Part 2
This book and these letters were known to Sir Walter Scott, who made use of some of them in his _History of Napoleon_. M. Aubenas, in his _Histoire de l'Imperatrice Josephine_, published in 1857, which has been lavishly made use of in a recent work on the same subject, seems to have known, at any rate, four of these letters, which were communicated to him by M. le Baron Feuillet de Conches. Monsieur Aubenas seems never to have seen the Tennant Collection, of which these undoubtedly form part, but as Baron Feuillet de Conches was an expert in deciphering Bonaparte's extraordinary caligraphy, these letters are very useful for reference in helping us to translate some phrases which had been given up as illegible by Mr. Tennant and Sir Walter Scott.
(2nd) The _Collection Didot_. This enormously valuable collection forms by far the greater part of the Letters that we possess of Napoleon to his wife. They are undoubtedly authentic, and have been utilised largely by Aubenas, St. Amand, Masson, and the _Correspondance de Napoleon I._ They were edited by Madame Salvage de Faverolles. As is well known, Sir Walter Scott was very anxious to obtain possession of these letters for his _Life of Napoleon_, and his visit to Paris was partly on this account. In _Archibald Constable and his Literary Correspondents_, edited in 1873 by his son, we find the following:--
"_Letter from_ ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE _to_ SIR WALTER SCOTT.
"_August 30, 1825._
"I have had various conversations with Mr. Thomson on the subject of Napoleon's correspondence with Josephine. Mr. Thomson communicated with Count Flahault for me in the view of its being published, and whether the letters could not, in the meantime, be rendered accessible. The publication, it seems, under any circumstances, is by no means determined on, but should they be given, the price expected is five thousand guineas, which I should imagine greatly too much. I have an enumeration of the letters, from whence written, &c. I shall subjoin a copy of it."
When they were finally published in 1833, they seem to have been stimulated into existence by publication of the _Memorial de Saint-Helene_, better known in England as _Las Cases_. Doubtless Hortense only allowed such letters to be published as would not injure the reputation of her mother or her relations. In the Preface it is stated: "We think that these letters will afford an interest as important as delightful. Everything that comes from Napoleon, and everything that appertains to him, will always excite the lively attention of contemporaries and posterity. If the lofty meditation of philosophy concerns itself only with the general influence of great men upon their own generation and future ones, a curiosity of another nature, and not less greedy, loves to penetrate into the inmost recesses of their soul, in order to elicit their most secret inclinations. It likes to learn what has been left of the _man_, amid the preoccupations of their projects and the elevation of their fortune. It requires to know in what manner their character has modified their genius, or has been subservient to it.
"It is this curiosity that we hope to satisfy by the publication of these letters. They reveal the inmost thought of Napoleon, they will reflect his earliest impulses, they will show how the General, the Consul, and the Emperor felt and spoke, not in his discourses or his proclamations--the official garb of his thought--but in the free outpourings of the most passionate or the most tender affections.... This correspondence will prove, we strongly believe, that the conqueror was human, the master of the world a good husband, the great man in fact an excellent man.... We shall see in them how, up to the last moment, he lavished on his wife proofs of his tenderness. Without doubt the letters of the Emperor Napoleon are rarer and shorter than those of the First Consul, and the First Consul writes no longer like General Bonaparte, but everywhere the sentiment is fundamentally the same.
"We make no reflection on the style of these letters, written in haste and in all the _abandon_ of intimacy. We can easily perceive they were not destined to see the light. Nevertheless we publish them without changing anything in them."
The _Collection Didot_ contains 228 letters from Napoleon to Josephine, and 70 from Josephine to Hortense, and two from Josephine to Napoleon, which seem to be the only two in existence of Josephine to Napoleon whose authenticity is unquestioned.
(3rd) The fugitive letters are collected from various sources, and their genuineness does not seem to be quite as well proved as those of the Tennant or Didot Series. We have generally taken the _Correspondence of Napoleon I._ as the touchstone of their merit to be inserted here, although one of them--that republished from _Las Cases_ (No. 85, Series G.)--is manifestly mainly the work of that versatile author, who is utterly unreliable except when confirmed by others. As Lord Rosebery has well said, the book is "an arsenal of spurious documents."
We have relegated to an Appendix those published by Madame Ducrest, as transparent forgeries, and have to acknowledge with thanks a letter from M. Masson on this subject which thoroughly confirms these views. There seems some reason to doubt No. I., Series E, but being in the _Correspondence_, I have translated it.
The _Correspondence of Napoleon I._ is a splendid monument to the memory of Napoleon. It is alluded to throughout the Notes as _The Correspondence_, and it deserves special recognition here. Its compilation was decreed by Napoleon III. from Boulogne, on 7th September 1854, and the first volume appeared in 1858, and the last in 1870. With the first volume is inserted the Report of the Commission to the Emperor, part of which we subjoin:--
"_Report of the Commission to the Emperor._
"SIRE,--Augustus numbered Caesar among the gods, and dedicated to him a temple; the temple has disappeared, the Commentaries remain. Your Majesty, wishing to raise to the chief of your dynasty an imperishable monument, has ordered us to gather together and publish the political, military, and administrative correspondence of Napoleon I. It has realised that the most conspicuous (_eclatant_) homage to render to this incomparable genius was to make him known in his entirety. No one is ignorant of his victories, of the laws with which he has endowed our country, the institutions that he has founded and which dwell immovable after so many revolutions; his prosperity and his reverses are in every mouth; history has recounted what he has done, but it has not always known his designs: it has not had the secret of so many admirable combinations that have been the spoil of fortune (_que la fortune a dejouees_), and so many grand projects for the execution of which time alone was wanting. The traces of Napoleon's thoughts were scattered; it was necessary to reunite them and to give them to the light.
"Such is the task which your Majesty confided to us, and of which we were far from suspecting the extent. The thousands of letters which were received from all parts have allowed us to follow, in spite of a few regrettable _lacunae_, the thoughts of Napoleon day by day, and to assist, so to say, at the birth of his projects, at the ceaseless workings of his mind, which knew no other rest than change of occupation. But what is perhaps most surprising in the reading of a correspondence so varied, is the power of that universal intelligence from which nothing escaped, which in turn raised itself without an effort to the most sublime conceptions, and which descends with the same facility to the smallest details.... Nothing seems to him unworthy of his attention that has to do with the realisation of his designs; and it is not sufficient for him to give the most precise orders, but he superintends himself the execution of them with an indefatigable perseverance.
"The letters of Napoleon can add nothing to his glory, but they better enable us to comprehend his prodigious destiny, the prestige that he exercised over his contemporaries--'le culte universel dont sa memoire est l'objet, enfin, l'entrainement irresistible par lequel la France a replace sa dynastie au sommet de l'edifice qu'il avait construit.'
"These letters also contain the most fruitful sources of information ... for peoples as for governments; for soldiers and for statesmen no less than for historians. Perhaps some persons, greedy of knowing the least details concerning the intimate life of great men, will regret that we have not reproduced those letters which, published elsewhere for the most part, have only dealt with family affairs and domestic relations. Collected together by us as well as the others, they have not found a place in the plan of which your Majesty has fixed for us the limits.
"Let us haste to declare that, in conformity with the express intentions of your Majesty, we have scrupulously avoided, in the reproduction of the letters of the Emperor, any alteration, curtailment, or modification of the text. Sometimes, thinking of the legitimate sorrow which blame from so high a quarter may cause, we have regretted not to be able to soften the vigorous judgment of Napoleon on many of his contemporaries, but it was not our province to discuss them, still less to explain them; but if, better informed or calmer, the Emperor has rendered justice to those of his servants that he had for a moment misunderstood, we have been glad to indicate that these severe words have been followed by reparation.
"We have found it necessary to have the spelling of names of places and of persons frequently altered, but we have allowed to remain slight incorrectnesses of language which denote the impetuosity of composition, and which often could not be rectified without weakening the originality of an energetic style running right to its object, brief and precise as the words of command. Some concise notes necessary for clearing up obscure passages are the sole conditions which we have allowed ourselves....
"The Commission has decided in favour of chronological order throughout. It is, moreover, the only one which can reproduce faithfully the sequence of the Emperor's thoughts. It is also the best for putting in relief his universal aptitude and his marvellous fecundity.
"Napoleon wrote little with his own hand; nearly all the items of his correspondence were dictated to his secretaries, to his aides-de-camp and his chief of staff, or to his ministers. Thus the Commission has not hesitated to comprise in this collection a great number of items which, although bearing another signature, evidently emanate from Napoleon....
"By declaring that his public life dated from the siege of Toulon, Napoleon has himself determined the point of departure which the Commission should choose. It is from this immortal date that commences the present publication.
"(Signed) THE MEMBERS OF THE COMMISSION.
"_Paris, January 20, 1858._"
CONTEMPORARY SOURCES.--It is a commonplace that the history of Napoleon has yet to be written. His contemporaries were stunned or overwhelmed by the whirlwind of his glory; the next generation was blinded by meteoric fragments of his "system," which glowed with impotent heat as they fell through an alien atmosphere into oblivion. Such were the Bourriennes, the Jominis, the Talleyrands, and other traitors of that ilk. But
"The tumult and the shouting dies; The captains and the kings depart;"
and now, when all the lesser tumults and lesser men _have_ passed away, each new century will, as Lockhart foretold, "inscribe one mighty era with the majestic name of Napoleon." And yet the writings of no contemporary can be ignored; neither Alison nor Scott, certainly not Bignon, Montgaillard, Pelet, Mathieu Dumas, and Pasquier. Constant, Bausset, Meneval, Rovigo, and D'Abrantes are full of interest for their personal details, and D'Avrillon, Las Cases, Marmont, Marbot, and Lejeune only a degree less so. Jung's _Memoirs of Lucien_ are invaluable, and those of Joseph and Louis Bonaparte useful. But the _Correspondence_ is worth everything else, including Panckouke (1796-99), where, in spite of shocking arrangement, print, and paper, we get the replies as well as the letters. The _Biographie Universelle Michaud_ is hostile, except the interesting footnotes of Begin. It must, however, be read. The article in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ was the work of an avowed enemy of the Napoleonic system, the editor of the _Life and Times of Stein_.
For the Diary, the _Revue Chronologique de l'Histoire de France_ or Montgaillard (1823) has been heavily drawn upon, especially for the later years, but wherever practicable the dates have been verified from the _Correspondence_ and bulletins of the day. On the whole, the records of respective losses in the battles are slightly favourable to the French, as their figures have been usually taken; always, however, the maximum French loss and the minimum of the allies is recorded, when unverified from other sources.
The late Professor Seeley, in his monograph, asserts that Napoleon, tried by his plan, is a failure--that even before death his words and
## actions merited no monument. We must seek, however, for the mightiest
heritage of Napoleon in his brainchildren of the second generation, the Genii of the Code.
The Code Napoleon claims to-day its two hundred million subjects. "The Law should be clean, precise, uniform; to interpret is to corrupt it." So ruled the Emperor; and now, a century later, Archbishop Temple (born in one distant island the year Napoleon died in another) bears testimony to the beneficent sway of Napoleon's Word-Empire. Criticising English legal phraseology, the Archbishop of Canterbury said, "The French Code is always welcome in every country where it has been introduced; and where people have once got hold of it, they are unwilling to have it changed for any other, because it is _a marvel of clearness_." Surely if ever Style _is_ the Man, it is Napoleon, otherwise the inspection of over seven million words, as marshalled forth in his _Correspondence_, would not only confuse but confound. As it is, its "hum of armies, gathering rank on rank," has left behind what Bacon calls a conflation of sound, from which, however, as from Kipling's steel-sinewed symphony,
"The clanging chorus goes-- Law, Order, Duty and Restraint, Obedience, Discipline."
FOOTNOTES
[6] Sometimes he is perhaps more to be trusted than the leading lexicographer, as for example when, the day after Wagram, he writes his Minister of War that the _coup de Jarnac_ will come from the English in Spain. Now, when the Jarnac in question was slain in fair fight by La Chateignerie by a blow _au jarret_, it was an _unexpected_ blow, but not surely, as Littre tells us, _manoeuvre perfide_, _deloyale_. Nothing was too disloyal for perfidious Albion, but for 30,000 English to outmanoeuvre three marshals and 100,000 French veterans would be, and was, the unexpected which happened at Talavera three weeks later.
[7] Findel's _History of Freemasonry_.
[8] Lord Rosebery.
[9] This versatile writer, the author of _Oberon_, the translator of Lucian and Shakespeare, and the founder of psychological romance in Germany, was then in his seventy-fifth year.
[10] The historian (1755-1809), "the Thucydides of Switzerland."
[11] Horne's _History of Napoleon_ (1841).
[12] Ibid.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Column Headings:
A: Pages. B: Series. C: Dates. D: No. of Letters. E: Sources. F: Tennant. G: Didot. H: Various. I: Pages of Corresponding Notes.
| | | | | E | | | A | B| C | D |----------------------------------- | I | | | | | | F | G | H | | | | | | | | |{No. 2, from } | | | 1-16 | A|1796 | 8 |{ Nos.} | |{ St. Amand, } |198-211| | | | | |{1, } | |{ _La Citoyenne_} | | | | | | |{3-8 } | |{ _Bonaparte_ } | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |{Nos. }|{No. 15, from } | | | 17-38 | B|1796-7 | 25 | |{1-14 }|{ Bourrienne's } |211-223| | | | | | |{16-25}|{ _Life of_ } | | | | | | | | |{ _Bonaparte_ } | | | | | | | | | | | | 39-46 | C|1800 | 4 | No. 3 | 1,2,4 | |223-225| | | | | | | | | | | 47-53 | D|1801-2 | 5 | | all | |225-231| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |{No. 1, } | | | | | | | | |{ _Correspondence_}| | 55-60 | E|1804 | 6 | |{Nos. }|{No. 5, } |232-237| | | | | | |{2,3,} |{ Collection } | | | | | | | |{4,6 } |{ of Baron Heath} | | | | | | | | | | | | 61-74 | F|1805 | 19 | | all | |237-243| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |{No. 9A, from } | | | | | | | | |{ Mlle. }|243-264 | | | | | | | | |{ D'Avrillon } | | | 75-118| G|1806-7 | 87 | |all but|{No. 85, from } | | | | | | | | |{ Las Casas } | | | | | | | | | | | |119-122| H|1807 | 3 | | all | |264-267| | | | | | | | | | |123-128| I|1808 | 4 | | all | |267-269| | | | | | | | | | |129-132| J|1808 | 3 | | all | |269-273| | | | | | | | | | |133-140| K|1808-9 | 14 | | all | |273-278| | | | | | | | | | |141-154| L|1809 | 25 | | all | |278-295| | | | | | | | | | |155-165| M|1809-10| 22 | | all | |295-304| | | | | | | | | | |167-176| N|1810 |11[13]| | all | |304-310| | | | | | | | | | |177-181| O|1811 | 4 | | all | |311-312| | | | | | | | | | |183-197| P|1812-14| 2 | | all | |312-315| | | | |------| | | | | | | | | 242 | | | | |
316. APPENDIX (1).--Reputed Poem by Napoleon.
317. APPENDIX (2).--Genealogy of the Bonaparte Family.
317-321. APPENDIX (3).--Spurious Letters of Napoleon to Josephine.
FOOTNOTES
[13] Exclusive of two from Josephine to Napoleon.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
NAPOLEON _Frontispiece_ FROM AN ENGRAVING BY T. WRIGHT, AFTER AN ORIGINAL DRAWING (_Photogravure_)
EUGENE BEAUHARNAIS _Face page_ 121 AFTERWARDS VICEROY OF ITALY (_Photogravure_)
JOSEPHINE BEAUHARNAIS _Face page_ 198 _Circa_ 1795 (_Photogravure_)
FAC-SIMILE OF LETTER, DATED APRIL 24, 1796 _Pages_ 202-3
NAPOLEON'S LETTERS
SERIES A
(1796)
"Only those who knew Napoleon in the intercourse of private life can render justice to his character. For my own part, I know him, as it were, by heart; and in proportion as time separates us, he appears to me like a beautiful dream. And would you believe that, in my recollections of Napoleon, that which seems to me to approach most nearly to ideal excellence is not the hero, filling the world with his gigantic fame, but the man, viewed in the relations of private life?"--_Recollections of Caulaincourt_, _Duke of Vicenza_, vol. i. 197.
SERIES A
(For subjoined Notes to this Series see pages 198-211.)
LETTER PAGE
_Bonaparte made Commander-in-Chief_ 198
No. 1. 7 A.M. 198
No. 2. _Our good Ossian_ 199
No. 4. _Chauvet is dead_ 199
No. 5. Napoleon's suspicions 199 _The lovers of nineteen_ 200 _My brother_ 200
No. 6. _Unalterably good_ 201 _If you want a place for any one_ 201
No. 7. A criticism by Aubenas 201 _June 15th_ 204 _Presentiment of ill_ 210
No. 8. The Treaty with Rome 210 _Fortune_ 211
1796.
_February 23rd.--Bonaparte made Commander-in-Chief of the Army of Italy._
No. 1.
_Seven o'clock in the morning._
My waking thoughts are all of thee. Your portrait and the remembrance of last night's delirium have robbed my senses of repose. Sweet and incomparable Josephine, what an extraordinary influence you have over my heart. Are you vexed? do I see you sad? are you ill at ease? My soul is broken with grief, and there is no rest for your lover. But is there more for me when, delivering ourselves up to the deep feelings which master me, I breathe out upon your lips, upon your heart, a flame which burns me up--ah, it was this past night I realised that your portrait was not you. You start at noon; I shall see you in three hours. Meanwhile, _mio dolce amor_, accept a thousand kisses,[14] but give me none, for they fire my blood.
N. B.
_A Madame Beauharnais._
* * * * *
_March 9th.--Bonaparte marries Josephine._
_March 11th.--Bonaparte leaves Paris to join his army._
No. 2.
_Chanceaux Post House, March 14, 1796._
I wrote you at Chatillon, and sent you a power of attorney to enable you to receive various sums of money in course of remittance to me. Every moment separates me further from you, my beloved, and every moment I have less energy to exist so far from you. You are the constant object of my thoughts; I exhaust my imagination in thinking of what you are doing. If I see you unhappy, my heart is torn, and my grief grows greater. If you are gay and lively among your friends (male and female), I reproach you with having so soon forgotten the sorrowful separation three days ago; thence you must be fickle, and henceforward stirred by no deep emotions. So you see I am not easy to satisfy; but, my dear, I have quite different sensations when I fear that your health may be affected, or that you have cause to be annoyed; then I regret the haste with which I was separated from my darling. I feel, in fact, that your natural kindness of heart exists no longer for me, and it is only when I am quite sure you are not vexed that I am satisfied. If I were asked how I slept, I feel that before replying I should have to get a message to tell me that you had had a good night. The ailments, the passions of men influence me only when I imagine they may reach you, my dear. May my good genius, which has always preserved me in the midst of great dangers, surround you, enfold you, while I will face my fate unguarded. Ah! be not gay, but a trifle melancholy; and especially may your soul be free from worries, as your body from illness: you know what our good Ossian says on this subject. Write me, dear, and at full length, and accept the thousand and one kisses of your most devoted and faithful friend.
[This letter is translated from St. Amand's _La Citoyenne Bonaparte_, p. 3, 1892.]
* * * * *
_March 27th.--Arrival at Nice and proclamation to the soldiers._
No. 3.
_April 3rd.--He is at Mentone._
_Port Maurice, April 3rd._