AUGEREAU DUC DE CASTIGLIONE
AUGEREAU DUC DE CASTIGLIONE
CHAPTER XBROTHERS
NAPOLEON was one of a large family, children of a shiftless father and a wonderful mother. Much the same might be said of a large number of other successful men—Moltke and Lincoln, for instance. But it is doubtful whether any importance from a eugenic point of view can be attached to this circumstance, for although some of the other Bonapartes showed undoubted talent in various directions, not one of them has ever displayed greatness comparable to the Emperor’s. Biologically, Napoleon might be said to be a “sport,” a “mutation,” as de Vries would say. Yet even this theory is open to controversy, for mutations usually breed true, and none of Napoleon’s children ever showed, as far as can be ascertained, any really striking amount of talent. Napoleon may thus be considered to be an isolated incident in his family history, one of the many immovable facts which are so gingerly skirted round by eugenists and other theorists.
What achievements can be ascribed to the brothers of the man who achieved so much? A few impracticable suggestions, a few novels (diluted St. Pierre, most of them), a few lost battles, a few lost kingdoms; beyond that—nothing. Louis was the father of Napoleon III., a clever man with manynatural disadvantages mingled with his advantages. Lucien saved one unpleasant situation when president of the Council of Five Hundred in 1799. Jerome’s grandson was a fairly eminent lawyer of the United States. The other Bonapartes were like their fathers and grandfathers before them, dilettanti, wobblers, unstable and irresponsible.
But useless as were Napoleon’s brothers to him, he nevertheless bore with them patiently for years. A clannish clinging together is to be noticed in all their dealings, both while they were obscure and while they were powerful. An early Corsican environment may perhaps account for this, or perhaps it is to be ascribed to the intense pride in himself which Napoleon felt, and which perhaps was extended to all of his own blood.
Napoleon, the second son, and Joseph, the eldest, were separated from the other brothers and sisters by a gap of some seven years; the intervening children had died in infancy. When Charles Bonaparte, the father, died, therefore, it was upon these two that the headship of the family and the attendant responsibility fell. Joseph had already shown signs of his general uselessness. His mathematics and education generally had been too weak for him to have much chance of success in the army; he flinched from the Church, and therefore returned to Corsica to farm the few acres the Bonapartes possessed, and to carry on somehow, Micawber-like, until something turned up.
Napoleon, just appointed second-lieutenant of artillery, took upon himself to keep and educate the next brother, Louis. Since he had only thirty pounds a year pay, the struggle must have been terribly hard. After a year or two came the temporary success of the Paolists in Corsica, and as the Bonapartes had taken the French side the family had to fly to France for safety, leaving alltheir property behind. Difficulties increased without number. The French Government, in the throes of the Terror, had voted monetary support for the refugees, but in the excitement of the Toulon rebellion the decree was forgotten, and not a sou was paid. St. Cyr, the State school for girls, was closed, and another mouth, that of the eldest daughter, Elise, had to be fed by the struggling family.
But then everything suddenly changed for the better. Napoleon, after distinguishing himself at Toulon, fought his way up to the rank of chef de brigade. Joseph obtained a commissaryship in the army of Italy through the aid of a fellow Corsican, Salicetti. Then also he married Mademoiselle Clary, daughter of a Marseilles merchant. Her dowry must have appeared enormous to the famished Bonapartes—it amounted to no less than six thousand pounds sterling. None of the Bonapartes could as yet foresee the day when any one of them would spend six thousand pounds on their most trifling whim.
A year later Napoleon saved the Directory from the revolt of the sections, and the family was at last in comparatively smooth water. With Napoleon in command of the Army of the Interior, influence could be brought to bear to help his brothers. Louis became his aide-de-camp. Lucien received a commissaryship with the Army of the North, while immediately afterwards the horizon of possibilities was widened still further by Napoleon’s appointment to the command in Italy and his amazing victories there. Joseph received important diplomatic appointments at Parma and Rome. Louis distinguished himself with the army. Lucien at this time was the black sheep of the family. He threw up one appointment after another; he expressed undesirable opinions with undesirableforce, and finally he married a completely illiterate girl of the Midi. However, Napoleon forgave him, and before setting out for Egypt he enabled him to secure election to the Council of Five Hundred. Lucien had always been, even in Corsica, a ranting rhetorician, and in the Council he would be able to indulge his bent to his heart’s desire. Jerome, the youngest brother, was still at school, and he had to master as best he could his disappointment at not accompanying Napoleon to Egypt. Eugène Beauharnais, his schoolfellow, was going; he asked bitterly why he could not go also, leaving out of calculation the years of difference in their ages.
Napoleon returned from Egypt to find his brothers had somewhat improved their positions. Lucien was president of the Council of Five Hundred; Joseph’s diplomatic services had enabled him to enter intimately into the Directory circles, so that Napoleon was at once able to plunge into the welter of politics. Thecoup d’étatof the 19th Brumaire was planned. Joseph acted as intermediary between Napoleon, Sièyes, Ducos, Bernadotte (now his brother-in-law), Fouché and Moreau. Lucien made himself responsible for the Council, and arranged for the vital meeting to be held at Versailles. Their united efforts gained for Napoleon the command of the Army of the Interior. Everything was in readiness. On the morning of the 19th the Upper House, the Council of Ancients, readily bowed to the will of the great soldier, but the Council of Five Hundred were not so willing to pronounce their own sentence of extinction.
Murmurs arose and grew louder, and when Napoleon appeared before them he was greeted with fierce cries. Half of the Five Hundred were oldsans-culottes, men who had gambled with their lives for power under Hébert and Danton, and when Napoleon, for the only time in his career, flinchedfrom danger, the dreadful cry which had announced Robespierre’s fall arose. “Hors la loi! Hors la loi!” shouted the deputies. Napoleon staggered out of the council hall, apparently ruined.
Lucien Bonaparte leaped into the breach. He spoke fervently on behalf of his brother, but he was shouted down by the furious deputies. Somebody demanded a motion of outlawry against Napoleon; Lucien refused to put it to the vote. Neither side would give way, and the passions grew fiercer and fiercer. Suddenly Lucien tore off the insignia of his office, and even as he did so the door flew open and Napoleon’s troops burst in. Leclerc, Napoleon’s brother-in-law, was at their head. “The Council is dissolved,” said Leclerc, and the soldiers cleared the hall with fixed bayonets. Napoleon had utilized to the full the few minutes Lucien had gained for him. He had inflamed the soldiers with tales of treachery and assassination. On the evening of the same day a rump of the Council met under Lucien’s presidency and confirmed Napoleon in all the powers he demanded.
At first sight this action of Lucien’s appears invaluable. Nevertheless, on further consideration one realizes that Napoleon could have succeeded without it. When Bernadotte was King of Sweden, he told the French Ambassador, apropos of some news regarding French parliamentary criticism, that if he were King of France with two hundred thousand soldiers at his back he would put his tongue out at the chamber of deputies. Napoleon at the time of thecoup d’état, had not merely two hundred thousand soldiers, but the whole weight of public opinion at his back. No decree of outlawry by a discredited Council of Five Hundred could injure him.
For all this, Lucien was of great use to Napoleon during the Consulate. As Tribune, he employedhis undoubted parliamentary gifts to foist on the legislative various unpalatable measures. He skilfully defended the proposed Legion of Honour to an acutely suspicious House, and then finally he effected a judicious weeding of the Senate and Corps Législatif during the retirements of 1802. For all these services he was made Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour, and a Senator; he received a large official income and a palace (Poppesdorf on the Moselle), while it seemed as if it would not be long before he received royal honours. Napoleon proposed that he should act as French agent in the Kingdom of Etruria; the Queen was recently widowed; a marriage would follow naturally, and Lucien would be proclaimed king. As far as Napoleon knew, there was no legal bar to such an arrangement, for Lucien’s illiterate wife had died some time back, but the proposal forced Lucien to make an announcement he should have made earlier. In 1803 he had secretly married a widow, Madame Jouberthon, who had been his mistress for a year, and actually had borne him a child the day before the ceremony.
This was the end of things as far as Lucien was concerned. Napoleon quarrelled violently with him, and Lucien left the country. He lived for a time in Rome, where Pius VII. made him Prince of Canino, but had to move on at the French occupation. He tried to reach the United States, but the English prevented this, as they feared he might have designs on Spanish America. They could have known little about the dilatory, hesitating æsthete to imagine he was capable of any action of importance. Lucien was brought a prisoner to England, and he promptly settled down and made himself comfortable at Ludlow, perfectly contented to enjoy his books, his scientific dabblings, his pictures, in peace. Once only did he rouse himself, and that was during theHundred Days. The old clan feeling apparently re-awoke, and he was at Napoleon’s side during that brief period. But as soon as Napoleon had left for St. Helena, and three months in a Piedmontese prison had cooled his own blood, he went back to Rome and continued his placid existence until his death in 1840. Two or three feeble novels and one frigid epic stand to his credit—further comment appears unnecessary; if a man with Lucien’s opportunities abandons them in favour of a mild life of artistic enjoyment, he must be either a great man or a very small man, and Lucien was not a great man.
But Lucien had at any rate the hardihood to stand up to his terrible brother about his marriage; Louis and Jerome gave way in a ridiculous fashion.
Louis allowed himself to be persuaded into marrying Hortense Beauharnais, Napoleon’s step-daughter, thereby making his sister-in-law Josephine into his mother-in-law as well. No love was lost between the newly-married pair, and they drifted apart after a month or two of married life. A child, Napoleon Charles, was born at the end of 1802, and Napoleon was popularly credited with being its incestuous father. At first he did his utmost to check these rumours, but later he tried to use them for his own ends—a scheme nipped in the bud by the child’s death from croup in 1807. Napoleon repeatedly tried to reconcile the parents, and on two occasions he met with success. The product of the first reconciliation was a child, Napoleon Louis, born in 1804, who died during the Carbonari insurrection in Italy in 1831, and the product of the second reconciliation was another child who later became Napoleon III.
On Louis, for his compliance, honours and wealth were heaped in profusion. He became a Prince of the Empire, with a million francs a year; as Constable of France, and consequently a GrandImperial Dignitary, he received one-third of a million francs a year; he was Governor of Paris; a member of the Council of State; in precedence only the Emperor and Joseph Bonaparte came before him. Louis found himself the third person in the Empire with an annual income of about eighty thousand pounds sterling.
Yet even this was not all. Austerlitz had laid Europe at Napoleon’s feet, and he used his power to the full. The rulers of Bavaria and Würtemberg became kings; a terse proclamation announced that the Bourbon house of Naples had “ceased to reign,” and Masséna with sixty thousand men swept into the country to establish Joseph Bonaparte on the throne. Louis was given the kingdom of Holland. Just before, Napoleon had offered the crown of Italy to these two brothers in turn, but they had refused it, partly on account of the utter dependence of Italy upon France, and partly because one condition of acceptance was resignation of all claims upon the throne of France.
Holland, when Louis arrived, was in a bad way. Her people were ground down by remorseless taxation; the Continental system was ruining them rapidly; the conscription was exhausting them; and the outlook generally was hopeless. In fact they were so sunk in despondency that on one occasion, when Napoleon called a plebiscite among them to decide on their Government, only one-sixth of the voters troubled to vote. With the advent of Louis they hoped for better things, but Louis was the kind of man from whom it is better to hope for nothing. His health was bad, his domestic troubles upset him, his terrible brother held him completely under his thumb, and tumbled over like card houses all his tentative schemes of improvement. Matters in Holland went from bad to worse. At intervals the wretched Louis roused himself, and tried to help hissubjects, but every time the thunders of Napoleon daunted him.
At last, in 1810, he found the French demanding military occupation of Holland as the only way to secure the thorough observance of the Continental system. A French division was marching on Amsterdam, and fighting was threatened between the Dutch troops and the French. Louis dropped his kingly dignity as if it were red-hot; he abdicated in favour of his son, Napoleon Louis, and then, leaving his wife and family behind, he fled across the frontier and never stopped until he was safe in Austria. Neither threats nor cajoleries on Napoleon’s part were able to bring him back to France and the undignified dignities which were offered him. He settled down with relief in Styria with his books and his artistic studies. A novel or two and some peculiarly unsatisfying memoirs were all he left behind after his death.
Hortense, his wife, found means to console herself. The Comte de Flahault became a frequent visitor at her house in Paris, and a son was eventually born to her, who became, under the Second Empire, the Duc de Morny. Flahault himself was with good reason believed to be a son of the great Talleyrand, Prince of Benevento, so that de Morny had the proud privilege of calling himself a doubly illegitimate grandson of Talleyrand, an illegitimate Beauharnais, an illegitimate Flahault and a natural brother of Napoleon III. A highly satisfactory pedigree, in truth.
It appeared at first as though Joseph Bonaparte would have better fortune than Lucien or Louis. He had already held positions of great responsibility as Ambassador and Plenipotentiary, and in 1806 he became King of Naples. His rule at first was precarious, for although many of the Neapolitans acquiesced in his elevation, the English, and theBourbons who still held Sicily did their best to make him as uncomfortable as possible. By landing banditti, galley-slaves and unpleasant characters generally, they kept Calabria in a blaze. A small English force was landed, won a battle at Maida, and then had to retire. But with fifty thousand Frenchmen at his back Joseph gradually wore down opposition and established himself more or less firmly.
However, this had hardly been accomplished when in 1808 he was suddenly called back to France and proclaimed King of Spain and the Indies. As regards the Indies, Joseph was divided from them by the British fleet, and if the fleet could preserve Sicily for the Italian Bourbons, it could most certainly preserve America for the Spanish ones. The Atlantic is a good deal wider than the Straits of Messina. As regards Spain the position was only not quite so difficult. The whole country was in rebellion, it is true; three weeks before the streets of Madrid had run knee-deep with the blood of Spaniards and Frenchmen. Some thirty thousand of his subjects had to be beaten in a pitched battle before Joseph could enter his capital, but Napoleon promised him two hundred thousand French soldiers to support him, and Joseph, a little bewildered, a little timorous, proceeded with the adventure. He reached Madrid, and sent his armies forward to subdue his kingdom. In three weeks one army, under Moncey, had been beaten back from Valencia with ruinous losses, while twenty thousand men under Dupont were hemmed in at Baylen and compelled to surrender. A hundred thousand Spaniards were marching on Madrid, and the King of Spain returned with all speed to the security of the French armies on the Ebro. Another battle had to be fought before this sanctuary could be gained. Immediately afterwards came the news that the pestilent English, for ever intruding themselvesuninvited, had landed in Portugal, beaten Junot and cleared Portugal of the French by the Convention of Cintra. Napoleon at this moment was at the Conference of Erfurt, trying to disentangle the politics of Russia, Austria, Prussia and the Rhenish Confederation, but as soon as he could, he ended this meeting, issued a few hasty orders to organize his army against a probable attack by Austria in the spring, and rushed back across Europe bent upon settling the affair out of hand. Calling up eighty thousand more troops, he pushed suddenly over the Ebro. The Spanish armies were shattered in three battles at Gamonal, Espinosa and Tudela. Once more Joseph was established in Madrid, but the English again interfered. A skilful thrust by Sir John Moore against the French communications led to the French armies being wheeled against him instead of pushing on to complete the overthrow of the Spaniards. In the middle of this movement Napoleon was called back to Paris on account of the Austrian trouble and the plottings of Talleyrand and Fouché; Joseph was left in Madrid, King of a country ablaze with rebellion, and commander of an army openly contemptuous.
Joseph bore his troubles for five years. Madrid and its environs were just able to bear the expense of his guard and his court; the rest of the country was parcelled out among French generals who ruled their districts despotically as far as the English and the partidas would allow them. Joseph simply did not count; his pathetic appeals to his protectors to combine as he wished were disregarded. Time and again he asked Napoleon either to give him full power or to relieve him of the burden of his mock sovereignty, but Napoleon bullied him into continuing with the farce. In 1812 he lost Madrid for a time, and in 1813 he lost all Spain. He gathered together all his possessions, and tried to retire inas dignified a fashion as possible. Forced by Wellington to fight at Vittoria, he was badly beaten and driven off his line of communications. Everything had to be abandoned. During the flight Joseph left his carriage by one door while the English Hussars entered it by the other, pistol shots were fired at him, and altogether he was hardly treated with the dignity a King deserves. All his court paraphernalia was captured by the English. His carriage was found stuffed with masterpieces; he lost gold to the value of a million sterling, and his plate, his personal belongings, and his lady friends were alike left behind. Soult at last arrived to hold the line of the Pyrenees, and Joseph was ignominiously thrust aside.
He pathetically re-entered the limelight in Paris during the fatal early months of 1814, but he was no longer taken seriously. A proclamation of his to the people of Paris, practically telling them to have no fear for he was with them was received with howls of derision. He pottered helplessly about until the abdication, he figured inconspicuously in the last gathering of the Bonaparte clan during the Hundred Days, and then went off to America. He shook from his shoulders with relief the burden of kingship. As with his brothers, feeble novels and the study of literature engaged his attention from 1815 until his death.
A third brother of Napoleon’s was also a king; he also was thrust on to an unwilling people, and he also was thrust off again in course of time. Jerome was the hope of the family; in 1801, at the age of seventeen, he appeared to give promise of great gifts. Napoleon sent him off to join the navy and to acquire manhood in that hardest of all schools. The First Consul’s plan was defeated, for the officers of the squadron hastened to make the great man’s young brother as comfortable as possible.
When Gantheaume, with vastly superior numbers, fell in with and captured the EnglishSwiftsure, Jerome (seventeen years old, if you please) was sent to receive the English captain’s sword. On the West Indian station the French admiral bluntly told Jerome that he was bound to become an admiral anyway, and he should work hard, not to achieve promotion but to be ready for it. Jerome did not follow his advice. The renewal of war with England in 1803 found Jerome still in the West Indies, and he left his ship (which was subsequently captured) and went off to the United States. At Washington he found the French Ambassador, Pichon, and drew lavishly on him for funds and embarrassed the worthy man enormously. Jerome had quite a nice little holiday in America, travelling about from place to place, making hordes of friends, spending thousands of dollars, and being generally lionized.
The climax was reached when at the age of nineteen he informed the wretched Pichon that he had just married a Miss Elizabeth Patterson, daughter of a worthy Baltimore merchant, and asked him for further funds to support his new condition. Pichon was horrified. The marriage was illegal by the law of France, it is true, but Jerome apparently took it seriously. Napoleon would be mad with rage. Pichon saw himself deprived of his position and driven into exile. He implored Jerome to go home. Jerome refused. Pichon cut off supplies. Jerome gaily borrowed from his new father-in-law. Then came the news that Napoleon had proclaimed himself Emperor of the French. Madame Jerome Bonaparte naturally wanted to go to France as soon as possible and enjoy her rank as an Imperial Princess. Jerome had doubts on the subject, but at last, when his funds ran low, he set out in one of Mr. Patterson’s ships for Lisbonwith his wife. At Lisbon what Jerome had feared came about. The French consul, acting on instructions from Paris, announced that he could give only Jerome a passport; he could not give “Miss Patterson” one. At first Jerome swore he would stay by his wife, but Napoleon’s emissaries made him tempting offers. If he abandoned Miss Patterson he would be made an Imperial Prince; he would have high command; he would receive at least 150,000 francs a year. Jerome succumbed. He told his wife to travel round by sea to Amsterdam, whence she could more easily reach Paris to join him. He himself went direct. Naturally by Napoleon’s orders Elizabeth was denied permission to land at Amsterdam; she at last realized what Jerome had done, and, as she could do nothing else, she went to England, where she was cordially received. A child was born to her while she was in lodgings at Camberwell, and this son’s son was in 1906 Attorney-General of the United States. But Elizabeth was never recognized by the French Government as Jerome’s wife, and eventually she went back to the United States. There is a story that many years after she encountered Jerome and his next wife, Catherine of Würtemberg, in a picture gallery at Florence. Jerome was a perfect gentleman, and passed her by after telling Catherine who she was.
Be that as it may, Jerome gained many solid advantages from his desertion of his wife. His debts were paid and a large income was allowed him. He was entrusted with the command of a small naval expedition against Algiers, and on his return to Genoa with a few score French prisoners whom he had released he was greeted with storms of salutes and congratulatory addresses. From the tone of the announcements one would gather that he had anticipated Lord Exmouth’s feat in 1816, bombarded the city and wrung submission from theDey by daring and courage. As a matter of fact the prisoners had been ransomed before he even started for a few pounds each by a French representative sent specially over.
It was much the same with the West Indian expedition which followed. Jerome certainly did considerable damage to English commerce, and somehow escaped the English cruisers, but the official description of his exploits seemed to indicate that he had almost subverted the British Empire.
No sooner was Jerome back in France than he turned soldier. On his early naval expeditions he had strutted about the deck in a Hussar uniform of which he was very fond, but apparently he did not see fit to appear before his troops in naval attire by way of returning the compliment. Napoleon was already planning to give Jerome a German kingdom, and he therefore decided that the young man should gain some military experience along with as much military glory as possible. With Vandamme as his adviser and a strongcorps d’arméeat his back, Jerome plunged into Silesia. The Prussians were stunned by the defeats of Jena and Auerstädt, and by the relentless pursuit which had followed, and they gave way before him with hardly a blow struck. One or two fortresses showed signs of resistance, and were blockaded. The remainder of the province was soon in Jerome’s hands, and he and Vandamme and the divisional commanders promptly enriched themselves with plunder. Once more Jerome’s achievements were blazoned abroad as feats of marvellous skill. Napoleon was usually successful in obtaining the gold of devotion in return for the tinsel of propaganda, and now he was exerting all his arts in his brother’s favour.
Napoleon’s victory of Friedland was followed by the Treaty of Tilsit, and one of the clauses therein gave Westphalia to Jerome. At the mature age oftwenty-three the young man found himself ruler of two millions of subjects. Moreover, he was given a royal bride. The King of Würtemberg, it is true, had not been a king for more than two years, but the house of Wittelsbach could trace its ancestry back to the time of Charlemagne. Catherine of Würtemberg was already affianced, but at the Emperor’s command the engagement was broken off and Catherine was given to Jerome. Jerome’s American marriage was declared null and void, first by Napoleon because at the time Jerome was a minor, and secondly by the Metropolitan of Paris, for no particular reason. The fact that the ceremony had been performed by a Roman Catholic archbishop with all due regard to the forms of the Church, did not count.
However, the splendours of the new marriage were such that the old one might well be forgotten. It took place in the gallery of Diana at the Tuileries, and was attended by all the shining lights of the Empire. There was a goodly assembly of Kings, and there were Princes and Grand Dukes in dozens. Everybody seemed to have made a special effort to wear as much jewellery as possible, and the display of diamond-sewn dresses and yard-long ropes of pearls was remembered for years afterwards. The Democratic Empire had certainly made great strides.
Once married, Jerome departed with his Queen to his kingdom of Westphalia. The new state was a curious mixture of fragments of other countries. Hesse, Hanover, Brunswick and Prussia had all contributed to it (unwillingly), and Calvinists and Catholics were represented in about equal numbers and with an equal aversion each from the other. The whole country was ruined by prolonged military occupation; it was loaded with debt, for Napoleon blithely began to collect money owing to the Elector of Hesse whom he had dispossessed; nearly one-fourthof the whole area was claimed by the Emperor to be distributed as endowments to his officers; a huge army had to be maintained, and a French army of occupation had to be paid and supplied; a war contribution had to be paid to the French treasury; and to crown it all the Continental system was slowly crushing the life out of the industries. During the first administrative year there was a deficit of five million francs, and this was the smallest there was during the whole lifetime of the country. From then onwards the financial measures proceeded on the well-worn way to ruin, the landmarks thereon being forced loans, repudiation of debt, and taxes amounting to one-half the total national income. There is nothing remarkable in the fact that the six years of the existence of the kingdom were marked by two serious mutinies and three distinct rebellions.
Jerome himself was quite indifferent to the troubles of his people. He spent enormous amounts on his palace at Cassel, and in addition he fell heavily into personal debt despite a Civil List of five million francs a year. His pleasures were, to say the least, of a dubious sort, and we find hints everywhere that the orgies at Cassel eclipsed even those at the Parc-aux-Cerfs in the good old days of the Bourbon régime. Catherine apparently made no violent objection to this behaviour of her husband’s; the graceless young scamp seems to have completely bewitched her. He must have had the time of his life during these years, despite occasional shocks like the one he experienced when he read in theMoniteur(the first indication he received) that one quarter of his kingdom had been annexed to France.
Only once did Jerome appear on active service during this period, and that was to command thirty or forty thousand men during the Russian campaign of 1812. He travelled with all the luxuries he could think of, equerries, cooks, valets, barbers, mistresses,until his headquarters appeared like a small town. But the hardships of war did not last long; Jerome was found wanting in military ability. His failure to keep up to the difficult time-table Napoleon set him during the advance into Lithuania led to his being placed under Davout’s command. Neither he nor Davout liked the arrangement, and Jerome threw up his command and went back to Cassel.
Here he enjoyed himself for one more year. Even he had flinched from reviving the olddroit du seigneur, but he did his best in that direction without that amount of ceremony. But the sands were running out as the French armies fell back from the Niemen to the Oder, from the Oder to the Elbe, and at last the battle of Leipzig laid open all the country between the Elbe and the Rhine to the triumphant Allies. The Kingdom of Westphalia vanished in a night, like a dream; the Westphalian army went over to the Alliesen bloc, and Jerome returned to France with barely two hundred men at his back.
The Hundred Days gave Jerome one last chance of displaying his manhood, and, curiously enough, he made the most of it. He was given command of a division of Reille’s corps in the Waterloo campaign, and he led it with unexpected dash and vigour. He fought heroically at Quatre Bras, exposing himself recklessly in the dreadful fighting in the wood. At Waterloo he headed the attack on Hougomont, leading assault after assault with unflinching bravery. He was wounded, but remained in action, and at the close of the day he was seen striving to rally his men when they broke panic-stricken before the allied advance.
Waterloo almost atones in the general estimation for Jerome’s long and useless life. After the second Restoration he drifted idly about Europe, accompanied by his devoted Catherine; when the Orleans monarchy fell he hastened back to France. Along with Louis Napoleon he planned thecoup d’état, andfor the rest of his life, until 1860, he was once more a prominent subject of the French Empire. Napoleon III. made him a Marshal; his son married a princess of the house of Savoy, and he died comfortably in bed at the age of seventy-six. He never met with any fatal retribution for his callous desertion of Elizabeth Patterson, or for the wild debauchery of his youth. There seems to be no moral to attach to the tale of his career.
Of the remaining descendants in the male line of the house of Bonaparte there is little to tell. One of them, Lucien, a grandson of Lucien, Napoleon’s brother, rose to the eminence of Cardinal; one or two of them have shown ability in various branches of science; the curious tendency to literature has repeatedly cropped out; but none of them has ever achieved anything really striking. Their novels are more feeble even than Garibaldi’s, while their political achievements are of course beneath comparison. Some of them have fought duels, and some of them have committed manslaughter. Some of them have even attained the dazzling heights of the French chamber of deputies. But there is not one of them who would receive two lines of notice in any fair-sized book of reference were it not for his relationship to the great Napoleon. The present head of the house is Napoleon Victor Jerome, who married in 1910 a Coburg princess, a member of the royal family of Belgium. He is Napoleon VI., if the principle of legitimacy can yet be applied to the house of Bonaparte; anyway, he shows not the least desire to become Napoleon VI.
Had Napoleon had no brothers, he would probably have been more successful; had he had any brothers of equal ability they would have pulled each other down in Europe, if they had not cut each other’s throats years before in Corsica; as it is, he stands as unique in his family as he does in his age.
JOSEPH NAPOLEON ROI DE NAPLES et de SICILEET ROI D’ESPAGNE ET DES INDESNé le 7 janvier 1768. Sacré et couronné le3e Mars 1806.
JOSEPH NAPOLEON ROI DE NAPLES et de SICILEET ROI D’ESPAGNE ET DES INDESNé le 7 janvier 1768. Sacré et couronné le3e Mars 1806.
CHAPTER XISISTERS
IF Napoleon’s brothers were all a generally hopeless lot, the same can by no means be said of his sisters. These stood out head and shoulders above the other women of the time; they were all distinguished by their force of character; whether they were married to nonentities or personalities they all did their best to wear the breeches—but they did not flinch from wearing nothing at all if the whim took them. They were all handsome women, and one of them, Pauline, was generally considered to be the most beautiful woman of the time.
Napoleon’s sisters resembled him much more closely than did his brothers. Xerxes, watching Artemisia fighting desperately at Salamis, exclaimed, “This woman plays the man while my men play the woman,” and a dispassionate observer of the conduct of the rulers of the countries of Europe in the Napoleonic era might well say the same. One has only to compare Joseph Bonaparte flying from Vittoria, or Murat flying from Tolentino, with Caroline rallying the Neapolitans, Louise of Prussia fighting desperately hard against fate at Tilsit, and Marie Caroline of Bourbon directing Sicily’s struggle with the great conqueror.
There are obvious differences, too, between Napoleon’s treatment of his brothers and his treatment of his sisters. Joseph and Jerome and Louishe bullied unmercifully, but it was far otherwise with Pauline, Caroline and Elise. He himself admitted that he always “formed into line of battle” in preparation for an interview with Caroline, and although authorities are at variance as to when he actually said to his family that anyone would think he was trying to rob them of the inheritance of the late King, their father, it is certain that the remark was addressed to his sisters and mother. They were all of them women with a very keen sense of what they wanted, and they fought like tiger-cats to obtain it.
The three girls all married before or during the Consulate, when Napoleon had not yet attained the heights he reached later, so that the marriages they made were by no means as brilliant as they might have been, and fell far short of the marriages which Napoleon arranged for much more distant relatives who became marriageable at a later period. Elise was old enough to experience acutely the trials of poverty which overtook the family before Napoleon was promoted to important commands. She was sent as a child to school at St. Cyr, a state-supported institution under the patronage of the Bourbons, and had to leave there at the same time as the Bonaparte family had to fly from Corsica to Marseilles. During the next few years she was rather a trial to her family, for she flirted with every man she met, eligible and ineligible. One of her admirers was Admiral Truguet, who was a thoroughly good sailor and quite a good match at that time, but Madame Bonaparte declined to allow the affair to develop. In the end it was a fellow Corsican, Félix Baciocchi, who gained her hand. Baciocchi was a distant connection of the Bonaparte family, and also, by a curious coincidence, he was a relation of Charles Andrea Pozzo di Borgo, another Corsican, who is believed to have been at feud with the Bonapartes, and who certainly distinguished himself, while in the service of variousEuropean monarchs, by his virulent hatred of Napoleon.
But Baciocchi did not distinguish himself at all. He was a complete nonentity, with neither the desire nor the capacity to achieve power. At the marriage Elise only brought him thirty thousand francs as dowry (her share of the Bonaparte property, now recovered from the Paolists), but after 1797 Napoleon was able to make Elise presents of considerably greater value. Baciocchi was then a major of infantry; but during the Consulate his wife endeavoured to obtain higher military command for him. So persistently did she scheme to this end that at last in self-defence Napoleon made him a senator in order to cut short his military career.
Pauline, the next sister, married Leclerc, a capable soldier, who rendered Napoleon valuable service during thecoup d’étatof Brumaire. He, at least, was worthy of promotion, and Bonaparte gave it to him lavishly. But it was Caroline, the youngest, who looked after herself best. Most of the generals of the Consulate sought her hand, including Lannes, but both Napoleon and Caroline desired alliance with the greatest of them all, Moreau. However, Moreau declined the honour (thereby directly bringing about his own exile soon after), and Caroline chose for herself a husband of whose military talents she was sufficiently sure to be certain that high command would be given him, but who also was sufficiently weak-willed to be well under her thumb. Lannes was of too lofty a type to please her in this respect, and his personal devotion to Napoleon was undoubted; Caroline therefore selected a young cavalry officer, Murat.
Pauline experienced an unfortunate beginning to the career she had planned for herself and her husband. Leclerc was appointed to the command of the expeditionary force which was sent to subdueHayti, and Pauline was ordered to accompany him. In vain she pleaded ill-health; in vain she said that her complexion would be ruined by the West Indian sun; Napoleon was adamant. Pauline kept up the plea of ill-health sufficiently well to be carried on board ship at Brest in a litter, but the expedition started. As was only to be expected, it ended in disastrous failure. Toussaint l’Ouverture, the leader of the rebellion, was indeed captured and sent to France to perish in a freezing mountain prison, but yellow fever attacked the French troops, and they died in thousands. Leclerc was one of those who perished.
Napoleon himself was able to gain some satisfaction even from the failure, because the men he had sent had all been drawn from the Army of the Rhine, and they were all guilty of the crime of believing that Moreau was a great man, and that Hohenlinden was a greater victory than Marengo. But, as has been said, the French died in thousands; the negroes fought stoutly, and at last after fifteen thousand Frenchmen had perished only a miserable fragment of the expeditionary force survived to be withdrawn under Rochambeau. Pauline returned to France to deplore her ruined complexion.
However, with the establishment of the Empire the sisters found plenty to occupy their minds in acquiring as much spoil as possible. Money they sought greedily, and Napoleon gave them millions of francs. They shed tears of rage when they found that the Emperor expected them to remain content with being plain Mesdames Murat, Leclerc and Baciocchi, while the hated Josephine was Sa Majesté Impériale et Royale l’Impératrice et Reine, and while plain Julie Clary and Hortense Beauharnais (Joseph’s and Louis’s wives) were Imperial and Royal Highnesses. Napoleon gave way to their bitter pleadings and at one stroke created them Princessesof the Empire, making their husbands Princes at the same time.
These names, Elise, Pauline and Caroline, were not the baptismal names of the ladies concerned. At baptism they had been given Italian names, each of them attached to the ever popular name of Maria. Their mother was Maria Letizia; while Elise was really Maria Anna, Pauline, Maria Paoletta and Caroline, Maria Annunziata. It is by these names that they are described on their marriage certificates, but they dropped them soon afterwards to assume names which appealed to them more. Changing their names did not change their natures; they intrigued and schemed and plotted; they flirted; they sought favours; they quarrelled with their husbands, with their sisters-in-law, and with each other; in fact they exhibited all the fierce self-seeking which characterized the ladies of the old monarchy. There was this difference, however. Fifty years before the Court ladies had intrigued for places, and for thousands of francs. Now they intrigued for kingdoms and millions.
Caroline early took first place in the race for power. Her husband, Murat, distinguished himself in the Austerlitz campaign by capturing the great bridge over the Danube by a trick which savoured rather of treachery, and by bold heading of cavalry charges at Austerlitz itself. He was already a Prince and second senior Marshal of the Empire; the only possible promotion left for him was a sovereignty. Napoleon, carving out his Confederation of the Rhine, found him one. A tiny area on the Rhine was obtained by exchange from Prussia and Bavaria, and Murat and Caroline became Grand Duke and Grand Duchess of Berg and Cleves. Caroline was in no way satisfied. She egged her husband on to demand increases of territory, privileges of toll on the Rhine, and so on, until the little state had setboth France and Prussia in a ferment. The tension hardly relaxed until, a month or two later, war broke out between the two countries. Murat went away with the Grand Army to Jena, Eylau and Friedland; Caroline stayed behind in Paris to guard their interests. She did it well. She indulged in an outrageous flirtation with Junot, Governor of Paris, and hints have not been wanting that her purpose was to arrange a revolution rather on the same lines as Mallet tried to follow in 1812. At her palace of the Elysée (now the official residence of the President of the Third Republic) she gave the most brilliant fêtes imaginable. She worked like a slave to gain popularity, so that she could gain the throne in the event of her brother’s death. Then Tilsit followed Friedland, and the Emperor returned. The campaign had brought more glory to Murat than he had as yet gained. He had headed the marvellous pursuit after Jena, when he had captured fortresses with a few regiments of Hussars, and it was largely through him that practically the whole Prussian army had fallen into the hands of the French. At Eylau, when Augereau’s corps had come reeling back through the blizzard, shattered and almost annihilated, when it seemed as though the Grand Army was at last going to taste defeat, Napoleon had called on Murat to save the day. Murat replied by charging at the head of eighteen thousand cavalry. He broke up the first Russian line, captured thousands of prisoners, and beat back the Russians until Davout and Ney were in position.
Naturally, he reaped vast rewards. His Grand Duchy was doubled in size; millions of francs were bestowed upon him and upon Caroline; but they were hugely dissatisfied. Murat had hoped for the crown of Poland, or, failing that, for a whole kingdom in Germany. But Poland was given to the King of Saxony, and the creation of Jerome Bonaparte’skingdom of Westphalia shut out all hopes of the further expansion of Berg. Caroline and Murat were furious. Murat showed his rage by hinting at rebellion; Caroline used her native Corsican guile and became as friendly to Napoleon as possible, helping him in his affairs with women, recounting to him the tittle-tattle of the drawing-rooms of Paris, and even at times giving him the shelter of her roof to conceal from Josephine some of his more flagrant unfaithfulnesses.
However, Murat was soon in employment again. He was appointed to the command in Spain, where Napoleon’s tortuous intrigues to dispossess the unspeakable Bourbons were beginning to take effect. Murat certainly achieved fair success. He gained possession of the Spanish fortresses, stamped out the little spurts of rebellion which occasionally flamed out, and by the time the outrageous treaty of Bayonne had been signed he was in a position to hand over to Napoleon the greater part of the country. Another disappointment awaited him. He had hoped that all this mysterious business would result in his being given the crown of Spain—but Joseph Bonaparte received it instead, and Murat and Caroline were forced to be content with Joseph’s former kingdom of Naples. Caroline was at last a Queen.
The royal pair began at once to treat their new kingdom much as Sancho Panza had determined to treat his island. Taxes were increased, the army was reorganized, and preparations were set on foot for the conquest of Sicily. To gain popularity with the Neapolitans they abrogated some of the more obnoxious decrees of Murat’s predecessor, and they further employed all their arts to blacken his memory, so that they would by contrast appear the better rulers.
But Napoleon nipped this scheme in the bud atonce. Every day brought fresh thunders from Paris. The Emperor sent furious orders forbidding certain measures, enjoining others, until it became very evident that he was determined to rule Naples himself, although he was content to allow Murat to bear the title and honours of King. Poor Murat could do nothing right. Any well-advised action on his part was looked upon as potential treason, while any failure called forth tornadoes of wrath from Paris. When, by a well-planned raid, he captured Capri from Sir Hudson Lowe, he was actually censured for informing the Emperor through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs instead of through the Ministry for War! Murat and Caroline chafed against their bonds, but while the Empire stood firm they were powerless.
Meanwhile, Pauline and Elise, although not as successful as Caroline, had nevertheless attained to some measure of sovereignty. Elise contrived for the greater part of the time to have her dullard husband sent away on various duties, while she herself flirted gaily with every man she could. As a matter of fact, her flirting was never so serious as was her sisters’; she had another outlet for her ingenuity in that she was passionately devoted to the stage and to all connected with it. She visited the theatre as often as she could; she read plays in hundreds, and she indulged in amateur theatricals whenever possible. When Italy was being parcelled out into fiefs by Napoleon, she prevailed on her brother to allot to her the principality of Piombino in full sovereignty, and later she contrived to have Lucca added to her little state. Here she settled down for a time, with all the paraphernalia of sovereignty, equerries, chamberlains, ladies-in-waiting, and especially a Court troupe of actors. Baciocchi, her husband, had indeed been given the title of Prince of Piombino, but Elise alone had been given the principality.Baciocchi was merely his wife’s subject, and Elise made the most of it. He could never worry her again, for Elise allotted him apartments far distant from her own, and never saw him without a third person being present. Scandal said that other men were allowed greater privileges, but there is nothing very definite from which one may draw reliable conclusions.
Soon Elise received further promotion. Napoleon cast a covetous eye upon the kingdom of Etruria which had set up in 1802, and by treaty with Spain he arranged to give the widowed Queen of Etruria (a Spanish princess) a new kingdom of Northern Lusitania in exchange. That this new kingdom was to be carved out of Portugal troubled him not at all; he even promised to make Godoy (First Minister of Spain) Prince of the Algarve, another Portuguese district. He had very little intention of fulfilling either promise, but they enabled him to send Junot marching hotfoot on Lisbon, and to annex Tuscany to the Empire. Elise seized her opportunity. By cajolery and blandishment she persuaded Napoleon to erect Tuscany into a government-general, and to confer upon her the ruling power with the title of Grand Duchess of Tuscany. Poor Baciocchi was appointed general of division in command of the French garrison. Elise settled down in the Pitti palace at Florence, and proceeded to rule the cradle of the Renaissance, the erstwhile domain of the Medicis, as thoroughly as her brother would allow her.
Pauline’s widowhood ended in a much more splendid match than was made by any of the other Bonapartes. She took as her second husband Prince Camillo Borghese, the head of one of the most renowned houses of Italy. The marriage was not a success (no Bonaparte marriage was, at that time), but Borghese’s wealth and the presents Napoleonheaped upon her enabled Pauline to indulge every whim of which she was capable. Proud of her reputation as the most beautiful woman of the time, she did all she could to enhance and set off her beauty. Like Poppæa, she bathed every day in milk—a hot milk bath followed by a cold milk shower. She surrounded herself with negro servants and dwarfs, by way of contrast, and her extravagances and wanton waste of money were the talk of the whole Empire. Canova carved her statue, and despite his cold classicism we can still perceive in that recumbent, self-satisfied figure the fiery, tempestuous woman who was once Pauline. Her posing semi-nude, even to such a sculptor as Canova, called forth a storm of comment from a gossip-loving Empire. The tale was told that when Pauline was asked if she did not feel uncomfortable, posing half-dressed, she replied, “Oh no, there was a fire in the room.”
When Elise received Piombino, Pauline begged Guastalla from Napoleon, and as Duchess she, too, held sovereignty. Borghese was made Governor-General of the Piedmontese departments, and was sent to Turin with an enormous Civil List to play the part of a semi-royalty, and to reconcile the Piedmontese to the loss of their Sardinian king. Such a task was naturally agreeable to Pauline, and in Turin she and Borghese did their best to astonish the provincials with a series of fêtes of unheard-of opulence. Pauline was the most talked about of all Bonaparte’s sisters; the voice of adulation praised her beauty; the voice of vituperation hinted frightful things about her morals. She was accused of hideous vices, of too great an affection for her brothers, of a lunatic passion for various men. Pauline apparently did not mind. She went gaily on through life, quarrelling with Borghese, spending money like water, indulging in hectic episodes with artists and soldiers, andgenerally recalling to mind the old days of the Borgias and the Viscontis.
With the publication of the fate of Napoleon’s Russian expedition a shudder ran through the Empire. Murat, whom Napoleon had left in command of the wreck of the Grand Army, deserted his charge and rushed home so as to be at hand to preserve his own kingdom should the Empire fall. Prussia became Russia’s ally. Sweden, under Bernadotte, had already done the same. Napoleon made a gigantic effort; in three months he raised and equipped an army of three hundred thousand men; he beat back the Allies, winning victories at Lützen and Bautzen; for a space it seemed as if he would regain his old European domination. Consequently the pendulum of his allies’ attitude swung back once more towards faithfulness, and Murat left Naples once more to command the cavalry of the Grand Army. But already Caroline and he had negotiated a secret convention with Austria by which he would declare war on France if called upon to do so. Elise in Tuscany had decided to join him, although, unfortunately for her, she extracted no definite promise from Austria that she would retain her throne.
Thus, while Murat was fighting for the Grand Army, leading charges made by fifty and seventy squadrons at a time, and capturing twelve thousand Austrian prisoners in a single battle, his wife in Naples was assuring Austria of his devotion to Austria; she was recruiting the Neapolitan army to the utmost, and, while not actually moving against France, she was refusing to allow a single Neapolitan battalion to go to Napoleon’s help. Then came the French defeats of 1813, culminating in the disaster of Leipzig. It was obvious that the Empire could not endure much longer. Bavaria, Baden, Würtemberg, all turned against Napoleon, and Murat realizedthat if he delayed further the Allies would not have so pressing a need for his aid, and he would be unable to secure his throne by his treachery. Without further hesitation he left the beaten Emperor, hurried across Europe through the first snows of autumn, and reached Naples early in November. The Neapolitan army was at last going to advance.
The advance was a very slow and cautious one. Eugène de Beauharnais, Viceroy of Italy, was fighting fiercely in Venetia against the Austrians. Tempting offers were made to him by the Allies, but he refused them; his dignified replies are worthy of Bayard or Francis I. But Murat and his Neapolitans were moving steadily northward; even now he had made no public declaration as to which side he was on, and in private he and Caroline were assuring Eugène, Napoleon and the Austrians at one and the same time of their unfailing support. Nor was this all. They were further intriguing with the infant United Italy party in an endeavour to increase their dominion in that way; while in addition they had made some sort of agreement with Elise Bonaparte in Tuscany. It would be hard to discover anywhere in history an equally loathsome example of double-dealing.
Murat occupied the Papal States, Tuscany, and portions of the Kingdom of Italy, but he still refrained from making any open attack on either French or Austrians. Not until March 6th, 1814, when he received from Caroline definite news of the certainty of the fall of the Empire, did he attack Eugène’s forces. He achieved little, and after two fierce little skirmishes he subsided once more into inaction. At last official intimation of Napoleon’s fall came to hand, and, abandoning Elise to her fate, Murat returned to Naples. Further diplomacy confirmed him in his possession of Naples; the only person concerned who kept to his pledged word inall the intricacies of the negotiations was Francis of Austria.
Thus 1815 found Napoleon’s three sisters in very different situations. Caroline was still a Queen; Elise, turned out of Tuscany by the Austrians, was a pensioner on her bounty; while Pauline, who alone had remained faithful to her brother, was living with Napoleon at Elba. Suddenly there came another dramatic change, for Napoleon escaped from Elba, and within a few days was once more Emperor of the French. Italy was again plunged into a ferment. Murat and Caroline were naturally anxious, for they could not expect that Napoleon would forgive their black treachery of the year before, while it was only too obvious that not a single country in Europe retained any interest in their possession of the throne of Naples. In these circumstances Murat took the first heroic decision of his life, and decided to cut the Gordian knot by force of arms. He declared war against Austria, proclaimed a United Italy, and with fifty thousand men he marched northward to establish himself as King of Italy. It was a vain effort. The Neapolitan army was a wretched force, and Murat himself was worse than useless in independent command. The Austrian army hurriedly concentrated, defeated Murat in one or two minor actions, and finally utterly routed him at Tolentino. The Neapolitans deserted in thousands, and Murat re-entered his dominions with only five thousand men left. The Austrians followed him up remorselessly; the Sicilians were preparing an expedition against him; and all that was left for Murat to do was to abdicate and fly for his life.
Caroline was successful in obtaining the protection of Francis of Austria, and she soon went off to settle down in Austria with a pension and a residence. Murat had reached France, and for some weeks he was in hiding in Marseilles. AfterWaterloo he left by sea to join his wife, but on his way he changed his mind and took his second heroic decision. Napoleon had regained France simply by appearing in person before his army; why should not Murat regain Naples in the same way? Murat landed with a score of companions at Pizzo in Calabria, and marched into the market place with his escort shouting “Long live King Joachim!” For a moment there was an astonished silence, and then the townspeople fell on the little party. Not for nothing had Murat decorated every mile of every road in Calabria with a gallows from which hung captured bandits; every soul in Pizzo must have had a blood feud with their late King. Battered with sticks and stones, Murat was seized and flung into prison, and five days later he was tried and shot.
Murat’s attempt was the last spurt of the Napoleonic feeling for a long period. Not until, with the passage of years, the Legend had been built up, do we hear of any surprising action or heroic deed. Europe sank into a slough of inaction, crushed down by the weight of the Holy Alliance and the burden of accumulated debts. The most typical action of a dull generation was the establishment on the throne of France of fat, pathetic, bourgeois Louis Philippe as King of the French. It was a safe thing to do, and Louis Philippe and his Amelia did their best to make it remain safe. No risks were taken until the movement of 1848. Happiness has no history, and there is precious little history about the period 1815-48. Had the Holy Alliance had its way, there would be even less. Somehow one cannot help feeling that the dullness of the period is the dullness of unhappiness. It was the time when “order reigned in Warsaw,” when little children died in droves in English factories, when in Naples the negation of God was erected into a system of government. Historians may sneerat the ineffectiveness of the Napoleonides; they may point to a pillaged, blood-drenched Europe writhing under the heel of a Corsican Emperor; they can draw horrible pictures of the sacks of Lübeck or Badajoz, but they are unconvincing when they attempt to prove that there was more unhappiness under the Empire than under the Holy Alliance. Peace has its defeats as well as war.
This digression may be unpardonable, but it was nevertheless inevitable. Let us minimize our error, even if we cannot repair it, by turning back to the consideration of three fair and frail women whom we left thrust back unwillingly into a private station of life. One of them did not long survive the calamities of 1814. This was Elise. The Allies refused her request to join Napoleon at St. Helena, and she lived quietly in Italy until her death in 1820. She was only forty-two when she died. Pauline had the advantage over her sisters of having a husband whose position was independent of the Empire. Prince Borghese was a very considerable person in Rome, and Pauline for some time was a leading figure in Italian society. It did not last long, however. She quarrelled with her husband; her beauty left her; Austrian, French and Papal surveillance worried her, and she died in 1825.
Caroline, the most capable and cold-hearted of all the Bonapartes, after Napoleon, bore her troubles with more dignity and for a much longer time. As the Countess of Lipona (an anagram of Napoli) she lived for some time in Austria; she travelled restlessly about; she seemed in fact to have completely recovered from the shock of the loss of her husband and her throne, when at last a whole series of deaths broke down her reserve and shortened her life. Pauline and Elise, as has been said, were already dead; in 1832 the Prince Imperial (Napoleon II.) died at Vienna; Prince Borghese died in the sameyear. Another brother-in-law, Baciocchi, died in 1834; Catherine of Westphalia, her best beloved sister-in-law, died in 1835, and then in 1836 Madame Mère, her stern but adored mother, also died. Caroline endured her loneliness for a little while longer, but she died in 1839. Even she, almost the last of her generation, was only fifty-six at her death.
None of the Bonaparte family was as long-lived as Napoleon’s mother. Maria Letizia Ramolino was certainly one of the greatest women of the period. Elise Bonaparte might be called the Semiramis of Italy; Caroline might intrigue for Empires; Pauline might be the most beautiful woman of France; but their mother combined all their good qualities with very few of their bad ones. To bring up a family of eight children thoroughly well on an income of less than one hundred pounds a year in a revolution-torn country like Corsica is in itself a remarkable feat, though hardly likely in unfavourable circumstances to gain mention in history, but to do it when handicapped by a husband like Carlo Bonaparte is more remarkable still. The strain of those dreadful years in Ajaccio would have broken down anyone of stuff less stern than Maria Letizia’s; pitched battles were fought in the streets outside the Bonapartes’ house; three-quarters of Corsica were at feud with the Bonapartes and the party they represented; death threatened them all at different times, while all the time a most bitter, grinding poverty harried them unmercifully.
Maria Letizia came through the ordeal unbroken in body or spirit. Even Napoleon’s fierce pride humbled itself before her, and her other children were her slaves. But she had a woman’s weaknesses as well as a man’s strength. She was bitterly jealous of her daughter-in-law Josephine; she was bigoted in church matters; and she fought like a tigress inthe cause of whichever of her children was experiencing misfortune. When Lucien left France in disgrace in consequence of his marriage to Madame Jouberthon, his mother strove desperately hard to re-establish him. She went to Italy to be near him, and endeavoured, by absenting herself at the time of the coronation, to force Napoleon to recall Lucien and herself together. However, her great son outwitted her on this occasion, for he dispensed with her presence, and yet arranged with David the artist for her portrait to appear along with the other French dignitaries in the celebrated picture of the coronation.
Letizia had a very good opinion of her own position. When Napoleon became Emperor, and made his brothers and sisters Imperial Highnesses, she demanded some greater title for herself. Napoleon was in a quandary, for on consulting precedents he found that no French king’s mother had ever been given any such honour if she had never been queen. Letizia insisted, and, almost at his wits’ end, Napoleon at last gave her a singular dignity. He awarded her the same position and precedence as used to be given under the Bourbons to the wife of the king’s second son. The king’s second son was Monsieur, and his wife was Madame. Letizia was named Madame, and as a subsidiary title she was called Mère de S.M. l’Empéreur et Roi. Almost at once the titles were merged together in common speech, and Letizia was called Madame Mère everywhere except at strict official gatherings.
By the time that the Empire was firmly founded, and all her children except Lucien were seated on thrones, Letizia was able to give free rein to the passion which came only second with her to her love for her children. It is said that shipwrecked sailors who have been starved for a long time cannot help, after being rescued, hoarding fragments of food forfear of another period of famine. With Madame Mère a similar state of affairs prevailed. She had felt the pinch of poverty for fifty years, and in no circumstances could she endure it again. She still lived as cheaply as she could, and she saved her money like a miser. She coaxed Napoleon into giving her an annual income of a million francs, and she did not spend a quarter of it. She did her best to obtain a sovereignty for herself, not that she wanted to rule, but because she could sell the fief back to the French and invest the proceeds. She made money by acute speculation. She clung like grim death to every sou which came within her reach.
Yet avarice pure and simple was not the sole motive of her actions. Just as a prophet has no honour in his own country, so the Emperor and the Kings and Princesses who were her children still seemed to be children to her, and all their talk of sovereignty was little better than childish prattling. She did not believe for one moment that the Empire could long endure, and in this her judgment was more acute than that of the majority of European statesmen. Wellington, as early as 1809, had seen through the shams and pretences of the glittering Empire, but few other men, not even Metternich, agreed with him at that time. But Madame Mère saw the end long before it came, and it was against that time of need that she saved so avariciously. Her judgment was proved accurate, and her savings proved useful in 1814.
In 1802 she had befriended Lucien; in 1805, Jerome; in 1810, Louis; now the greatest of her sons had met with adversity, and Letizia rushed to his assistance. She shared his exile in Elba, and from her own purse she provided the money which enabled him to maintain his Lilliputian court. She was by his side during the Hundred Days, and after he had been sent to St. Helena she returned to Italyand resumed the headship of the family. Her wealth as well as her marvellous personality assured her the respect of her sons and daughters. The death of the Prince Imperial in 1832 was a terrible shock to her; she had long been looking to him to restore the fame of the exiled house, and she had arranged to leave him all her money and papers. She did not long survive his death, but died in 1836, at the age of eighty-six.
She lies buried in Ajaccio, and the inscription over her tomb can still make the casual tourist catch his breath, and still makes the blood of Corsican youth run a little faster—