On the tribune of the Convention stands Buonaparte with his officers, hailed by the acclamations of the assembly, to whom the youthful saviour is being presented. He scarcely notices the applause, for such triumphs of the moment seem of little value to him. Coldly surveying the hall, he thinks: “So you are the leaders of the nation. You trembled with fear when you heard the thunder of the guns! You shall not forget how to tremble! I have become your protector. I shall go on protecting you until you have become my humble servants.”
As a matter of course, he is appointed to the command of the Army of the Interior. He now has a great following: cashiered officers, who hope to climb in the footsteps of the cashiered general; officials who have dreaded the reaction; all who feel that they have been rescued. But the crowd must be learning to hate him; for, in that darkling hour, hundreds of unarmed citizens, idle spectators, women have perished. What is that to him? It is not his aim to be loved.
Now, when he suddenly has money and servants and carriages at his disposal, he wants nothing for himself, everything for his kin. His younger brothers are given good positions; his mother can once more live a life after her own heart, and gratify her taste for saving; Joseph has the offer of several posts; there are places for the most distant relatives. But the letters become rarer, and the very first of them sounds a new note: “I shall do everything I can to help you, shall spare no effort which can contribute to your happiness.” From brother, he has become protector, head of the family.
During these weeks, when he is tasting the joys of fulfilment, he becomes involved in the only passion of his life.
Désirée has missed her chance. Only a few weeks before, writing from the office of the general staff, he had implored Joseph to intervene on his behalf, to demand a prompt answer. “I am burning with desire to have a home of my own.” At the same time, in several of his letters, we find more frequent references to charming women, allusions which betray a happy prospect of success. He has come to know la femme de trente ans, in her power and her beauty. He has made advances to two such women, in quick succession: one of them a Corsican of noble birth, a friend of his mother’s; the other, a pretty cocotte, Chénier’s mistress. Both of them are considerably older than he, and neither of them favours his suit. But the atmosphere surrounding these practitioners of the art of love, the electric atmosphere of the new salon, has exercised its influence on him: “A kiss for the two ladies: for the first, on the lips; for the second, on the cheek.” Since he has hitherto known almost nothing of women, his lonely heart is susceptible.
Immediately after his appointment, the new generalissimo issues a decree against bearing arms. A search is made, and all weapons in civilian hands are confiscated. Now a boy of twelve, with engaging manners, turns up at the general’s office with a plea for the return of his dead father’s sword, which has been taken away from his mother. Napoleon concedes the point, and shortly afterwards the mother comes to thank him. What an elegant woman—wayward, gracious, captivating! Thirty or more; who can say? Not so much beautiful, as enthralling; slender; distinguished, but with a slightly foreign air; the dark skin of the Creole, for she was born in Martinique, though brought up in Paris; and during the days of the Terror she has learned to conquer by her charms.
When the general pays her a visit at the little house in an out-of-the-way suburb, his eyes, sharpened by his own experience of poverty, detect evidence of an endeavour to put a good face upon poor circumstances. This does not trouble him. An army officer, who now, at the age of twenty-seven, can for the first time dispose of means which enable him to live as he pleases, he prizes money, but he does not prize rich people. Just as in the life of affairs, men can only move him by their capacity, by what they can do; so women can only please him by their capacity—by their personal appearance, their nature, and what they can make of these.
Josephine makes a great deal, as she needs to do. From Martinique, her tropical home, she was able to save nothing when she lost her husband, Vicomte de Beauharnais. For years she was separated from him, but was reunited with him after her return to Paris from a prolonged visit to her native island. During the Terror, he was executed as a royalist; and she spent three terrible months in gaol, to be liberated after Robespierre’s fall on the very day when Buonaparte was imprisoned. Friends came to her assistance in her difficulties; but her position and that of her two lovely young children, Hortense and Eugene, was precarious.
In this genteel poverty, it is expedient for her to make the best use of her charms. In any case, she is a born coquette, and is urged towards amorous adventures by the spur of her own love of pleasure. At this time, she is Barras’ mistress, her handsome friend Tallien having taken up with a wealthy banker, handing over the man of might to Josephine. However, the two women hold Barras in joint control. The Committee of Public Safety supplies them with horses and carriages. But Beauharnais, being of gentle birth, knows how to give attractive dinner parties, and associates with members of both factions, although the counts and marquises who frequent her house leave their wives at home. She has become an adventuress of the revolution.
Well, what about Buonaparte himself? Any change in the political situation may cost him his position. What more is he, as yet, than an adventurer of the revolution? If Murat had failed to shark up those guns the other night, the general would have been shot. Life is insecure, both for him and for Josephine.
What can be easier than to befool this misanthropic and misogynistic man in whose dumb soul the schoolmaster at Brienne had long ago discovered the hidden volcano? For the first time in his life he is in the toils of a woman, an expert in love; he is consumed by his passion for the Creole beauty. To Josephine, it seems a stroke of luck, and in cold blood she decides on marriage.
“You have seen General Buonaparte at my house. He is to become a father to my orphaned children, a husband to my widowed self.... I admire the general’s courage, and I wonder how much he knows.... But, I must confess, I am alarmed at the energy which animates all his doings. In his questing glance there is something inexplicable, which intimidates even our Directors. What ought to please me most, the passionate ardour he displays, is the very thing which makes me hesitate. Now that I am past my first youth, can I hope that I shall be able to keep alive in him an affection so stormy that it borders on madness?”
This lady of refinement does not fully understand what threatens her, and yet in the depths of her soul she shudders at the foreboding that she is to become the play of elemental forces. For, if this man who covets all or nothing and cannot rest until he has all, this man who has never given himself up to any one person or any one thing because it has been his unceasing wish to gain every one and everything, if Napoleon now gives himself for the first and only time in his life, he will stake his whole being, and will fetter it to the personality of the woman whom he clasps in his arms.
“I am waiting for you; I am wholly filled with you; your picture and the intoxicating evening leave my senses no peace. Sweet, incomparable Josephine, what have you done to my heart? Are you angry with me? Do you look sad? Are you ill at ease?... But I find calm when I give myself up to my passion, that on your lips, at your heart, I may fan the flames which burn me. How plain it was to me last night that your picture can never replace the real you. At noon you will start; in three hours I shall see you; till then, mio dolce amor, a thousand kisses! But you must not give me kisses, for they burn my blood!”
He does not tell her his plans, and yet he tells her something more. “These Directors fancy that I need their protection. They will consider themselves happy, some day, to secure mine. I shall make my way with the sword.”—“What do you think,” writes Josephine, “of this faith in success? Can such self-confidence be based on anything else than immeasurable conceit? A brigadier general is to protect the heads of the government! I don’t know what to make of it; and yet, often enough, this ludicrous self-assurance makes me believe that anything is possible which the strange man wants to achieve.”
We feel as if we were standing in front of the iron door which guards a glowing human heart, and looking through the key-hole into the fiery furnace of a soul.
But this woman, whom he possesses, why does he take her to wife? That he may possess her for himself alone? His egotism is against it, and, besides, he would be deluding himself. To gain advantages? In respect of money, and in respect of influence with the powerful, she can offer him nothing that he does not already enjoy. Of course she might prove useful to him; he is certainly flattered that she is of noble birth; and beyond doubt he has taken into consideration the fact that if she, who had a place in the days of the old regime, becomes his wife, this will put an end to the whispers that he is “only a Corsican.” Yet it is as a Corsican, with the family feeling of an Italian (a feeling that has come down to him through the generations, and masters even him), that he desires marriage with a woman of birth. Finally, is it not obvious that this man who is so utterly self-centred must passionately long for a perpetuation of his own ego?
The one thing in the world which Napoleon cannot make without another’s aid is an heir, and this heir must be made out of good materials. He is no man of the people. He has come into being amid the struggles of old families, and beneath a coat-of-arms bearing two stars which he now wishes to fuse into one. If he has helped to break down the prejudices against the masses, he has been moved along this course by delight in the elemental energy of action, and never by humanist feelings. Why should he wish to mix his blood with that of the people? When he marries the woman who long ere this has granted him all, he does so because, in both branches of her ancestry, she is the offspring of a long line of noble forebears. It is her birth, in addition to her charms, which makes her a welcome figure in a drawing-room, despite her reputation and her position. Since the Thirteenth Vendémiaire, Barras, the most powerful of the Directors, has regarded Buonaparte as his main prop—and he wishes to bind the general to his service by handing over Josephine. In this realm of erotic freedoms, a man who should wish, of a sudden, to insist on points of honour would simply make himself ridiculous. There are no knights and ladies now, but only citizens and citizenesses, who pair and separate as they please.
Barras has long since decided that Napoleon shall command the Army of Italy; and when Josephine, womanlike, is unable to make up her mind, Barras gives her a definite pledge to this effect. There are good reasons, too, why he should send the dangerous man to the most difficult front. Napoleon’s great plan, the one which has procured him his position on the general staff, is now sent to Nice, and comes back with annotations by the commander-in-chief there. The man who has drafted the plan, says that worthy, must have been a lunatic. He had better come and try his own hand at the job. That is exactly what the Directory has been angling for. The writer of the criticism is recalled, and the “lunatic” is sent to take his place.
The position is assured; the prudent Josephine hesitates no longer. A legal friend has to certify that no birth certificate is now obtainable from the blockaded island in the West Indies, and that the authorities must therefore take the lady’s word for the statement that she is twenty-eight. Since this knocks five years off her age, the bridegroom is gallant enough to add a year to his own. Thus the marriage begins with a twofold falsification of dates. A marriage settlement arranging for the division of property is signed, although the vicomtesse owns nothing but debts, and the warrior declares that his only possessions are his clothes, his uniform.
In the wedding ring, the words “To Destiny!” are engraved.
Two days later, he leaves Paris. Eleven crazy love letters are sent to her from eleven halting places. In Nice he joins his army, and takes over a command which will lead him beyond the frontiers of Europe.
It is the season of the equinoctial gales. From a turret he looks across at the enemy coast, and thinks: “This is the place I have always coveted as a starting-point. Behind me lies Paris; and her bedchamber, hung with mirrors. That is happiness. It is mine. Over there, across the mountains, in that hostile land, is fame. The goal of my desire.”
As he turns away, he catches sight of a familiar line of mountains shimmering in the distant blue. No longer does this hold his attention.
It is his lost homeland. The island.