Chapter X: The Fall of the Empire. 1810-1814

Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica

by John Kendrick Bangs

Just before the opening of the year 1810, which marked the
beginning of Bonaparte's decay, Fouche demanded an audience.

"Well, Fouche," said the Emperor, "what now?"

"This Empire can't go much further, Your Majesty, unless more
novelty is introduced. I've had my men out all through France taking
notes, and there's but one opinion among 'em all. You've got to do
something new or stop the show. If you'd only done what I suggested
at Austerlitz, and lost a leg, it would have been different. The
people don't ask much song-and-dance business from a one-legged
man."

"We compromised with you there," retorted Napoleon. "At
Ratisbon our imperial foot was laid up for a week."

"Yes--but you didn't lose it," returned Fouche. "Can't you see
the difference? If you'd lost it, and come home without it, there'd
have been evidence of your suffering. As it is, do you know what
your enemies are saying about your foot?"

"We do not," said the Emperor, sternly. "What do they say?"

"Well, the Bourbons say you stepped on it running away from the
enemy's guns, and the extreme Republicans say your wound is nothing
but gout and the result of high, undemocratic living. Now, my dear
sir--Sire, I mean--I take a great deal of interest in this Empire. It
pays me my salary, and I've had charge of the calcium lights for some
time, and I don't want our lustre dimmed, but it will be dimmed
unless, as I have already told you a million times, we introduce some
new act on our programme. 1492 didn't succeed on its music, or its
jokes, or its living pictures. It was the introduction of novelties
every week that kept it on the boards for four hundred years."

"Well--what do you propose?" asked Bonaparte, recognizing the
truth of Fouche's words.

"I--ah--I think you ought to get married," said Fouche.

"We am married, you--you--idiot," cried Bonaparte.

"Well, marry again," said Fouche. "You've been giving other
people away at a great rate for several years--what's the matter with
acquiring a real princess for yourself?"

"You advise bigamy, do you?" asked Bonaparte, scornfully.

"Not on your life," returned Fouche, "but a real elegant
divorce, followed by an imperial wedding, would rattle the bones of
this blase old Paris as they haven't been rattled since Robespierre's
day."

Bonaparte reddened, then, rising from the throne and putting his
hand to the side of his mouth, he said, in a low, agitated tone:

"Close the door, Fouche. Close the door and come here. We want
to whisper something to you."

The minister did as he was bidden.

"Fouche, old boy," chuckled the Emperor in the ear of his
rascally aide--"Fouche, you're a mind-reader. We've been thinking of
just that very thing for some time--in fact, ever since We met that
old woman Emperor Francis Joseph. He'd make an elegant
mother-in-law."

"Precisely," said Fouche. "His daughter Marie-Louise, an
archduchess by birth, is the one I had selected for you. History
will no doubt say that I oppose this match, and publicly perhaps I
may seem to do so, but you will understand, my dear Sire, that this
opposition will serve, as it is designed to serve, as an
advertisement of our enterprise, and without advertising we might as
well put up the shutters. Shall we--ah--announce the attraction to
the public?"

"Not yet," said Napoleon. "We must get rid of our leading lady
before we bring on the understudy."

It is a sad chapter in the history of this eminent man wherein
is told the heart-breaking story of his sacrifice--the giving up
through sheer love of his country of the only woman he had ever
loved, and we should prefer to pass it over in silence. We allude to
it here merely to show that it was brought about by the exigencies of
his office, and that it was nothing short of heroic self-abnegation
which led this faithful lover of his adopted native land to put the
beautiful Josephine away from him. He had builded an Empire for an
opera bouffe people, and he was resolved to maintain it at any
cost.

In March, 1810, Bonaparte, having in his anxiety to spare the
feelings of the divorced Josephine, wooed Marie-Louise by proxy in
the person of Marshal Berthier, met his new fiancee at Soissons.

"It is three months since we lost our beloved Josephine," he
said to Fouche, with tears in his voice, "but the wound is beginning
to heal. We fear we shall never love again, but for the sake of the
Empire we will now begin to take notice once more. We will meet our
bride- elect at Soissons, and escort her to Paris ourself."

This was done, and on the 2nd of April, 1810, Marie-Louise
became Empress of France. Josephine, meanwhile, had retired to
Malmaison with alimony of 3,000,000 francs.

Fouche was delighted; Paris was provided with conversation
enough for a year in any event, and Bonaparte found it possible to
relax a little in his efforts to inspire interest. His main anxiety
in the ensuing year was as to his family affairs. His brothers did
not turn out so highly successful as professional kings as he had
hoped, and it became necessary to depose Louis the King of Holland
and place him under arrest. Joseph, too, desired to resign the
Spanish throne, which he had found to be far from comfortable, and
there was much else to restore Bonaparte's early proneness to
irritability; nor was his lot rendered any more happy by
Marie-Louise's expressed determination not to go to tea with
Josephine at Malmaison on Sunday nights, as the Emperor wished her to
do.

"You may go if you please," said she, "but I shall not. Family
reunions are never agreeable, and the circumstances of this are so
peculiar that even if they had redeeming features this one would be
impossible."

"We call that rebellion--don't you?" asked Bonaparte of
Fouche.

"No," said Fouche. "She's right, and it's for your good. If
she and Josephine got chumming and compared notes, I'm rather of the
opinion that there'd be another divorce."

Fouche's reply so enraged the Emperor that he dismissed him from
his post, and the Empire began to fall.

"I leave you at your zenith, Sire," said Fouche. "You send me
to Rome as governor in the hope that I will get the Roman fever and
die. I know it well; but let me tell you that the reaction is nearly
due, and with the loss of your stage manager the farce begins to
pall. Farewell. If you can hook yourself on to your zenith and stay
there, do so, but that you will I don't think."

It was as Fouche said. Perplexities now arose which bade fair
to overwhelm the Emperor. For a moment they cleared away when the
infant son of Marie-Louise and Bonaparte was born, but they broke out
with increasing embarrassment immediately after.

"What has your son-in-law named his boy, Francis Joseph?" asked
Alexander of Russia.

"King of Rome," returned the Austrian.

"What!" cried Alexander, "and not after you--or me? The
coxcomb! I will make war upon him."

This anecdote is here given to the world for the first time. It
is generally supposed that the rupture of friendly relations between
Alexander and Bonaparte grew out of other causes, but the truth is as
indicated in this story. Had Fouche been at hand, Bonaparte would
never have made the mistake, but it was made, and war was
declared.

After a succession of hard-fought battles the invading army of
the Emperor entered Moscow, but Napoleon's spirit was broken.

"These Russian names are giving us paresis!" he cried. "How I
ever got here I don't know, and I find myself unprovided with a
return ticket. The names of the Russian generals, to say nothing of
those of their rivers and cities, make my head ache, and have ruined
my teeth. I fear, Davoust, that I have had my day. It was easy to
call on the Pollylukes to surrender in Africa; it never unduly taxed
my powers of enunciation to speak the honeyed names of Italy; the
Austrian tongue never bothered me; but when I try to inspire my
soldiers with remarks like, 'On to Smolensko!' or 'Down with
Rostopchin!' and 'Shall we be discouraged because Tchigagoff, and
Kutusoff, and Carrymeoffski, of the Upperjnavyk Cgold Sdream Gards,
oppose us?' I want to lie down and die. What is the sense of these
barbed-wire names, anyhow? Why, when I was told that Barclay de
Tolly had abandoned Vitepsk, and was marching on Smolensko with a
fair chance of uniting with Tormagoff and Wittgenstein, I was so
mixed that I couldn't tell whether Vitepsk was a brigadier-general or
a Russian summer-resort. Nevertheless, we have arrived, and I think
we can pass a comfortable winter in Moscow. Is Moscow a cold place,
do you know?"

Marshal Ney looked out of the window.

"No, Your Majesty," he said; "I judge from appearances that it's
the hottest place in creation, just now. Look!"

Bonaparte's heart sank within him. He looked and saw the city
in flames.

"Well," he cried, "why don't you do something? What kind of
theatrical soldiers are you? Ring up the fire department! Ah,
Fouche, Fouche, if you were only here now! You could at least arrest
the flames."

It was too late. Nothing could be done, and the conquering hero
of nearly twenty years now experienced the bitterness of defeat.
Rushing through the blazing town, he ordered a retreat, and was soon
sadly wending his way back to Paris.

"We are afraid," he murmured, "that that Moscow fire has cooked
our imperial goose."

Then, finding the progress of the army too slow, and anxious to
hear the news of Paris, Napoleon left his troops under the command of
Ney and pushed rapidly on, travelling incognito, not being desirous
of accepting such receptions and fetes in his honor as the enemy had
in store for him.

"I do not like to leave my army in such sore straits," he said,
"but I must. I am needed at the Tuileries. The King of Rome has
fallen in love with his nurse, and I understand also that there is a
conspiracy to steal the throne and sell it. This must not be.
Reassure the army of my love. Tell them that they are, as was the
army of Egypt, my children, and that they may play out in the snow a
little while longer, but must come in before they catch cold."

With these words he was off. Paris, as usual, received him with
open arms. Things had been dull during his absence, and his return
meant excitement. The total loss of the French in this campaign was
450,000 men, nearly a thousand cannon, and seventy-five eagles and
standards.

"It's a heavy loss," said the Emperor, "but it took a snow-storm
to do it. I'd rather fight bears than blizzards; but the French must
not be discouraged. Let them join the army. The Russians have
captured three thousand and forty-eight officers whose places must be
filled. If that isn't encouragement to join the army I expect to
raise next spring I don't know what is. As for the eagles--you can
get gold eagles in America for ten dollars apiece, so why repine! On
with the dance, let joy be unconfined!"

It was too late, however. The Empire had palled. Bonaparte
could have started a comic paper and still have failed to rouse Paris
from its lethargy, and Paris is the heart of France. Storms
gathered, war-clouds multiplied, the nations of the earth united
against him, the King of Rome began cutting his teeth and destroyed
the Emperor's rest. The foot-ball of fate that chance had kicked so
high came down to earth with a sickening thud, and Mr. Bonaparte of
Corsica yielded to the inevitable.

"Fouche," he said, sending for the exiled minister in his
extremity, "when I lost you I lost my leading man--the star of my
enterprise. During your absence the prompter's box has been empty,
and I don't know what to do. The world is against me--even France.
I see but one thing left. Do you think I could restore confidence by
divorcing Marie-Louise and remarrying Josephine? It strikes me that
an annual shaking-up of that nature would sort of liven matters
up.

"No!" said Fouche, "it won't do. They've had one divorce. You
mustn't repeat yourself now. You forget the thing I've always tried
to impress upon you. Be New; not parvenu or ingenue, but plain up
and down New is what you need to be. It would have been just the
same if you'd thrashed Russia. They'd have forced you to go on and
conquer China; then they'd have demanded a war with Japan, after
which they'd have dethroned you if you didn't annex the Sandwich
Islands to the United States, and then bag the whole thing for
France. This is what you get for wanting to rule the French people.
You can't keep quiet--you've got to have a move on you constantly or
they won't have you. Furthermore, you mustn't make 'em laugh except
at the other man. You've had luck in that respect, but there's no
telling how long it will continue now that you have a son. He's
beginning to say funny things, and they're generally at your expense,
and one or two people hereabouts have snickered at you already."

"What do you mean?" said Napoleon, with a frown. "What has the
boy said about me?"

"He told the Minister of Finance the other night that now that
you were the father of a real Emperor's grandson, you had a valid
claim to respectability, and he'd bite the head off the first person
who said you hadn't," said Fouche.

"Well--that certainly was standing up for his daddy," said the
Emperor, fondly.

"Ye-e-es," said Fouche, "but it's one of those double
back-action remarks that do more harm than good."

"Well," said Bonaparte, desperately, "let the boy say what he
pleases; he's my son, and he has that right. The thing for us to
decide is, what shall we do now?"

"There are three things left," said Fouche.

"And they?" asked the Emperor.

"Write Trilby, abdicate, or commit suicide. The first is beyond
you. You know enough about Paris, but your style is against you. As
for the second, abdication--if you abdicate you may come back, and
the trouble will begin all over again. If you commit suicide, you
won't have any more rows. The French will be startled, and say that
it's a splendid climax, and you will have the satisfaction of knowing
that some other man will try to please them with the same result."

"It shall be abdication," said the Emperor, with a sigh. "I
don't mind suicide, but, hang it, Fouche, if I killed myself I could
not read what the papers said about it. As for writing Trilby, it
would do more for royalty than for me. Therefore I will go to
Fontainebleau and abdicate. I will go into exile at Elba. Exiles
are most interesting people, and it may be that I'll have another
chance."

This course was taken, and on the 20th of April, 1814, Bonaparte
abdicated. His speech to his faithful guard was one of the most
affecting farewells in history, and had much to do with the encore
which Napoleon received less than a year after. Escorted by four
commissioners, one from each of the great allied powers, Austria,
Russia, England, and Prussia, and attended by a few attached friends
and servants, Bonaparte set out from Paris. The party occupied
fourteen carriages, Bonaparte in the first; and as they left the
capital the ex-Emperor, leaning out of the window, looked back at the
train of conveyances and sighed.

"What, Sire? You sigh?" cried Bertrand.

"Yes, Bertrand, yes. Not for my departed glory, but because I
am a living Frenchman, and not a dead Irishman."

"And why so, Sire?" asked Bertrand.

"Because, my friend, of the carriages. There are fourteen in
this funeral. Think, Bertrand," he moaned, in a tone rendered doubly
impressive by the fact that it reminded one of Henry Irving in one of
his most mannered moments. "Think how I should have enjoyed this
moment had I been a dead Irishman!"