Books: Troublemaker’s Troubles

No PEACE WITH NAPOLEON!—General de Caulaincourt—Morrow ($3).

ST. HELENA—Octave Aubry—Lippincott ($5).

At four o’clock in the afternoon of April 4, 1814, Armand de Caulaincourt, Napoleon’s dour, devoted Minister of Foreign Affairs, arrived at Essonnes, on the road to Paris. He carried the Emperor’s abdication in favor of his son, and instructions for a project so audacious it had a good chance of succeeding. The Allied Armies had taken Paris four days prior. Headed by Talleyrand, a movement for the restoration of the Bourbons was gaining strength. Only Napoleon could visualize a plan of action in this “hour of his vast reverses.” The situation as he saw it was roughly as follows : The Allies, under Tsar Alexander, had taken Paris almost to their own surprise, were uneasy about controlling a city of 750,000, undecided between the Bourbons and Napoleon’s son, anxious to avoid an unpopular move. So long as the French Army seemed solidly for Napoleon or his heir, they would avoid a showdown. The Sixth Corps of the French Army, under the square-faced, conscientious, devoted Duke of Ragusa, was at Essonnes, close to Paris. Caulaincourt therefore was to inform Ragusa of the changed plans, proceed to Paris with Napoleon’s abdication, stall for time in negotiations with Alexander, while Napoleon maneuvered his troops and those of Ragusa in preparation for battle out side the city walls. The threat alone might sway the Allies to favor Napoleon’s son.

When Caulaincourt arrived at Essonnes, he found Ragusa acting queerly. An emissary from the Allied field headquarters nearby had arrived at the same moment. Puzzled Caulaincourt ran down to the courtyard to see about getting through the Allied lines, found when he returned that Ragusa was involved in mysterious negotiations with the enemy. But Ragusa was one of Napoleon’s most trusted officers. “No one,” the Emperor said, “inspires me with more confidence.” Worried, Caulaincourt hustled Ragusa into a carriage and carried him on to Paris. The emissaries stopped at Allied field headquarters on the way. There Ragusa raced to the Allied commander alone, conferred secretly, then smugly announced that his private negotiations had been broken off. Caulaincourt was getting sick with fear. Afraid to let the miserable Ragusa out of his sight, Caulaincourt dragged him to Alexander. Until five in the morning Napoleon’s emissaries argued with that odd Tsar, who was in his most mellow mood. He encouraged them; Napoleon’s cause still had a chance. But all precautions were futile, for at eleven-thirty in the morning, when Caulaincourt was having breakfast with Marshal Ney, Ragusa suddenly burst in. stupefied them by jabbering incoherently that he was disgraced. All night long his troops had been going over to the enemy. Betrayed by Ragusa’s staff, the soldiers had thought they were going into battle.

In his long-lost memoirs,* Caulaincourt cleared up a major Napoleonic mystery with his account of Ragusa’s treachery, clarified another with his account of Napoleon’s attempted suicide a week later. Last year the first volume of this extraordinary document was offered U. S. readers under the title With Napoleon in Russia. Last week the second and concluding volume retraced the stages of the Emperor’s decline to the time of his departure for Elba. Together the two books constitute an amazing picture of the smashing of a world power, the first volume more readable as a connected narrative, the second more notable for its explicit records of events over which historians have speculated endlessly. A stoic, melancholy spirit, Caulaincourt was a strange combination himself, a blunt, hard-riding man of action who was also a fatalist and a philosopher, and who wrote with classic seventy.

So outspoken he often exasperated Napoleon, Caulaincourt had opposed the war with Russia, refused to flatter his Emperor, so that, although the Corsican tormented his General, Napoleon also had a nervous desire for his praise and a respect for his honesty. This feeling deepened as Napoleon went down, until on the night of his attempted suicide he poured out his story to Caulaincourt alone while the sweat broke out on his sunken features and he waited for the poison to take effect. The poison was opium, belladonna and white hellebore. Napoleon’s stomach rejected it and in place of the dignified Roman death he had courted, he spent the night vomiting, begging Caulaincourt to give him another potion, spinning out his disconnected, feverish explanation of his rise and fall. Ending with this bitter scene, Caulaincourt’s memoirs have an almost symphonic symmetry: they begin at the moment of the Empire’s greatest strength and trace its collapse in the swirl of defeats, treacheries, frustrations, massed chances, which followed one another faster than the imagination could encompass them.

According to Caulaincourt, the Empire ended with Ragusa’s treachery; what followed were the convulsions of its death-agony. Another addition to the 40,000 books about Napoleon, Author Aubry’s St. Helena, also published last week, carries the story of Napoleon’s personal decline to its miserable conclusion. An exhaustive record of the Emperor’s last six years, St. Helena is a superb piece of composition that remains interesting through its 500 pages. Beginning with Waterloo, it clips along like a good melodrama through Napoleon’s flight, his success in winning the friendship of one antagonistic English jailer after another. A strange bunch of gifted eccentricsfollowed him. There was tiny, weasel-faced, unctuous Emmanuel de Las Cases, who was 49, three years older than Napoleon, and who followed Napoleon because he wanted to win immortality by being his Boswell. He was so open in his admiration for the Emperor that his hard-eyed rivals called him “Rapture.” Another follower was Charles Tristan de Montholon, a born courtier who accompanied Napoleon into exile because his debts were so great he could go nowhere else. Swaggering, hypersensitive, jealous Caspar Gourgaud also went along because he had no other choice. General Henri Gratien Bertrand, Napoleon’s Grand Marshal, tall, skinny and timid, “had the face of a middle-aged woman who had for some unexplained reason taken to side-burns.” Humorously aware of the ridiculousness of his little company, Napoleon enjoyed pitting the members against one another so he could keep better informed about them.

In a shabby five-room cottage at Longwood, on a bleak plateau on the island, the tragi-comedy of Napoleon’s exile worked itself out. He adjusted himself to it more readily than anyone else. He romped with the children, teased the pretty, high-spirited 14-year-old Betsy Balcolme, a St. Helena heiress who played tricks on him, pulled his hair, once almost killed him with one of her pranks. Making a great fuss over his rights, Napoleon outsmarted his jailers almost from habit, played on the sympathies of Europe, started such rumors that presently a large body of troops and a good-sized fleet were assembled to prevent an escape that was literally impossible. Napoleon would hide from his guards, dress his servant in his clothing, start a panic, then shake his head gleefully over the stupidity of the English. Such small victories tightened the restrictions around him. His last struggle was his five-year fight with short, redheaded, pompous, shifty-eyed Sir Hudson Lowe, which ended with Napoleon’s death and left Lowe disgraced and almost mad.

Napoleon, who had liked his other jailers, hated Lowe from the start. He believed, or pretended to believe, that Lowe was going to kill him. Always bluffing, Napoleon drove Lowe to distraction, created parliamentary crises in London, steered his ill-assorted little company so artfully they became an efficient propaganda and espionage apparatus. Meanwhile he waddled around Longwood, recalling his great days, making the whole company work on his memoirs. Talking as much as Samuel Johnson, the imperial chatterbox spun out his pungent, cynical comments, salting his malice with sudden acts of kindness, keeping his followers in line like a wealthy old uncle with hints of the wealth he would leave them. He bluffed them, too, for he had very little to leave. But his mimic war for moral mastery of the island became deadly serious. Being made ridiculous so often weakened Sir Hudson Lowe’s already feeble intelligence. When Napoleon was dying of cancer, vomiting consistently, Lowe damned his agony as more play acting, refused the medical care which Napoleon demanded. After two weeks of his last illness, when his anguish had become intense,Napoleon’s main thought was to keep his English enemy from, finding out how miserable he was. And as he was virtually breathing his last, the greatest trouble-maker in history could not refrain from sowing a little posthumous dissension: he gave some valuable books to English officers, so that the tactless Lowe, under orders to confiscate all Napoleon’s gifts, would get in more trouble trying to take them away.

*Caulaincourt’s memoirs were suppressed by his family after his death in 1827, prepared for publication in 1914, hidden in the wall of a chateau during the German invasion, buried in a bombardment, recovered when the chateau was repaired in 1933, first published in France the same year.