberg, Prince, in the cam- paign of 1814, 385; deceived by a Napoleonic ruse, 388; stag- gered by Napoleon at Monte- reau, 389; nearly overwhelmed Napoleon at Arcis Sur Aube, 390. Smith, Sidney, commander of Eng- lish fleet at Acre, 98; taunting Napoleon, 105; sent European newspapers to Napoleon, 109; rescued royal family of Portu- gal, 266. Soult, Mme., rebuked by Napoleon, 283. Soult, Marshal, at Ulm, 190; at the Battle of Austerlitz, 199- 201; his antecedents, 247, 248; at Waterloo, 435. Spain, her secret transfer of Louisiana to Napoleon, 143; her royal family dethroned by Na- poleon, 266; her crown trans- ferred to Joseph Bonaparte, 266, 267; her revolution, 267-270. Stael, Mme. de, her dialogue with the First Consul, 153. St. Cyr, Marshal, his antecedents, 247, 248. St. Denis, Napoleon's valet, by the deathbed at St. Helena, 471; re- INDEX 523 turned to St. Helena to escort Napoleon's body to France, 485, 486. St. Helena, proposed by Pozzo di Borgo as place of exile for Na- poleon, 414; chosen by the Brit- ish ministry, 455, 450; de- scribed, 458, 459. Stokoe, Dr., removed from Napo- leon's household at Longwood, 468. Sturmer, Baron, Austrian commis- sioner at St. Helena, 466. Suchet, Marshal, his antecedents, 247, 248. Suez Canal, Napoleon's project for its construction vetoed by engi- neers, 88. Sweden, Napoleon and Czar deter- mined to close her ports against England, 244; Napoleon con- sented to Russia taking Finland from her, 245 ; Napoleon an- nexed Swedish Pommerania, 324; Bernadotte chosen heir to her throne, 323, 324; annexed Norway, 384. Switzerland, her confederation re- modelled by Napoleon, 179. Taine, Henri, on Napoleon, 260. Talleyrand, Charles Maurice, dis- missed by Napoleon, 261 ; his re- tort to him, 288 ; his gross in- sult, 317; leader in the Bourbon restoration, 395 ; wished to re- move Napoleon from Elba, 414. Tilsit, East Prussia, Peace of, 238-245. Tolstoi, Count Leo, on Napoleon in Moscow, 344 ; on the retreat of the French, 351. Toulon, France, Siege of, 32-34. Trafalgar, Spain, Battle of, 191. Turkey, Napoleon chosen to in- struct her army, 35; nominal ruler of Egypt, 80; declared war on France, 89; her partition dis- cussed by Napoleon and Alex- ander at Tilsit, 240, 241. Ulm, Wlirtemberg, Campaign of, 184-192. United States, its treaty with Na- poleon in 1800, 143; purchase of Louisiana, 143-146; its flag the refuge of commerce in Napole- onic wars, 264; injuries to its shipping, 265; Embargo Act, 265; its ships admitted to Rus- sian ports in defiance of Napo- leon, 321. Uxbridge, Lord, retreating before Napoleon, 431, 432. Valjean, Jean, the original of the character followed Napoleon to Waterloo, 420. Vandamme, General, at the Battle of Austerlitz, 201, 202. Venice, invaded by Napoleon, 53; the republic destroyed by Napo- leon, 70; ceded to Austria by Napoleon, 72; ceded to Napoleon by Austria, 204. Victor, Marshal, at Battle of Friedland, 237 ; in the campaign of 1814, 385. Victor Emmanuel II, at the Battle of Solferino, 56. Victoria of England, presented to France the funeral car of Napo- leon at St. Helena, 487. Vignali, Father, one of Napoleon's priests at St. Helena, 469; pray- ing by the deathbed, 471. Wagram, Austria, Battle of, 278, 279. Walewska, Mme., presented a son to Napoleon, 290. 524 INDEX Walewski, Count, son of Napoleon, 290. Washington, George, mourning for his death ordered by Napoleon, 116; his biography read by him on the Bellerophon, 454. Waterloo, Belgium, Battle of, 432- 446; its effect, 448, 449. Wellington, Duke of, at military school in France, 20; his cam- paign in Portugal, 268 ; fooled by Napoleon in the Hundred Days, 428; his army, 429; at the Duchess of Richmond's ball, 429; at the Battle of Quatre Bras, 430; at the Battle of Waterloo, 432-446; counselled moderation to Bliicher, 450. Whitworth, Lord, in a stormy scene with Napoleon, 180. William I, German Emperor and son of Louise, 229; at the tomb of his mother, 246. William II, German Emperor, at Tilsit, 239 ; dedicated monument on the battlefield of Leipsic, 377. Wurmser, Marshal, in command of an Austrian army against Na- poleon, 54; defeated by Napo- leon at Castiglione, 56: defeated in the Tyrol and retired in- to Mantua, 56; his surrender, 62. Wiirtemberg, raised to a kingdom by Napoleon, 213. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA HP HE following pages contain advertisements of books by the same author or on kindred subjects. 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