Leo Tolstoy - 3 books to know Napoleonic Wars

(Here the author would have liked to insert a page of dots. ‘That will not look pretty,’ says the publisher, ‘and for so frivolous a work not to look pretty means death.’

‘Politics,’ the author resumes, ‘are a stone attached to the neck of literature, which, in less than six months, drowns it. Politics in the middle of imaginative interests are like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert. The noise is deafening without being emphatic. It is not in harmony with the sound of any of the instruments. This mention of politics is going to give deadly offence to half my readers, and to bore the other half, who have already found far more interesting and emphatic politics in their morning paper.’

‘If your characters do not talk politics,’ the publisher retorts, ‘they are no longer Frenchmen of 1830, and your book ceases to hold a mirror, as you claim. . . . ’)

Julien’s report amounted to twenty-six pages; the following is a quite colourless extract; for I have been obliged, as usual, to suppress the absurdities, the frequency of which would have appeared tedious or highly improbable. (Compare the Gazette des Tribunaux. )

The man with the waistcoats and the fatherly air (he was a Bishop, perhaps), smiled often, and then his eyes, between their tremulous lids, assumed a strange brilliance and an expression less undecided than was his wont. This personage, who was invited to speak first, before the Duke (‘but what Duke?’ Julien asked himself), apparently to express opinions and to perform the functions of Attorney General, appeared to Julien to fall into the uncertainty and absence of definite conclusions with which those officers are often reproached. In the course of the discussion the Duke went so far as to rebuke him for this.

After several phrases of morality and indulgent philosophy, the man with the waistcoats said:

‘Noble England, guided by a great man, the immortal Pitt, spent forty thousand million francs in destroying the Revolution. If this assembly will permit me to express somewhat boldly a melancholy reflection, England does not sufficiently understand that with a man like Bonaparte, especially when one had had to oppose to him only a collection of good intentions, there was nothing decisive save personal measures . . . ’

‘Ah! Praise of assassination again!’ said the master of the house with an uneasy air.

‘Spare us your sentimental homilies,’ exclaimed the chairman angrily; his boar’s eye gleamed with a savage light. ‘Continue,’ he said to the man with the waistcoats. The chairman’s cheeks and brow turned purple.

‘Noble England,’ the speaker went on, ‘is crushed today, for every Englishman, before paying for his daily bread, is obliged to pay the interest on the forty thousand million francs which were employed against the Jacobins. She has no longer a Pitt . . . ’

‘She has the Duke of Wellington,’ said a military personage who assumed an air of great importance.

‘Silence, please, Gentlemen,’ cried the chairman; ‘if we continue to disagree, there will have been no use in our sending for M. Sorel.’

‘We know that Monsieur is full of ideas,’ said the Duke with an air of vexation and a glance at the interrupter, one of Napoleon’s Generals. Julien saw that this was an allusion to something personal and highly offensive. Everyone smiled; the turncoat General seemed beside himself with rage.

‘There is no longer a Pitt,’ the speaker went on, with the discouraged air of a man who despairs of making his hearers listen to reason. ‘Were there a fresh Pitt in England, one does not hoodwink a nation twice by the same means . . . ’

‘That is why a conquering General, a Bonaparte is impossible now in France,’ cried the military interrupter.

On this occasion, neither the chairman nor the Duke dared show annoyance, though Julien thought he could read in their eyes that they were tempted to do so. They lowered their eyes, and the Duke contented himself with a sigh loud enough to be audible to them all.

But the speaker had lost his temper.

‘You are in a hurry for me to conclude,’ he said with heat, entirely discarding that smiling politeness and measured speech which Julien had assumed to be the natural expression of his character: ‘you are in a hurry for me to conclude; you give me no credit for the efforts that I am making not to offend the ears of anyone present, however long they may be. Very well, Gentlemen, I shall be brief.

‘And I shall say to you in the plainest of words: England has not a halfpenny left for the service of the good cause. Were Pitt to return in person, with all his genius he would not succeed in hoodwinking the small landowners of England, for they know that the brief campaign of Waterloo cost them, by itself, one thousand million francs. Since you wish for plain speaking,’ the speaker added, growing more and more animated, ‘I shall say to you: Help yourselves, for England has not a guinea for your assistance, and if England does not pay, Austria, Russia, Prussia, which have only courage and no money, cannot support more than one campaign or two against France.

‘You may hope that the young soldiers collected by Jacobinism will be defeated in the first campaign, in the second perhaps; but in the third (though I pass for a revolutionary in your prejudiced eyes), in the third you will have the soldiers of 1794, who were no longer the recruited peasants of 1792.’

Here the interruption broke out in three or four places at once.

‘Sir,’ said the chairman to Julien, ‘go and make a fair copy in the next room of the first part of the report which you have taken down.’ Julien left the room with considerable regret. The speaker had referred to probabilities which formed the subject of his habitual meditations.

‘They are afraid of my laughing at them,’ he thought. When he was recalled, M. de La Mole was saying, with an earnestness, which, to Julien, who knew him, seemed highly amusing:

‘Yes, Gentlemen, it is above all of this unhappy race that one can say: “Shall it be a god, a table or a bowl?”

‘“It shall be a god!” cries the poet. It is to you, Gentlemen, that this saying, so noble and so profound, seems to apply. Act for yourselves, and our noble France will reappear more or less as our ancestors made her and as our own eyes beheld her before the death of Louis XVI.

‘England, her noble Lords at least, curses as heartily as we ignoble Jacobinism: without English gold, Austria, Russia, Prussia cannot fight more than two or three battles. Will that suffice to bring about a glorious occupation, like that which M. de Richelieu squandered so stupidly in 1817? I do not think so.’

At this point an interruption occurred, but it was silenced by a general murmur. It arose once more from the former Imperial General, who desired the Blue Riband, and was anxious to appear among the compilers of the secret note.

‘I do not think so,’ M. de La Mole resumed after the disturbance. He dwelt upon the word ‘I’ with an insolence which charmed Julien. ‘That is well played,’ he said to himself as he made his pen fly almost as fast as the Marquis’s utterance. With a well-placed word, M. de La Mole annihilated the twenty campaigns of the turncoat.

‘It is not to foreigners alone,’ the Marquis continued in the most measured tone, ‘that we can remain indebted for a fresh military occupation. That youthful band who contribute incendiary articles to the Globe will provide you with three or four thousand young captains, among whom may be found a Kleber, a Hoche, a Jourdan, a Pichegru, but less well-intentioned.’

‘We did wrong in not crowning him with glory,’ said the chairman, ‘we ought to have made him immortal.’

‘There must, in short, be two parties in France,’ went on M. de La Mole, ‘but two parties, not in name only, two parties clearly defined, sharply divided. Let us be certain whom we have to crush. On one side the journalists, the electors, public opinion; in a word, youth and all those who admire it. While it is dazed by the sound of its own idle words, we, we have the certain advantage of handling the budget.’