“What the German peoples ardently desire is that persons who are not of noble birth but are talented shall have equal rights to your consideration and to office, so that there may be an end, once and for all, to any kind of subordination, and to all intermediaries between the ruler and the lowest classes of the population. The advantages brought by the Code Napoléon, publicity of legal procedure, and trial by jury, will be characteristics of your monarchy. To lay my whole thought before you: for the consolidation of this monarchy, I look more to the effects just named than to the results of the greatest victories. Your people must have a liberty, an equality, and a prosperity hitherto unknown in Germany. This way of ruling will be a stronger barrier between you and Prussia than the Elbe, than fortresses, than the protection of France. What nation would ever wish to go back to Prussian rule when it had once experienced the advantages of a liberal government?”

In these sentences (which are written as a private lesson, and are not penned with an eye to public effect), the Emperor expounds to his youngest brother the great mission that is being entrusted to the latter when he takes charge of the new kingdom of Westphalia. Jerome’s task was to plant the fundamental ideas of the revolution on German soil, a pioneer work, this introduction of the first glimmer of self-government in a part of western Europe where hitherto the inhabitants had known only how to obey. In Holland and Italy, ideas of self-government were by no means new. But as far as concerned the princes of the Confederation of the Rhine, although, acting under orders, they could introduce the new legal codes, they lacked the traditions and the talents that might have made it possible to initiate such changes from within. We can now understand the historic mission of the youngest of the Bonapartes. He was to make a great experiment in democracy; he was to transform four million Germans from subjects into citizens. Had this impetus been successful, the whole nation might have been spared resubjugation to princely arrogance after the War of Liberation.

But the young man of twenty-three who, coming at the end of this long family, had been reared as a prince, regarded his kingship as a gallant adventure, in which money and vital energy could be squandered. Youth was like champagne, which bubbles when the cork is drawn. He forsook the arms of his Württemberg consort for those of innumerable mistresses; ran into debt, became involved in manifold scandals, and procreated children all over the place; amused himself more than his subjects; and, by this traditional deportment of one born in the purple, succeeded for decades to come in discrediting the fine notion of the choice of the fittest. There was something to be said for the German view that, if they must have a prince to ride across fields and men, they would like him to be one who had inherited the position. Jerome, however, laughed at the world’s mockery, and even laughed at his great brother’s exhortations.

Napoleon had a predilection for his youngest brother, the sort of weakness that fathers are apt to have for the latest born of their sons. The brio of the young man’s life was in keeping with his own tempo. Besides, Jerome was always amiable, took nothing amiss. For instance, on one occasion he asked Napoleon to make him commander-in-chief, and showed no offence at a refusal couched in the following terms: “Are you serious? After you have been through six campaigns, and after you have had a half a dozen horses shot under you, you can ask me again!”

When Jerome went to war, he took his whole court with him—not the queen, indeed, but all the prettiest of her ladies. He issued proclamations in the style of the Roi Soleil. But he was not mortified to receive the following imperial admonition:

“I have read an order of the day issued by you, in which you make yourself ridiculous. You are king, and the Emperor’s brother! Fine qualities in war! In war, a man must be a soldier before everything. When I am in camp, I need neither ministers nor luxury. You must camp with the advance guard, be in the saddle day and night, march with the advance guard, so that you may get all the news without delay. If you don’t like that, you had better stay at home in your palace! You make war like a satrap! God in heaven, you never learned that from me! I ride in front of the skirmishers, and do not allow even my minister for foreign affairs to follow me.... You make vast claims; you have a certain amount of talent and a few good qualities, but these are put quite in the shade by your follies. Furthermore, you are insufferably conceited, and know absolutely nothing of public affairs.”

The king sticks the letter into his jabot with a laugh. But the Emperor? Cannot he realise, while he talks to his brother like a father, that every one to whom he gives unmerited power endangers the very essence of power? That these golden crowns and the extemporised coats-of-arms he provides for them create very unstable kings and princes? That homunculus escapes from the phial and makes fun of his master? This perennial weakness where his relatives are concerned leads him, at times, to assume what is a very unusual role for him, that of the good-natured man; for, though he begins by issuing orders to his brothers, he very often gives way to them in the end. “My brother, inclosed you will find the constitution of your kingdom”—thus he begins a missive of instruction in matters of high politics, with a sentence that might have been taken out of a comic opera. When he is in a friendly humour, he will end a letter full of reproaches with a paternal smile: “Mon ami, I love you, but you are so frightfully young!”

Napoleon is no longer young. Inevitably, as his plans grow, there must be an increase in that harshness which, in him, is mainly the outcome of overwork. When, twelve years earlier, he had come down from the Alps as a conqueror and his fame had spread before him across the plain of Lombardy, his youth had endowed the novelty of this campaign with a sort of romantic innocence which carried his contemporaries off their feet. Now, when the mountain torrent has long since widened into a river, bearing on its broad bosom ships freighted with the treasures of the world, and when the river is drawing near to the ocean in which its waters will soon mingle with all the waters of the earth; now, the gravity of this labour of Atlas has stamped its imprint upon his features, has written its message in his heart. Rare have become the hours of tranquillity, few the moments of merriment and sportive humour; and the heroical cynicism of his mission moulds him before the eyes of the world into a statue of bronze.

True, he had sent for his Polish countess. She was installed in the very street where Josephine had first charmed him, and where, again and again, a quaint superstition led him to house his lady friends. Walewska is munificently provided for, and Napoleon’s physician visits her every day. But, though there is no secret about the matter, she leads a retired life, does not use the box at the opera he has reserved for her, and seldom sees him now that she has come to Paris. This is an interlude between one idyll and the next. He has made up his mind that the child she is to bear him will be a son; and the event may have still greater consequences to-day than it would have had yesterday.

For the first of his illegitimate children, the one of whose birth he had received tidings in Berlin (when he had been reassured to learn that there was no justification for the common belief that he was sterile), has been put out of court by the mother’s unwise importunity. Shortly after his return to Paris, she had called. He would not see her, sending a message to say that he received no one whom he had not summoned. He provided her with a house and an income, and would have nothing more to do with her. But he had the boy brought to him, and playfully teased the little chap. For a moment, he even thought of adopting him. All had to be done secretly. The invisible master, whom he called the “nature of things” and on rare occasions “fate,” forbade him the unconcealed enjoyment of this most natural of scenes in our human life, one in which Napoleon could not play his part until he was nearly forty. At length he had a son of his body, who might become his heir. Yet he, Emperor of the West, could not step forward and say: “This is my son!” Wishing to give the boy at least half his own name, he called him Léon.

But the mother had become completely estranged from him, and Napoleon soon ceased to have any serious thought of making the child his successor. Perhaps he thought that the boy came of a bad stock; maybe he had a foreboding that this half Napoleon would become a half criminal and an outright ne’er-do-well.

All the more vigorously does his advance in years urge him towards a new marriage. There are long conversations between Napoleon and Josephine, between reason and sorrow; and after them it is not Josephine alone in whom the servants note the traces of tears. “How terrible to die childless!” he says on one occasion. Nevertheless his fondness for his helpmate increases. We know how difficult he found it to break with any of his collaborators; and his temperamental conservatism makes him cling to this first companion of his rise. “If I were to divorce her,” he says to Talleyrand who advises him to take this step, “the witchery of my home would be gone. I should have to go to school again in order to understand the ways and fancies of a young wife. The empress adapts herself to me perfectly, and understands me so well. Besides, it would be very ungrateful to divorce a woman who has done so much for me.” Such are the motives, tender and reasonable, respectable and convenient—in a word, thoroughly middle class—which make the man cleave to his wife.

But the difficulties grow in number, and the need for a decisive step becomes more urgent. While he ponders the moral impression which his divorcing Josephine will make in France (where she inspires far more personal affection than he does), he, as his manner is, lays his plans deliberately, that, at last, he may make an advance which no one anticipates, and will enable him to fulfil two wishes at once. He arranges for an interview with a man whom he has long needed, and whom he may now need more than ever. His mother is always interceding with him on Lucien’s behalf; now, Napoleon, who is travelling in Italy, sends for Lucien.

The conversation between the brothers is the most interesting of all Napoleon’s recorded conversations, and has been reported by Lucien with fidelity and picturesqueness. Napoleon is there portrayed to the life.