The Napoleon of the People - Honore de Balzac
THE NAPOLEON OF THE PEOPLE
BY
HONORE DE BALZAC
PREPARER'S NOTE
The Napoleon of the People was originally published in Le Medicin
de Campagne (The Country Doctor). It is a story told to a group of
peasants by the character of Goguelat, an ex-soldier who served
under Napoleon in an infantry regiment. It was later included in
Folk-tales of Napoleon: Napoleonder from the Russian, a collection
of stories by various authors. This translation is by Ellen
Marriage and Clara Bell.
Napoleon, you see, my friends, was born in Corsica, which is a French
island warmed by the Italian sun; it is like a furnace there,
everything is scorched up, and they keep on killing each other from
father to son for generations all about nothing at all--'tis a notion
they have. To begin at the beginning, there was something
extraordinary about the thing from the first; it occurred to his
mother, who was the handsomest woman of her time, and a shrewd soul,
to dedicate him to God, so that he should escape all the dangers of
infancy and of his after life; for she had dreamed that the world was
on fire on the day he was born. It was a prophecy! So she asked God to
protect him, on condition that Napoleon should re-establish His holy
religion, which had been thrown to the ground just then. That was the
agreement; we shall see what came of it.
Now, do you follow me carefully, and tell me whether what you are
about to hear is natural.
It is certain sure that only a man who had had imagination enough to
make a mysterious compact would be capable of going further than
anybody else, and of passing through volleys of grape-shot and showers
of bullets which carried us off like flies, but which had a respect
for his head. I myself had particular proof of that at Eylau. I see
him yet; he climbs a hillock, takes his field-glass, looks along our
lines, and says, "That is going on all right." One of the deep
fellows, with a bunch of feathers in his cap, used to plague him a
good deal from all accounts, following him about everywhere, even when
he was getting his meals. This fellow wants to do something clever, so
as soon as the Emperor goes away he takes his place. Oh! swept away in
a moment! And this is the last of the bunch of feathers! You
understand quite clearly that Napoleon had undertaken to keep his
secret to himself. That is why those who accompanied him, and even his
especial friends, used to drop like nuts: Duroc, Bessieres, Lannes
--men as strong as bars of steel, which he cast into shape for his own
ends. And here is a final proof that he was the child of God, created
to be the soldier's father; for no one ever saw him as a lieutenant or
a captain. He is a commandant straight off! Ah! yes, indeed! He did
not look more than four-and-twenty, but he was an old general ever
since the taking of Toulon, when he made a beginning by showing the
rest that they knew nothing about handling cannon. Next thing he does,
he tumbles upon us. A little slip of a general-in-chief of the army of
Italy, which had neither bread nor ammunition nor shoes nor clothes--a
wretched army as naked as a worm.
"Friends," he said, "here we all are together. Now, get it well
into your pates that in a fortnight's time from now you will be the
victors, and dressed in new clothes; you shall all have greatcoats,
strong gaiters, and famous pairs of shoes; but, my children, you will
have to march on Milan to take them, where all these things are."
So they marched. The French, crushed as flat as a pancake, held up
their heads again. There were thirty thousand of us tatterdemalions
against eighty thousand swaggerers of Germans--fine tall men and well
equipped; I can see them yet. Then Napoleon, who was only Bonaparte in
those days, breathed goodness knows what into us, and on we marched
night and day. We rap their knuckles at Montenotte; we hurry on to
thrash them at Rivoli, Lodi, Arcola, and Millesimo, and we never let
them go. The army came to have a liking for winning battles. Then
Napoleon hems them in on all sides, these German generals did not know
where to hide themselves so as to have a little peace and comfort; he
drubs them soundly, cribs ten thousand of their men at a time by
surrounding them with fifteen hundred Frenchmen, whom he makes to
spring up after his fashion, and at last he takes their cannon,
victuals, money, ammunition, and everything they have that is worth
taking; he pitches them into the water, beats them on the mountains,
snaps at them in the air, gobbles them up on the earth, and thrashes
them everywhere.
There are the troops in full feather again! For, look you, the
Emperor (who, for that matter, was a wit) soon sent for the
inhabitant, and told him that he had come there to deliver him.
Whereupon the civilian finds us free quarters and makes much of us, so
do the women, who showed great discernment. To come to a final end; in
Ventose '96, which was at that time what the month of March is now, we
had been driven up into a corner of the _Pays des Marmottes_; but after
the campaign, lo and behold! we were the masters of Italy, just as
Napoleon had prophesied. And in the month of March following, in one
year and in two campaigns, he brings us within sight of Vienna; we had
made a clean sweep of them. We had gobbled down three armies one after
another, and taken the conceit out of four Austrian generals; one of
them, an old man who had white hair, had been roasted like a rat in
the straw before Mantua. The kings were suing for mercy on their
knees. Peace had been won. Could a mere mortal have done that? No. God
helped him, that is certain. He distributed himself about like the
five loaves in the Gospel, commanded on the battlefield all day, and
drew up his plans at night. The sentries always saw him coming; he
neither ate nor slept. Therefore, recognizing these prodigies, the
soldier adopts him for his father. But, forward!
The other folk there in Paris, seeing all this, say among themselves:
"Here is a pilgrim who appears to take his instructions from Heaven
above; he is uncommonly likely to lay a hand on France. We must let
him loose on Asia or America, and that, perhaps, will keep him quiet."
The same thing was decreed for him as for Jesus Christ; for, as a
matter of fact, they give him orders to go on duty down in Egypt. See
his resemblance to the Son of God! That is not all, though. He calls
all his fire-eaters about him, all those into whom he had more
particularly put the devil, and talks to them in this way:
"My friends, for the time being they are giving us Egypt to stop our
mouths. But we will swallow down Egypt in a brace of shakes, just as
we swallowed Italy, and private soldiers shall be princes, and shall
have broad lands of their own. Forward!"
"Forward, lads!" cry the sergeants.
So we come to Toulon on the way to Egypt. Whereupon the English put
to sea with all their fleet. But when we are on board, Napoleon says
to us:
"They will not see us: and it is right and proper that you should
know henceforward that your general has a star in the sky that guides
us and watches over us!"
So said, so done. As we sailed over the sea we took Malta, by way of
an orange to quench his thirst for victory, for he was a man who must
always be doing something. There we are in Egypt. Well and good.
Different orders. The Egyptians, look you, are men who, ever since the
world has been the world, have been in the habit of having giants to
reign over them, and armies like swarms of ants; because it is a
country full of genii and crocodiles, where they have built up
pyramids as big as our mountains, the fancy took them to stow their
kings under the pyramids, so as to keep them fresh, a thing which
mightily pleases them all round out there. Whereupon, as we landed,
the Little Corporal said to us:
"My children, the country which you are about to conquer worships a
lot of idols which you must respect, because the Frenchman ought to be
on good terms with all the world, and fight people without giving
annoyance. Get it well into your heads to let everything alone at
first; for we shall have it all by and by! and forward!"
So far so good. But all those people had heard a prophecy of
Napoleon, under the name of _Kebir Bonaberdis_; a word which in our
lingo means, "The Sultan fires a shot," and they feared him like the
devil. So the Grand Turk, Asia, and Africa have recourse to magic, and
they send a demon against us, named the Mahdi, who it was thought had
come down from heaven on a white charger which, like its master was
bullet-proof, and the pair of them lived on the air of that part of
the world. There are people who have seen them, but for my part I
cannot give you any certain informations about them. They were the
divinities of Arabia and of the Mamelukes who wished their troopers to
believe that the Mahdi had the power of preventing them from dying in
battle. They gave out that he was an angel sent down to wage war on
Napoleon, and to get back Solomon's seal, part of their paraphernalia
which they pretended our general had stolen. You will readily
understand that we made them cry peccavi all the same.
Ah, just tell me now how they came to know about that compact of
Napoleon's? Was that natural?
They took it into their heads for certain that he commanded the
genii, and that he went from place to place like a bird in the
twinkling of an eye; and it is a fact that he was everywhere. At
length it came about that he carried off a queen of theirs. She was
the private property of a Mameluke, who, although he had several more
of them, flatly refused to strike a bargain, though "the other"
offered all his treasures for her and diamonds as big as pigeon's
eggs. When things had come to that pass, they could not well be
settled without a good deal of fighting; and there was fighting enough
for everybody and no mistake about it.
Then we are drawn up before Alexandria, and again at Gizeh, and
before the Pyramids. We had to march over the sands and in the sun;
people whose eyes dazzled used to see water that they could not drink
and shade that made them fume. But we made short work of the Mamelukes
as usual, and everything goes down before the voice of Napoleon, who
seizes Upper and Lower Egypt and Arabia, far and wide, till we came to
the capitals of kingdoms which no longer existed, where there were
thousands and thousands of statues of all the devils in creation, all
done to the life, and another curious thing too, any quantity of
lizards. A confounded country where any one could have as many acres
of land as he wished for as little as he pleased.
While he was busy inland, where he meant to carry out some wonderful
ideas of his, the English burn his fleet for him in Aboukir Bay, for
they never could do enough to annoy us. But Napoleon, who was
respected East and West, and called "My Son" by the Pope, and "My dear
Father" by Mahomet's cousin, makes up his mind to have his revenge on
England, and to take India in exchange for his fleet. He set out to
lead us into Asia, by way of the Red Sea, through a country where
there were palaces for halting-places, and nothing but gold and
diamonds to pay the troops with, when the Mahdi comes to an
understanding with the Plague, and sends it among us to make a break
in our victories. Halt! Then every man files off to that parade from
which no one comes back on his two feet. The dying soldier cannot take
Acre, into which he forces an entrance three times with a warrior's
impetuous enthusiasm; the Plague was too strong for us; there was not
even time to say "Your servant, sir!" to the Plague. Every man was
down with it. Napoleon alone was as fresh as a rose; the whole army
saw him drinking in the Plague without it doing him any harm whatever.
There now, my friends, was that natural, do you think?
The Mamelukes, knowing that we were all on the sick-list, want to
stop our road; but it was no use trying that nonsense with Napoleon.
So he spoke to his familiars, who had tougher skins than the rest:
"Go and clear the road for me."
Junot, who was his devoted friend, and a first-class fighter, only
takes a thousand men, and makes a clean sweep of the Pasha's army,
which had the impudence to bar our way. Thereupon back we came to
Cairo, our headquarters, and now for another story.
Napoleon being out of the country, France allowed the people in Paris
to worry the life out of her. They kept back the soldiers' pay and all
their linen and clothing, left them to starve, and expected them to
lay down law to the universe, without taking any further trouble in
the matter. They were idiots of the kind that amuse themselves with
chattering instead of setting themselves to knead the dough. So our
armies were defeated, France could not keep her frontiers; The Man was
not there. I say The Man, look you, because that was how they called
him; but it was stuff and nonsense, for he had a star of his own and
all his other peculiarities, it was the rest of us that were mere men.
He hears this history of France after his famous battle of Aboukir,
where with a single division he routed the grand army of the Turks,
twenty-five thousand strong, and jostled more than half of them into
the sea, rrrah! without losing more than three hundred of his own men.
That was his last thunder-clap in Egypt. He said to himself, seeing
that all was lost down there, "I know that I am the saviour of France,
and to France I must go."
But you must clearly understand that the army did not know of his
departure; for if they had, they would have kept him there by force to
make him Emperor of the East. So there we all are without him, and in
low spirits, for he was the life of us. He leaves Kleber in command, a
great watchdog who passed in his checks at Cairo, murdered by an
Egyptian whom they put to death by spiking him with a bayonet, which
is their way of guillotining people out there; but he suffered so
much, that a soldier took pity on the scoundrel and handed his flask
to him; and the Egyptian turned up his eyes then and there with all
the pleasure in life. But there is not much fun for us about this
little affair. Napoleon steps aboard of a little cockleshell, a mere
nothing of a skiff, called the _Fortune_, and in the twinkling of an
eye, and in the teeth of the English, who were blockading the place
with vessels of the line and cruisers and everything that carries
canvas, he lands in France for he always had the faculty of taking the
sea at a stride. Was that natural? Bah! as soon as he landed at
Frejus, it is as good as saying that he has set foot in Paris.
Everybody there worships him; but he calls the Government together.
"What have you done to my children, the soldiers?" he says to the
lawyers. "You are a set of good-for-nothings who make fools of other
people, and feather your own nests at the expense of France. It will
not do. I speak in the name of every one who is discontented."
Thereupon they want to put him off and to get rid of him; but not a
bit of it! He locks them up in the barracks where they used to argufy
and makes them jump out of the windows. Then he makes them follow in
his train, and they all become as mute as fishes and supple as tobacco
pouches. So he becomes Consul at a blow. He was not the man to doubt
the existence of the Supreme Being; he kept his word with Providence,
who had kept His promise in earnest; he sets up religion again, and
gives back the churches, and they ring the bells for God and Napoleon.
So every one is satisfied: _primo_ the priests with whom he allows no
one to meddle; _segondo_, the merchant folk who carry on their trades
without fear of the _rapiamus_ of the law that had pressed too heavily
on them; _tertio_, the nobles; for people had fallen into an unfortunate
habit of putting them to death, and he puts a stop to this.
But there were enemies to be cleared out of the way, and he was not
the one to go to sleep after mess; and his eyes, look you, traveled
all over the world as if it had been a man's face. The next thing he
did was to turn up in Italy; it was just as if he had put his head out
of the window and the sight of him was enough; they gulp down the
Austrians at Marengo like a whale swallowing gudgeons! _Haouf_! The
French Victories blew their trumpets so loud that the whole world
could hear the noise, and there was an end of it.
"We will not keep on at this game any longer!" say the Germans.
"That is enough of this sort of thing," say the others.
Here is the upshot. Europe shows the white feather, England knuckles
under, general peace all round, and kings and peoples pretending to
embrace each other. While then and there the Emperor hits on the idea
of the Legion of Honor. There's a fine thing if you like!
He spoke to the whole army at Boulogne. "In France," so he said,
"every man is brave. So the civilian who does gloriously shall be the
soldier's sister, the soldier shall be his brother, and both shall
stand together beneath the flag of honor."
By the time that the rest of us who were away down there in Egypt had
come back again, everything was changed. We had seen him last as a
general, and in no time we find that he is Emperor! And when this was
settled (and it may safely be said that every one was satisfied) there
was a holy ceremony such as was never seen under the canopy of heaven.
Faith, France gave herself to him, like a handsome girl to a lancer,
and the Pope and all his cardinals in robes of red and gold come
across the Alps on purpose to anoint him before the army and the
people, who clap their hands.
There is one thing that it would be very wrong to keep back from you.
While he was in Egypt, in the desert not far away from Syria, _the Red
Man_ had appeared to him on the mountain of Moses, in order to say,
"Everything is going on well." Then again, on the eve of victory at
Marengo, the Red Man springs to his feet in front of the Emperor for
the second time, and says to him:
"You shall see the world at your feet; you shall be Emperor of the
French, King of Italy, master of Holland, ruler of Spain, Portugal,
and the Illyrian Provinces, protector of Germany, saviour of Poland,
first eagle of the Legion of Honor and all the rest of it."
That Red Man, look you, was a notion of his own, who ran on errands
and carried messages, so many people say, between him and his star. I
myself have never believed that; but the Red Man is, undoubtedly, a
fact. Napoleon himself spoke of the Red Man who lived up in the roof
of the Tuileries, and who used to come to him, he said, in moments of
trouble and difficulty. So on the night after his coronation Napoleon
saw him for the third time, and they talked over a lot of things
together.
Then the Emperor goes straight to Milan to have himself crowned King
of Italy, and then came the real triumph of the soldier. For every one
who could write became an officer forthwith, and pensions and gifts of
duchies poured down in showers. There were fortunes for the staff that
never cost France a penny, and the Legion of Honor was as good as an
annuity for the rank and file; I still draw my pension on the strength
of it. In short, here were armies provided for in a way that had never
been seen before! But the Emperor, who knew that he was to be Emperor
over everybody, and not only over the army, bethinks himself of the
bourgeois, and sets them to build fairy monuments in places that had
been as bare as the back of my hand till then. Suppose, now, that you
are coming out of Spain and on the way to Berlin; well, you would see
triumphal arches, and in the sculpture upon them the common soldiers
are done every bit as beautifully as the generals!
In two or three years Napoleon fills his cellars with gold, makes
bridges, palaces, roads, scholars, festivals, laws, fleets, and
harbors; he spends millions on millions, ever so much, and ever so
much more to it, so that I have heard it said that he could have paved
the whole of France with five-franc pieces if the fancy had taken him;
and all this without putting any taxes on you people here. So when he
was comfortably seated on his throne, and so thoroughly the master of
the situation, that all Europe was waiting for leave to do anything
for him that he might happen to want; as he had four brothers and
three sisters, he said to us, just as it might be by way of
conversation, in the order of the day:
"Children, is it fitting that your Emperor's relations should beg
their bread? No; I want them all to be luminaries, like me in fact!
Therefore, it is urgently necessary to conquer a kingdom for each one
of them, so that the French nation may be masters everywhere, so that
the Guard may make the whole earth tremble, and France may spit
wherever she likes, and every nation shall say to her, as it is
written on my coins, 'God protects you.'"
"All right!" answers the army, "we will fish up kingdoms for you
with the bayonet."
Ah! there was no backing out of it, look you! If he had taken it into
his head to conquer the moon, we should have had to put everything in
train, pack our knapsacks, and scramble up; luckily, he had no wish
for that excursion. The kings who were used to the comforts of a
throne, of course, objected to be lugged off, so we had marching
orders. We march, we get there, and the earth begins to shake to its
centre again. What times they were for wearing out men and shoe-leather!
And the hard knocks that they gave us! Only Frenchmen could have stood
it. But you are not ignorant that a Frenchman is a born philosopher;
he knows that he must die a little sooner or a litter later. So we used
to die without a word, because we had the pleasure of watching the
Emperor do _this_ on the maps.
[Here the soldier swung quickly round on one foot, so as to trace a
circle on the barn floor with the other.]
"There, that shall be a kingdom," he used to say, and it was a
kingdom. What fine times they were! Colonels became generals whilst
you were looking at them, generals became marshals of France, and
marshals became kings. There is one of them still left on his feet to
keep Europe in mind of those days, Gascon though he may be, and a
traitor to France that he might keep his crown; and he did not blush
for his shame, for, after all, a crown, look you, is made of gold. The
very sappers and miners who knew how to read became great nobles in
the same way. And I who am telling you all this have seen in Paris
eleven kings and a crowd of princes all round about Napoleon, like
rays about the sun! Keep this well in your minds, that as every
soldier stood a chance of having a throne of his own (provided he
showed himself worthy of it), a corporal of the Guard was by way of
being a sight to see, and they gaped at him as he went by; for every
one came by his share after a victory, it was made perfectly clear in
the bulletin. And what battles they were! Austerlitz, where the army
was manoeuvred as if it had been a review; Eylau, where the Russians
were drowned in a lake, just as if Napoleon had breathed on them and
blown them in; Wagram, where the fighting was kept up for three whole
days without flinching. In short, there were as many battles as there
are saints in the calendar.
Then it was made clear beyond a doubt that Napoleon bore the Sword of
God in his scabbard. He had a regard for the soldier. He took the
soldier for his child. He was anxious that you should have shoes,
shirts, greatcoats, bread, and cartridges; but he kept up his majesty,
too, for reigning was his own particular occupation. But, all the
same, a sergeant, or even a common soldier, could go up to him and
call him "Emperor," just as you might say "My good friend" to me at
times. And he would give an answer to anything you put before him. He
used to sleep on the snow just like the rest of us--in short, he
looked almost like an ordinary man; but I who am telling you all these
things have seen him myself with the grape-shot whizzing about his
ears, no more put out by it than you are at this moment; never moving
a limb, watching through his field-glass, always looking after his
business; so we stood our ground likewise, as cool and calm as John
the Baptist. I do not know how he did it; but whenever he spoke, a
something in his words made our hearts burn within us; and just to let
him see that we were his children, and that it was not in us to shirk
or flinch, we used to walk just as usual right up to the sluts of
cannon that were belching smoke and vomiting battalions of balls, and
never a man would so much as say, "Look out!" It was a something that
made dying men raise their heads to salute him and cry, "Long live the
Emperor!"
Was that natural? Would you have done this for a mere man?
Thereupon, having fitted up all his family, and things having so
turned out that the Empress Josephine (a good woman for all that) had
no children, he was obliged to part company with her, although he
loved her not a little. But he must have children, for reasons of
State. All the crowned heads of Europe, when they heard of his
difficulty, squabbled among themselves as to who should find him a
wife. He married an Austrian princess, so they say, who was the
daughter of the Caesars, a man of antiquity whom everybody talks
about, not only in our country, where it is said that most things were
his doing, but also all over Europe. And so certain sure is that, that
I who am talking to you have been myself across the Danube, where I
saw the ruins of a bridge built by that man; and it appeared that he
was some connection of Napoleon's at Rome, for the Emperor claimed
succession there for his son.