The Conversation Read online

  BONAPARTE

  In thirty of the country’s departments, the Chouannerie was little more than a pretext for thievery. The right bank of the Garonne, Provence, the Languedoc, and the entire Rhone Valley was in the hands of highwaymen. Coaches were attacked, couriers robbed, homes looted. Pillagers were putting peasants’ feet on red-hot grills to make them tell them where their money was stashed.

  CAMBACÉRÈS

  I know several merchants, even two representatives on official business, who bought passports from these bands just to ensure safe passage from Paris to Marseille or to Aix-en Provence. No one went anywhere without an armed escort.

  BONAPARTE

  The roads were impassable, public buildings were in shambles. It took Marseilles a full year to do the business it used to do in six months, and its old port was a wreck. In Lyon, there were fifteen-hundred boats instead of the normal eight thousand. In Paris, workshops hired a fraction as many workers as in 1789. It is indisputable that because of me, the present is better than the past. The future is what preoccupies me now.

  CAMBACÉRÈS

  You have secured the future because you have done away with the past.

  BONAPARTE

  Do not deceive yourself. I am at one with all of France’s past, from Clovis to this National Convention—of which you were also a part, my dear Cambacérès—and several times have I saved it from foreign threat. I have fought against, and beaten, violence, hatred, excesses, divisions, factions. No more factions. I want them gone.

  CAMBACÉRÈS

  You have planted the colors, starting the day after Eighteen Brumaire and right up to your arrival here in the Tuileries. You have put your wife in Marie-Antoinette’s bedroom, and you have taken as your bedroom that of Louis the Sixteenth. Yet I understand that you find this a somewhat sad place.

  BONAPARTE

  Grandeur is always sad.

  CAMBACÉRÈS

  You found its walls covered in revolutionary graffiti and festooned in decorations dominated by the red cap. You called it “filth” and ordered that it be removed.

  BONAPARTE

  Enough of the red heel and the red cap! Enough of Jacobins and the Royalists. I recognize no more parties and I see in France only the French. I have had enough of people taking sides. I am on the side of the French people, and I leave nothing to chance—neither the great issues nor the smallest details. I have taken the place of the Bourbons and now embody a sovereign people. I restore order to things, but I do not restore them for others. I restore them for myself. You remember, Cambacérès, the Constitution that Sieyès wanted to fob off on us after Eighteen Brumaire?

  CAMBACÉRÈS

  Very clearly. At the top of the hierarchy would be the Grand Elector, a king without royal command, installed in Versailles, who would choose two consuls, one to manage exterior matters—the army, the navy, the colonies, war. The other would manage interior matters, meaning the police, justice, finance. Below them were the ministers, the procurators of public service. At their side was a College of Conservators, who would have designated a tribunal, charged with debating matters of law, as well as a legislative body that would have voted upon them.

  BONAPARTE

  Perhaps you also remember that you were in favor of all that metaphysical nonsense.

  CAMBACÉRÈS

  In favor? Permit me to say that that’s simplifying it a little. I didn’t hesitate to abandon the spirit of the assembly for the spirit of government and choose you over that metaphysical nonsense, as you put it.

  BONAPARTE

  As for me, I would have rather have been up to my knees in blood than see all that become reality. When Sieyès proposed that I move into Versailles and assume the ridiculous title of Grand Elector, which translated as “weak-kneed king,” I replied, “How is it, Citizen Sieyès, that you believe that a man of honor would agree to be a pig in the manure inside Versailles?”

  CAMBACÉRÈS

  That shook everyone up. You rid yourself of Sieyès and of Barras, who seemed all-powerful, and you recruited me, who gave myself to you.

  BONAPARTE

  I like you, Cambacérès. That’s the reason you are Second Consul. You are wise, pragmatic, and prudent. Perhaps too pragmatic and too prudent. Above all you are an excellent administrator. Military men are excellent at slashing and burning. Administrators determine the success of an enterprise.

  CAMBACÉRÈS

  I owe you everything. I serve you scrupulously and loyally.

  BONAPARTE

  You have never disappointed me. So now I will match your loyalty and speak to you with an open heart. In addition to your appetite for food, you have another small fault that would cost you more with someone other than me.

  CAMBACÉRÈS

  Another small fault?

  BONAPARTE

  Don’t play dumb, Cambacérès. Not only are you not married . . .

  CAMBACÉRÈS

  You would wish that I were?

  BONAPARTE

  If it meant being marrying some silly goose like that imbecile Talleyrand has done, assuredly not. But let us look straight at the matter: you don’t like women. The other day when you arrived late to the Counsel of State and kept me waiting, you offered the excuse that a woman had made you late. I put you on notice. “Next time, you will tell this woman to take her cane and hat and be gone.”

  CAMBACÉRÈS

  Citizen First Consul, no scandal has ever besmirched my private life, and public order was never disturbed on my account. I have never compromised my dignity and most certainly not yours.

  BONAPARTE

  That is not important. You have been cautious. Your prudence has nonetheless not prevented Talleyrand from grouping all of us consuls in a formula which he amuses Paris by calling, “Hic, Haec, Hoc.”

  CAMBACÉRÈS

  Monsieur de Talleyrand is perhaps recalling his Church Latin.

  BONAPARTE

  Hic is the masculine demonstrative and has a certain emphasis. That’s me. Haec, the feminine demonstrative, is vaguely pejorative in tone. That’s you. Hoc, the neutral demonstrative, which is completely insulting, is poor Lebrun. I say this in the spirit of friendship, Cambacérès. Don’t be too Haec.

  CAMBACÉRÈS

  General, I will speak with the same frankness with which you are showing me. When I was young I visited the girls just as all the boys did, but I took no great pleasure there and never stayed for long. As soon as I was finished, I said, “Adieu, messieurs!” and left.

  BONAPARTE

  My dear friend, I have as much reason to be cautious about women as you do, and neither Madame de Staël nor Madame Récamier will change my mind about them. But I wish for you to avoid being called “Tante Turlurette” by street urchins.

  CAMBACÉRÈS

  “Tante Turlurette!” Is that what you think?

  BONAPARTE

  Well, what do you expect? You run the risk. It’s all the more vexing because as regards the territories, the Concordat, the Code civil, and the Légion d’honneur, you have been extremely useful to me.

  CAMBACÉRÈS

  If I have served you well, I have fulfilled my destiny.

  BONAPARTE

  Almost nothing was left after twenty years of mediocrity and ten years of disorder. I want to create great things, things that will endure. I dreamed of a republican knighthood, to recognize exactly the kind of distinction treated disdainfully by the monarchy and dragged through the mud by the Jacobins. That is why I instituted the Légion d’honneur. I wanted a body of laws worthy of Moses, of Solomon, and of Justinian. That is why I imposed the Civil Code, drafted, thanks to you, in a style capable of making poets and novelists pale with envy.

  CAMBACÉRÈS

  How impatient you were during those interminable debates—on marriage, divorce, succession, natural children, capital punishment. You always wanted to move more quickly. I was always keen for your sake to find the simplest, most brief, and clearest formulation: “All those con
demned to death will have their head removed . . .”

  BONAPARTE

  Setting up the Concordat was your finest moment. The role of the Church is a matter of great national importance. You know well, Cambacérès, that for me the religion is not about the mystery of incarnation but a means to social order. No society can function without morality, and there is no morality without religion. Only religion can give the state strong and lasting support. A society without religion is like a ship without a compass. I was a Mohamedan in Egypt and I would be a Buddhist in India. I am a Catholic here because most here are Catholics. I place no faith in metaphysical nonsense, and thumb my nose at holy men, dervishes, and fakirs. Aside from Talleyrand, who is different and who keeps the future in mind, I have never used bishops in my governments. Priests are as chatty as women: no state secret is safe under their robes. Yet religion is still as necessary to the state as are police and the army. Bells and the cannons are the two great voices of men, competing with thunder, that great voice of nature. I made the cannons speak in Egypt, and in Italy I mourned the silence of the bells in our campaigns. Hence I signed the Concordat. I reopened the churches.

  CAMBACÉRÈS

  What caused me most concern was that great ceremonial cross which the pope’s nuncio, Cardinal Caprara, never parts with. A cardinal and his cross in the streets of Paris in Year IX of the Republic! We had to hide one from the other at the back of a coach.

  BONAPARTE

  My dear Cambacérès, I could say of you what Voltaire and Robespierre said of the Supreme Being: if you didn’t exist it would be necessary to invent you. The Te Deum at Notre Dame on Easter Sunday did not come out of nowhere. The Jacobins were furious. Even the Army balked.

  CAMBACÉRÈS

  Indeed they did. General Delmas told me, “This was a pretty procession of monks. All it lacked was the million men who killed each other to destroy what you are bringing back.”

  BONAPARTE

  Notre Dame had been closed for ten years. My republican colonels, my Jacobin captains, my twenty-year-old lieutenants. None of them had ever been to a mass before. Only Talleyrand, the Bishop of Autun returned by Pious VII to civil life, and Fouché, the former seminary student and regicide who joined the police, could recall what it was all about. You should have seen the two of them. They didn’t bat an eyelash. It is true that Talleyrand’s expression is so impassive that it is impossible to read. If you kicked him in the ass, his face would show nothing.

  CAMBACÉRÈS

  You have turned the Catholics of France into republicans.

  BONAPARTE

  I also defended the rights of Protestants and of Jews. Most of all I gave back to the French a Church designed to serve me. I appointed bishops who would obey me and feel honored to dine with the Prefect. Once priests were religious ministers. They became government ministers. The people followed: Sunday once a week is better than a day off every ten.

  CAMBACÉRÈS

  You were assisted in this by Chateaubriand and his Genius of Christianity, which arrived on the scene at just the right moment—on the eve of that Te Deum in Notre Dame.

  BONAPARTE

  I repaid Chateaubriand by sending him to Rome with my Uncle Fesch. According to Fontanes, his friend who sleeps with my sister Élisa while I sleep with France, they didn’t get along at all. Chateaubriand has talent but he is impossible.

  CAMBACÉRÈS

  He’s royalist who supports you. He dedicated Genius of Christianity to you.

  BONAPARTE

  Successful men of letters think themselves the center of the world. My difficulty with Monsieur de Chateaubriand is not whether to buy him but whether to pay him what he believes he’s worth. He’s offered himself to me twenty times, but always in such a way that would make me bend to his imagination, which leads to falseness, rather than the other way around. I have always ended up refusing his services, meaning to serve him. I’m sorry for this. With Talleyrand, Chateaubriand has the strongest head of our times. I’m sorry for his sake that he does not have a greater sense of his own interests.

  CAMBACÉRÈS

  There is also Madame de Staël, who is intelligent, enjoys creating trouble, and dangerous. And perhaps a little too virile. Talleyrand argues that he and Chateaubriand both figure in her novel, Delphine, disguised as women. There is also Benjamin Constant, a woman’s man and Madame de Staël’s unfaithful lover. In politics as in love, one never knows which way he will lean.

  BONAPARTE

  Don’t speak to me of those two! They are hollow, and cast ill upon the entire human species. I admire Corneille, and they are far from his sort. Madame de Staël in particular, daughter of the incompetent Necker, is a bird of bad omen. She always was a sign of trouble. I do not intend to let her stay in France.

  CAMBACÉRÈS

  There are those who oppose you, Citizen First Consul, and not all of them are writers. The ones to fear are not the royalists or the Jacobins. They are all around you, in the Army, and perhaps in your own family, which is weaving its own dark designs. The day you created the Légion d’honneur, General Moreau awarded an honorary casserole to his cook. General Bernadotte works hard—but not for your interests. And your brother Lucien . . .

  BONAPARTE

  I know that Lucien conspires. Why do you think that I made him ambassador to Spain?

  CAMBACÉRÈS

  To remove him as Minister of the Interior—and to get him far from Paris. That was well done.

  BONAPARTE

  Lucien is ambitious and thinks himself self-made. He badly wants to get involved in politics. He plays the republican and pretends to a patriotism that he mocks in private. Joseph, my older brother, has very little ambition, and also not much spirit. Lucien, on the other hand, could easily see himself sharing power with Moreau and Carnot, three equal consuls each taking their turn as president. A revolving presidency! Can you imagine the stupidity of that? Lucien helped me on Eighteen Brumaire, but he has never stopped conspiring against me, and with a clumsiness that does both of us harm. Yet he keeps doing it. And now he wants to get married.

  CAMBACÉRÈS

  I thought that he already was married.

  BONAPARTE

  He was. He married the daughter of a Provence innkeeper. She died, which was a good thing. Then he pursued Juliette Récamier, who wanted nothing to do with him and sent her ridiculous letters with openings like, “Romeo writes you, his Juliet . . .”

  CAMBACÉRÈS

  This came to you through Fouché, I imagine.

  BONAPARTE

  Of course Fouché, thanks to whom, even though he is no longer a minister—though I may reappoint him—I have a functioning police force. Then I learned from Pauline that Lucien had become infatuated with a widow, a kind of stockbroker: Madame Jouberthon. I opposed this relationship, but to no effect. Do you know what he said to me?

  CAMBACÉRÈS

  I’m afraid I don’t. I’m not as close to Fouché as you are.

  BONAPARTE

  He said, “At least mine is pretty.”

  CAMBACÉRÈS

  That is not only vulgar but inaccurate. In any case, I hope he won’t marry her. Let him make her a kept woman. She seems accustomed to that and it’s his fantasy.

  BONAPARTE

  Too late. He married her. Lucien is as much an idiot in his private life as in his public life. Oh, my dear colleague, the French people think that I am preoccupied only with great thoughts about power and war, and instead I spend my time worrying about matters of the heart.

  CAMBACÉRÈS

  I find that hard to believe.

  BONAPARTE

  No, it’s quite true. My youngest brother, Jérôme, is nineteen. While he was on a trip to the United States, he married an American girl.

  CAMBACÉRÈS

  An American?

  BONAPARTE

  Yes, an American! The daughter of a merchant from the city of Baltimore by the name of Elizabeth Patterson. So you see, now I am the brother-in-law o
f Madame Jouberton and Elizabeth Patterson.

  CAMBACÉRÈS

  You are the Victor of Rivoli and Marengo, you have conquered Venice and Egypt, you have forced the English to accept a peace treaty, and you are First Consul and President of the Italian Republic.

  BONAPARTE

  I also have brothers and sisters, and they strive to poison my life and dishonor what I have taken such pains to nurture. Only my dear and beautiful Pauline has given me some satisfaction.

  CAMBACÉRÈS

  At least that’s something.

  BONAPARTE

  As you say. After the death of poor Leclerc, who was so brutally taken from her before being carried off by yellow fever in Santo Domingo, she has found consolation, first with that thug Sarlovèze, who hated me and whom I got rid of, and then with Eugène de Beauharnais, the son of my Joséphine. Happily, she just married Prince Camille Aldobrandini Borghèse, grand-nephew of two popes, who is both more capable and wealthy than the miserable Bacciochi, husband of my sister Élisa.

  CAMBACÉRÈS

  My congratulations, Citizen First Consul.

  BONAPARTE

  Élisa has gone nearly mad with rage and jealousy over it. Her relationship with that journalist Fontanes is not enough to bring her peace. Oh, Cambacérès! You see how it is with family. Mine has made disgraceful marriages and yet dreams of wealth and glory. It owes everything to me and yet wants everything from me—power, money, titles, honors. It makes me wonder sometimes whether we are not all sharing in the legacy of my dead father. Everything they have comes from me and I am exhausting myself counteracting their idiocies and grossness.

  CAMBACÉRÈS

  You can always count upon your friends—upon me, who thinks only of your greatness. And upon Joséphine.