Alexandre Dumas - The Last Cavalier - Being the Adventures of Count Sainte-Hermine in the Age of Napoleon

Those fateful words were spoken at about four in the afternoon on the 30th Pluviose in the Revolutionary year VIII (February 19, 1800).

This narration begins exactly one year to the day after the First Consul’s installation. It follows our book The Whites and the Blues , which ended, as we recall, with Pichegru fleeing from Sinnamary, and our novel The Companions of Jehu , which ended with the execution of Ribier, Jahiat, Valensolles, and Sainte-Hermine.

As for General Bonaparte, who was not yet general at that time, we left him just after he had returned from Egypt and landed back on French soil. Since the 24th Vendémiaire in the year VII he had accomplished a great deal.

First of all, he had managed and won the 18th Brumaire, though the case is still being appealed before posterity.

Then, like Hannibal and Charlemagne, he crossed the Alps.

Later, with the help of Desaix and Kellermann, he won the battle of Marengo, after first losing it.

Then, in Lunéville, he arranged peace.

Finally, on the same day that he had David’s bust of Brutus placed in the Tuileries, he re-established the use of “madame” as a form of address. Stubborn people were still free to use the word “citizen” if they wanted, but only yokels and louts still said “citizeness.”

And of course only the proper sort of people came to the Tuileries.

Now it’s the 30th Pluviose in the year IX (February 19, 1801), and we are in the First Consul Bonaparte’s palace in the Tuileries.

We shall now give the present generation, two thirds of a century later, some idea of his study where so many events were planned. With our pen we shall draw as best we can the portrait of that legendary figure who was considering not only how to change France but also how to turn the entire world upside down.

His study, a large room painted white with golden moldings, contains two tables. One, quite beautiful, is reserved for the First Consul; when seated at the table, he has his back to the fireplace and the window to his right. Also on the right is a small office where Duroc, his trusty aide-de-camp of four years, works. From that room they can communicate with Landoire, the dependable valet who enjoys the First Consul’s total confidence, and with the large apartments that open up onto the courtyard.

The First Consul’s chair is decorated with a lion’s head, and the right armrest is damaged because he has often dug into it with his penknife. When he is sitting at his table, he can see in front of him a huge library packed with boxes from ceiling to floor.

Slightly to the right, beside the library, is the room’s second large door. It opens up directly to the ceremonial bedroom, from which one can move into the grand reception room. There, on the ceiling, Le Brun painted Louis XIV in full regalia, and there a second painter, certainly not as gifted as Le Brun, had the audacity to add a Revolutionary cockade to the great king’s wig. Bonaparte is in no rush to remove it because it allows him to say, when he points out the anomaly to visitors: “Those men from the Convention years were certainly idiots!”

Opposite the study’s only window, which allows light into this quite sizable room and looks out over the garden, stands a large wardrobe that’s attached to the consular office. It is none other than Marie de Médicis’s oratory, and it leads to a small stairway that descends to Madame Bonaparte’s bedroom below.

Just like Marie-Antoinette, whom she resembles in more ways than one, Josephine hates the state apartments. Consequently, she has arranged her own little safe haven in the Tuileries, as had Marie-Antoinette at Versailles.

Almost always, at least at the time we are speaking of, the First Consul would enter his office in the morning through that wardrobe. We say “almost always,” because after they moved to the Tuileries the First Consul also had a bedroom separate from Josephine’s. He slept there if he came home too late at night, so as not to disturb his wife, or if some subject of discord—and such moments, though not yet frequent, were beginning to occur from time to time—had precipitated an argument that left them for a time not on speaking terms.

The second table is nondescript. Placed near the window, it affords the secretary a view of thick chestnut tree foliage, but in order to see whoever may be walking in the garden he has to stand up. When he is seated, his back is turned just slightly to the First Consul, so the secretary has to turn his head only a bit to see him. As Duroc is rarely in his office, that is where the secretary often receives visitors.

Bourrienne is that secretary.

The most skillful artists competed with each other to paint or sculpt Bonaparte’s, and later Napoleon’s, features. But the men who lived most closely with him, although they could recognize in such statues or portraits the extraordinary man’s essence, say that no single image of the First Consul or the Emperor exists that is a perfect likeness.

When he was First Consul, they managed to paint or sculpt his prominent cranium, his magnificent brow, the hair that he plastered down over his temples and let fall to his shoulders, his tanned face, long and thin, with its meditative physiognomy.

As Emperor, in their depictions, his head resembles an antique medallion and his pale, unhealthy skin marks a man who will die young. They could draw his hair as black as ebony, to show off his dark complexion to full effect, but neither the chisel nor the brush could render the dancing flames in his eyes or capture the somber cast of his features when he was in deep thought.

With the speed of lightning the expression in his eyes obeyed his will. In anger, nobody looked more fearsome; in kindness, no one’s gaze was more caressing. Indeed, for each thought that traversed his soul he had a different expression.

He was short of stature, scarcely five feet three inches tall, and yet Kléber, who stood a head taller than he, once said to him as he placed his hand on his shoulder, “General, you are as big as the world!” And at that moment he did seem truly a head taller than Kléber.

He had lovely hands. He was proud of his hands and cared for them as a woman might have done. In conversation, he would frequently glance at them with admiration. Only on his left hand would he wear a glove; he kept his right hand bare, ostensibly so it would be ready should he want to reach out to someone he might choose to so honor, but in reality it was so he could admire his hand and shine his nails with a cambric handkerchief. Monsieur de Turenne, part of whose job it was to help the Emperor dress, came to the point where he would order gloves only for his left hand, thus saving six thousand francs a year.

He could not stand inactivity. Even in his private apartments he would constantly pace up and down, all the while leaning slightly forward, as if the weight of every thought in his head was forcing his neck to bend, and holding his hands clasped behind his back. His right shoulder would frequently jerk, and at the same time the muscles in his mouth would tighten. These ticks, these habits of mind and body, some people mistook for convulsive movements from which they deduced that Bonaparte must be subject to epileptic attacks.

He was passionate about bathing. Sometimes he would stay in his bath for two or three hours while the secretary or an aide read him the newspapers or a pamphlet the police had brought to his notice. Once he was in his bath, he would leave the hot faucet open, with no concern if the bath overflowed. Often, when Bourrienne, soaked with steam, could bear it no longer, he would ask if he could open the window or leave the room. In general, his request was granted.

Bonaparte truly loved to sleep. When his secretary woke him at seven, he would frequently complain, saying: “Oh, just let me sleep a little longer.” “Don’t come into my bedroom at night,” he would say. “Never wake me up for good news, for there’s no hurry to hear good news. But if ever there is bad news, wake me up immediately, for then there’s not a moment to be lost.”