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

Madame de Sourdis bowed her head. It was clear that she felt great disappointment. She had dreamed of a high rank in the army for her son-in-law; and for her daughter, a high position at the court.

“Madame,” said Hector, “please don’t think that I am among those people who praise the old regime to the detriment of the current one, or that I am blind to the First Consul’s great qualities. I saw him the other day for the first time at Madame de Permon’s ball, and rather than feeling repulsed, I was attracted to him. I admire his campaign of ’96 and ’97 as a masterpiece of modern strategy and an exemplar of his military genius. I am less enthusiastic, I’ll admit, about his Egyptian campaign, which could have no happy outcome and was no more than a mask to cover his immense thirst for fame: Bonaparte fought and won where Marius and Pompey had also fought and won. By that, he hoped to awaken and amend ancient echoes that for centuries had repeated no names but those of Alexander and Caesar. How tempting. But it was an expensive fantasy that cost our country so much money and so many men! As for the most recent campaign, at Marengo, that was a campaign only for personal glory, undertaken to give a firm footing to the legitimacy of the 18th Brumaire and to force foreign governments to recognize the new French government. But, as everyone knows, Bonaparte was not a military genius. He was lucky, like a gambler who is about to lose and then draws two trump cards. And what trump cards they were! Kellermann and Desaix! The 18th Brumaire was no more than a conspiracy whose lucky success in the end barely justifies its author’s means. What if it had failed? What if his attempt to overthrow the established government had been ruled a rebellion, a crime of treason? Then in the Bonaparte family at least three heads would have rolled. Chance served him well when he returned from Alexandria, fortune was on his side at Marengo, and his boldness saved him in Saint-Cloud. But a temperate man, a man not blinded by passion, would never mistake three lightning flashes, however bright they might be, for the dawn of a great day. If I were completely free of my background, if my family had not stood firmly in the Royalist camp, I would have no objection to linking my own fortune to Bonaparte’s, although I consider him an illustrious adventurer who once fought a war for France and two other times for himself. Now, to prove to you that I am not prejudiced against him, I promise that the first time he does something great for France I shall come over to his side. For to my great astonishment, and although I owe my most recent loss to him, I do admire him in spite of his faults and in spite of myself. That is the kind of influence that those of a superior nature exert upon those lesser beings around them, and I feel that influence.”

“I understand,” said Madame de Sourdis. “But will you at least permit one thing?”

“It is not for me to permit,” said Hector, “but rather for you to order.”

“Will you allow me to ask the First Consul and Madame Bonaparte for their assent to Claire’s marriage? Connected as I am to Madame Bonaparte, I can hardly do otherwise. It is simply a step that etiquette demands.”

“Yes, but on the condition that if they refuse, we will proceed anyway.”

“If they refuse, you will carry off my darling Claire and I shall come to forgive you wherever you have taken her. But rest assured, they will not refuse me.”

And with that assurance, permission was granted to Madame de Sourdis to seek the blessing of the First Consul and Madame Bonaparte on the marriage of Claire de Sourdis to Monsieur le Comte Hector de Sainte-Hermine.

THERE WAS ONE MAN whom Bonaparte hated, feared, and tolerated all at the same time. He is the man who appeared for a moment to talk to Mademoiselle de Fargas when she was setting her conditions for delivering up the Companions of Jehu.

Bonaparte, when he began pulling away from the influence of Fouché, was obeying that admirable instinct more typical of animals than of humans: to remove oneself from beasts that may prove to be harmful.

Joseph Fouché, Minister of the Police, was a creature both ugly and harmful. It is rare that what is ugly is good, and in Fouché’s case, his morality, or rather his immorality, was equal to his ugliness.

Bonaparte saw men as nothing but means or obstacles to him. For Bonaparte the general, Fouché, on the 18th Brumaire, had been a means. For Bonaparte the First Consul, Fouché could indeed become an obstacle. He who had conspired against the Directory in favor of the Consulate might as easily conspire now against the Consulate in favor of some other government. Fouché had become a man whom Bonaparte needed to bring down after having raised him up, and given the current political situation, bringing him down would be difficult. For Fouché was one of those men who, as they climb, cling to every rough edge, hold on to every farrow, make every mark and scar their own so they never want any point of support at any level once they have arrived.

Indeed, Fouché was attached to the Republic by his vote to have the king killed; to the Terror, by his bloody incursions into Lyon and Nevers; to the Thermidorians, by his role in bringing down Robespierre; to Bonaparte, by his participation in the 18th Brumaire; and to Josephine, through the terror that had been inspired by Joseph and Lucien, Fouché’s avowed enemies. He was attached to the Royalists by services he had rendered to individuals as Minister of the Police, after having attacked the class as a whole when he was proconsul. As director of public opinion, he had turned the office to his own uses, and his police, instead of serving the general populace, had become simply Fouché’s police, a force in service to the minister’s schemes. All over Paris, all over France, Fouché’s agents sang in praise of his abilities. Stories of his extraordinary skill abounded, the best indicator of that skill being his ability to make everyone believe the stories to be true.

Fouché had been Minister of the Police since the 18th Brumaire. No one, not even Bonaparte himself, could understand how the First Consul could have allowed Fouché to have such powerful influence over him. The situation bothered Bonaparte increasingly. Outside Fouché’s presence, when the minister’s magnetism no longer had any effect, in his every cell Bonaparte rebelled against Fouché’s sway. When the First Consul spoke of him, his words, cutting and spiteful, betrayed his anger. Yet when Fouché next appeared, the lion again lay down, calmed if not tamed.

One thing in particular bothered Bonaparte: Fouché never entered wholeheartedly into his grandiose plans, unlike his brothers Joseph and Lucien, who not only entered into them but helped to move them forward. One day, though, Bonaparte did have it out with Fouché.

“Be careful,” the Minister of the Police had said, “if you restore the royalty, you will have worked for the Bourbons, for sooner or later they will get back on the throne that you have reestablished. Nobody would dare to prophesy what combination of lucky events and of cataclysms we might have to live through before that happened, but we need nothing more than our own intelligence to judge how long you and your descendants would need to fear such a possibility. You are moving rapidly in the direction of the old regime, in form if not in content, so that occupation of the throne will soon be just a question not of government but of which family sits in it. If France must give up its hard-fought-for freedom and return to the good pleasure of the monarchy, why should it not prefer the former race of kings that gave us Henri IV and Louis XIV? You have given France nothing but the despotism of the sword!”