Harper's New Monthly Magazine. No. XVI.—September, 1851—Vol. III

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE

While Napoleon was spending his few months of furlough in Corsica, he devoted many hours every day to the careful composition, after the manner of Plutarch, of the lives of illustrious Corsicans. Though he had made considerable progress in the work, it was lost in the subsequent disorders of those times. He also established a debating club, composed of the several officers in the army upon the island, to discuss the great political questions which were then agitating Europe. These subjects he studied with most intense application. In this club he was a frequent speaker, and obtained much distinction for his argumentative and oratorical powers. Napoleon, at this time, warmly espoused the cause of popular liberty, though most sternly hostile to lawless violence. As the reign of terror began to shed its gloom on Paris, and each day brought its tidings of Jacobin cruelty and carnage, Napoleon imbibed that intense hatred of anarchy which he ever after manifested, and which no temptation could induce him to disguise. One day he expressed himself in the club so vehemently, that an enemy, Salicetti, reported him to the government as a traitor. He was arrested, taken to Paris, and obtained a triumphant acquittal. Some years after he had an opportunity to revenge himself, most magnanimously, upon his enemy who had thus meanly sought his life, and whom he could not but despise. Salicetti, in his turn, became obnoxious to the Jacobins, and was denounced as an outlaw. The officers of police were in pursuit of him, and the guillotine was ravenous for his blood. He ungenerously sought concealment under the roof of Madame Permon, the mother of the young lady who had suggested to Napoleon the idea of "Puss in Boots." By this act he exposed to the most imminent peril the lives of Madame Permon and of all the members of her household. Napoleon was on terms of familiar intimacy with the family, and Salicetti was extremely apprehensive that he might discover his retreat, and report him to the police. Madame Permon also, knowing the hatred with which Salicetti had sought Napoleon's life, participated in these fears.

The very next morning Napoleon made his appearance in the saloon of Madame Permon.

"Well, Madame Permon," said he, "Salicetti will now in his turn be able to appreciate the bitter fruits of arrest. And to him they ought to be the more bitter, since he aided, with his own hand, to plant the trees which bear them."

"How!" exclaimed Madame Permon, with an air of affected astonishment, "is Salicetti arrested?"

"And is it possible," replied Napoleon, "that you do not know that he has been proscribed. I presumed that you were aware of the fact, since it is in your house that he is concealed."

"Concealed in my house!" she cried, "surely, my dear Napoleon, you are mad. I entreat you do not repeat such a joke in any other place. I assure you it would peril my life."

Napoleon rose from his seat, advanced slowly toward Madame Permon, folded his arms upon his breast, and fixing his eyes in a steadfast gaze upon her, remained for a moment in perfect silence.

"Madame Permon!" he then said, emphatically, "Salicetti is concealed in your house. Nay – do not interrupt me. I know that yesterday at five o'clock he was seen proceeding from the Boulevard in this direction. It is well known that he has not in this neighborhood any acquaintances, you excepted, who would risk their own safety, as well as that of their friends by secreting him."

"And by what right," Madame Permon replied, with continued duplicity, "should Salicetti seek an asylum here? He is well aware that our political sentiments are at variance, and he also knows that I am on the point of leaving Paris."

"You may well ask," Napoleon rejoined, "by what right he should apply to you for concealment. To come to an unprotected woman, who might be compromised by affording a few hours of safety to an outlaw who merits his fate, is an act of baseness to which no consideration ought to have driven him."

"Should you repeat abroad this assertion," she replied, "for which there is no possible foundation, it would entail the most serious consequences upon me."

Again Napoleon, with much apparent emotion, fixed his steadfast gaze upon Madame Permon, and exclaimed, "You, Madame, are a generous woman, and Salicetti is a villain. He was well aware that you could not close your doors against him, and he would selfishly allow you to peril your own life and that of your child, for the sake of his safety. I never liked him. Now I despise him."

With consummate duplicity Madame Permon took Napoleon's hand, and fixing her eye unquailing upon his, firmly uttered the falsehood, "I assure you, Napoleon, upon my honor, that Salicetti is not in my apartments. But stay – shall I tell you all?"

"Yes! all! all!" he vehemently rejoined.

"Well, then," she continued, with great apparent frankness, "Salicetti was, I confess, under my roof yesterday at six o'clock; but he left in a few hours after. I pointed out to him the moral impossibility of his remaining concealed with me, living as publicly as I do. Salicetti admitted the justice of my objection, and took his departure."

Napoleon, with hurried step, traversed the room two or three times, and then exclaimed, "It is just as I suspected. He was coward enough to say to a woman, 'Expose your life for mine.' But," he continued, stopping before Madame Permon, and fixing a doubting eye upon her, "you really believe, then, that he left your house and returned home!"

"Yes!" she replied, "I told him that since he must conceal himself in Paris, it were best to bribe the people of his own hotel, because that would be the last place where his enemies would think of searching for him."

Napoleon then took his leave, and Madame Permon opened the door of the closet where Salicetti was concealed. He had heard every word of the conversation, and was sitting on a small chair, his head leaning upon his hand, which was covered with blood, from a hemorrhage with which he had been seized. Preparations were immediately made for an escape from Paris, and passports were obtained for Salicetti as the valet de chambre of Madame Permon. In the early dawn of the morning they left Paris, Salicetti as a servant, seated upon the box of the carriage. When they had arrived at the end of the first stage, several miles from the city, the postillion came to the window of the coach, and presented Madame Pennon with a note, which, he said, a young man had requested him to place in her hands at that post. It was from Napoleon. Madame Permon opened it and read as follows:

"I never like to be thought a dupe. I should appear to be such to you, did I not tell you that I knew perfectly well of Salicetti's place of concealment.

"You see, then, Salicetti, that I might have returned the ill you did to me. In so doing I should only have avenged myself. But you sought my life when I never had done aught to harm you. Which of us stands in the preferable point of view at the present moment? I might have avenged my wrongs; but I did not. Perhaps you may say, that it was out of regard to your benefactress that I spared you. That consideration, I confess, was powerful. But you, alone, unarmed and an outlaw, would never have been injured by me. Go in peace, and seek an asylum where you may cherish better sentiments. On your name my mouth is closed. Repent and appreciate my motives.

"Madame Permon! my best wishes are with you and your child. You are feeble and defenseless beings. May Providence and a friend's prayers protect you. Be cautious, and do not tarry in the large towns through which you may have to pass. Adieu."

Having read the letter, Madame Permon turned to Salicetti, and said, "You ought to admire the noble conduct of Bonaparte. It is most generous."

"Generous!" he replied, with a contemptuous smile, "What would you have had him do? Would you have wished him to betray me?"

The indignant woman looked upon him with disgust, and said, "I do not know what I might expect you to do. But this I do know, that it would be pleasant to see you manifest a little gratitude."

When they arrived at a seaport, as Salicetti embarked on board a small vessel which was to convey him to Italy, he seemed for a moment not to be entirely unmindful of the favors he had received. Taking Madame Permon's hands in his, he said, "I should have too much to say, were I to attempt to express to you my gratitude by words. As to Bonaparte, tell him I thank him. Hitherto I did not believe him capable of generosity. I am now bound to acknowledge my mistake. I thank him."

Napoleon, after his acquittal from the charges brought against him by Salicetti, remained in Paris for two or three months. He lived in the most frugal manner, spending no money or time in dissipation or amusements. He passed most of his hours in the libraries, reading volumes of solid worth, and seeking the conversation of distinguished men. Without any exhibition of vanity, he seemed to repose great reliance upon his own powers, and was never abashed in the slightest degree by the presence of others, of whatever rank or attainments. Indeed he seemed, even then, to be animated by the assurance that he was destined for some great achievements. His eye was surveying the world. He was meditating upon the rise and fall of empires. France, Europe even, seemed too small for his majestic designs. He studied with intense interest the condition of the countless myriads of men who swarm along the rivers and the hill-sides of internal Asia; and dreamed of being himself the founder of an Empire there, in comparison with which the dynasties of Europe should be insignificant. Indeed he never, in all his subsequent career, manifested the least surprise in view of his elevation. He rose from step to step, regarding each ascent as a matter of course, never shrinking in the least degree from assuming any weight of responsibility, and never manifesting the slightest embarrassment in taking the command from the hands of gray-headed veterans.

While in Paris, he was, on the famous morning of the 20th of June, 1792, walking with his friend Bourrienne, along the banks of the Seine, when he saw a vast mob of men, women, and boys, with hideous yells and frantic gestures, and brandishing weapons of every kind, rolling like an inundation through the streets of the metropolis, and directing their steps toward the palace of the imprisoned monarch. Napoleon ran before them that he might witness their proceedings. Climbing, by an iron fence, upon the balustrade of a neighboring building, he saw the squalid mass of thirty thousand miscreants break into the garden of the Tuileries, swarm through the doors of the regal mansion, and, at last, compel the insulted and humiliated king, driven into the embrasure of a window, to put the filthy red cap of Jacobinism upon his brow. This triumph of the drunken vagrants, from the cellars and garrets of infamy, over all law and justice, and this spectacle of the degradation of the acknowledged monarch of one of the proudest nations on the globe, excited the indignation of Napoleon to the highest pitch. He turned away from the sight as unendurable, exclaiming, "The wretches! how could they suffer this vile mob to enter the palace! They should have swept down the first five hundred with grape shot, and the rest would have soon taken to flight."

New scenes of violence were now daily enacted before the eyes of Napoleon in the streets of Paris, until the dreadful 10th of August arrived. He then again saw the triumphant and unresisted mob sack the palace of the Tuileries. He witnessed the king and the royal family driven from the halls of their ancestors, and followed by the frenzied multitude, with hootings, and hissings, and every conceivable insult, in momentary peril of assassination, until they took refuge in the Assembly. He saw the merciless massacre of the faithful guards of the king, as they were shot in the garden, as they were pursued and poniarded in the streets, as they were pricked down with bayonets, from the statues upon which they had climbed for protection, and in cold blood butchered. He saw, with his bosom glowing with shame and indignation, the drunken rioters marching exultingly through the streets of the metropolis, with the ghastly heads of the slaughtered guards borne aloft, upon the points of their pikes, as the trophies of their victory.

These hideous spectacles wrought quite a revolution in the mind of Napoleon. They effectually arrested the progress of all his tendencies toward democracy. He had been a great admirer of constitutional liberty in England, and a still greater admirer of republican liberty in America. He now became convinced that the people of France were too ignorant and degraded for self-government, that they needed the guidance and control of resistless law. He hated and despised the voluptuousness, the imbecility, and the tyranny of the effete monarchy. He had himself suffered most keenly from the superciliousness of the old nobility who grasped at all the places of profit and honor, merely to gratify their own sensuality, and left no career open to merit. Napoleon had his own fortune to make, and he was glad to see all these bulwarks battered down, which the pride and arrogance of past ages had reared to foster a worthless aristocracy; and to exclude the energetic and the aspiring, unaided by wealth and rank, from all the avenues of influence and celebrity. On the other hand the dominion of the mob appeared to him so execrable that he said, "I frankly declare that if I were compelled to choose between the old monarchy and Jacobin misrule, I should infinitely prefer the former." Openly and energetically, upon all occasions, fearless of consequences, he expressed his abhorrence of those miscreants who were trampling justice and mercy beneath their feet, and who were, by their atrocities, making France a by-word among all nations. This is a key to the character of Napoleon. Those opposing forces guided his future career. He ever, subsequently, manifested the most decisive resolution to crush the Jacobins. He displayed untiring energy in reconstructing in France a throne invincible in power, which should govern the people, which should throw every avenue to greatness open to all competitors, making wealth, and rank, and influence, and power the reward of merit. Napoleon openly avowed his conviction that France, without education and without religion, was not prepared for the republicanism of the United States. In this sentiment La Fayette and most of the wisest men of the French nation fully concurred. With an arm of despotic power he crushed every lawless outbreak. And he gathered around his throne eminent abilities, wherever he could find them, in the shop of the artisan, in the ranks of the army, and in the hut of the peasant. In France at this time, there was neither intelligence, religion, nor morality, among the masses. There was no reverence for law either human or divine. Napoleon expressed his high approval of the constitutional monarchy of England, and declared that to be the model upon which he would have the new government of France constructed. He judged that France needed an imposing throne, supported by an illustrious nobility and by a standing army of invincible power, with civil privileges cautiously and gradually disseminated among the people. And though in the pride of subsequent success he was disposed to gather all power into his own hands, few persons could have manifested during so long a reign, and through the temptations of so extraordinary a career, more unwavering consistency.

One evening he returned home from a walk, through the streets of the tumultuous metropolis, in which his ears had been deafened by the shouts of the people in favor of a new republican constitution. It was in the midst of the reign of terror, and the guillotine was drenched in blood. "How do you like the new constitution?" said a lady to him. He replied, hesitatingly, "Why, it is good in one sense, to be sure; but, all that is connected with carnage, is bad," and then, as if giving way to an outburst of sincere feeling, he exclaimed, emphatically, "No! no! no! away with this constitution. I do not like it!"

The republicanism of the United States is founded on the intelligence, the Christianity, and the reverence for law so generally prevalent throughout the whole community. And should that dark day ever come, in which the majority of the people will be unable to read the printed vote which is placed in their hands, and lose all reverence for earthly law, and believe not in God, before whose tribunal they must finally appear, it is certain that the republic can not stand for a day. Anarchy must ensue, from which there can be no refuge but in a military despotism.

In these days of pecuniary embarrassment Napoleon employed a bootmaker, a very awkward workman, but a man who manifested very kindly feelings toward him, and accommodated him in his payments. When dignity and fortune were lavished upon the first consul and the emperor, he was frequently urged to employ a more fashionable workman. But no persuasions could induce him to abandon the humble artisan who had been the friend of his youthful days. Instinctive delicacy told him that the man would be more gratified by being the shoemaker of the emperor, and that his interests would thus be better promoted than by any other favors he could confer.

A silversmith, in one of Napoleon's hours of need, sold him a dressing-case upon credit. The kindness was never forgotten. Upon his return from the campaign of Italy, he called, rewarded him liberally, and ever after employed him, and also recommended him to his marshals and to his court in general. In consequence the jeweler acquired an immense fortune.

Effects must have their causes. Napoleon's boundless popularity in the army and in the nation, was not the result of accident, the sudden outbreak of an insane delusion. These exhibitions of an instinctive and unstudied magnanimity won the hearts of the people as rapidly as his transcendent abilities and Herculean toil secured for him renown.

Napoleon with his political principles modified by the scenes of lawless violence which he had witnessed in Paris, returned again to Corsica.

Soon after his return to his native island, in February, 1793, he, being then 22 years of age, was ordered, at the head of two battalions, in co-operation with Admiral Turget, to make a descent upon the island of Sardinia. Napoleon effected a landing and was entirely successful in the accomplishment of his part of the expedition. The admiral, however, failed, and Napoleon, in consequence, was under the necessity of evacuating the positions where he had entrenched himself, and of returning to Corsica.

He found France still filled with the most frightful disorders. The king and queen had both fallen upon the scaffold. Paoli, disgusted with the political aspect of his own country, treasonably plotted to surrender Corsica, over which he was the appointed governor, to the crown of England. It was a treacherous act, and was only redeemed from utter infamy by the brutal outrages with which France was disgraced. A large party of the Corsicans rallied around Paoli. He exerted all the influence in his power to induce Napoleon, the son of his old friend and comrade, and whose personal qualities he greatly admired, to join his standard. Napoleon, on the other hand, with far greater penetration into the mysteries of the future, entreated Paoli to abandon the unpatriotic enterprise. He argued that the violence with which France was filled was too terrible to be lasting, and that the nation must soon return again to reason and to law. He represented that Corsica was too small and feeble to think of maintaining independence in the midst of the powerful empires of Europe; that in manners, language, customs, and religion it never could become a homogeneous part of England; that the natural connection of the island was with France, and that its glory could only be secured by its being embraced as a province of the French Empire. And above all, he argued that it was the duty of every good citizen, in such hours of peril, to cling firmly and fearlessly to his country, and to exert every nerve to cause order to emerge from the chaos into which all things had fallen. These were unanswerable arguments, but Paoli had formed strong attachments in England, and remembered, with an avenging spirit, the days in which he had fled before the armies of conquering France.

The last interview which took place between these distinguished men, was at a secluded convent in the interior of the island. Long and earnestly they argued with each other, for they were devoted personal friends. The veteran governor was eighty years of age, Napoleon was but twenty-two. It was with the greatest reluctance that either of them could consent to draw the sword against the other. But there was no alternative. Paoli was firm in his determination to surrender the island to the English. No persuasions could induce Napoleon to sever his interests from those of his native country. Sadly they separated to array themselves against each other in civil war.

As Napoleon, silent and thoughtful, was riding home alone, he entered a wild ravine among the mountains, when suddenly he was surrounded by a party of mountaineers, in the employ of Paoli, and taken prisoner. By stratagem he effected his escape, and placed himself at the head of the battalion of national guards over which he had been appointed commander. Hostilities immediately commenced. The governor, who with his numerous forces had possession of the town of Ajaccio, invited the English into the harbor, surrendering to them the island. The English immediately took possession of those heights on the opposite side of the gulf, which, it will be remembered, that Napoleon had previously so carefully examined. The information he gained upon this occasion was now of special service to him. One dark and stormy night he embarked in a frigate, with a few hundred soldiers, landed near the entrenchments, guided the party in the darkness, over the ground, with which he was perfectly familiar, surprised the English in their sleep, and, after a short but sanguinary conflict, took possession of the fort. The storm, however, increased to a gale, and when the morning dawned, they strained their eyes in vain through the driving mist to discern the frigate. It had been driven by the tempest far out to sea. Napoleon and his little band were immediately surrounded by the allied English and Corsicans, and their situation seemed desperate. For five days they defended themselves most valiantly, during which time they were under the necessity of killing their horses for food to save themselves from starvation. At last the frigate again appeared. Napoleon then evacuated the town in which he had so heroically contended against vastly outnumbering foes, and, after an ineffectual attempt to blow up the fort, succeeded in safely effecting an embarkation. The strength of Paoli was daily increasing, and the English in greater numbers crowding to his aid. Napoleon saw that it was in vain to attempt further resistance, and that Corsica was no longer a safe residence for himself or for the family. He accordingly disbanded his forces and prepared to leave the island.

Paoli called upon Madame Letitia, and exhausted his powers of persuasion in endeavoring to induce the family to unite with him in the treasonable surrender of the island to the English. "Resistance is hopeless," said he, "and by this perverse opposition, you are bringing irreparable ruin and misery on yourself and family." "I know of but two laws," replied Madame Letitia, heroically, "which it is necessary for me to obey, the laws of honor and of duty." A decree was immediately passed banishing the family from the island. One morning Napoleon hastened to inform his mother that several thousand peasants, armed with all the implements of revolutionary fury, were on the march to attack the house. The family fled precipitately, with such few articles of property as they could seize at the moment, and for several days wandered, houseless and destitute, on the sea-shore, until Napoleon could make arrangements for their embarkation. The house was sacked by the mob, and the furniture entirely destroyed.