Jean d'Ormesson: The Conversation

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 condemned 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.