Yet in these varying moods he was never idle. As three years before, he and Bourrienne indulged in financial speculations; he tried to persuade Joseph to invest his wife’s dot in the property of the émigrés. He prepared memorials on the political disorders of the times and on military questions, and he pushed his brothers as if he had no personal ambition. He did not neglect to make friends either. The most important of those whom he cultivated was Paul Barras, revolutionist, conventionalist, member of the Directory, and one of the most influential men in Paris at that moment. He had known Napoleon at Toulon, and showed himself disposed to be friendly. “I attached myself to Barras,” said Napoleon later, “because I knew no one else. Robespierre was dead; Barras was playing a rôle: I had to attach myself to somebody and something.” One of his plans for himself was to go to Turkey. For two or three years, in fact, Napoleon had thought of the Orient as a possible field for his genius, and his mother had often worried lest he should go. Just now it happened that the Sultan of Turkey asked the French for aid in reorganizing his artillery and perfecting the defences of his forts, and Napoleon asked to be allowed to undertake the work. While pushing all his plans with extraordinary enthusiasm, even writing Joseph almost daily letters about what he would do for him when he was settled in the Orient, he was called to do a piece of work which was to be of importance in his future.
The war committee needed plans for an Italian campaign; the head of the committee was in great perplexity. Nobody knew anything about the condition of things in the South. By chance, one day, one of Napoleon’s acquaintances heard of the difficulties and recommended the young general. The memorial he prepared was so excellent that he was invited into the topographical bureau of the Committee of Public Safety. His knowledge, sense, energy, fire, were so remarkable that he made strong friends and became an important personage.
Such was the impression he made, that when in October, 1795, the government was threatened by the revolting sections, Barras, the nominal head of the defence, asked Napoleon to command the forces which protected the Tuileries, where the Convention had gone into permanent session. He hesitated for a moment. He had much sympathy for the sections. His sagacity conquered. The Convention stood for the republic; an overthrow now meant another proscription, more of the Terror, perhaps a royalist succession, an English invasion.
“I accept,” he said to Barras; “but I warn you that once my sword is out of the scabbard I shall not replace it till I have established order.”
It was on the night of 12th Vendémiaire that Napoleon was appointed. With incredible rapidity he massed the men and cannon he could secure at the openings into the palace and at the points of approach. He armed even the members of the Convention as a reserve. When the sections marched their men into the streets and upon the bridges leading to the Tuileries, they were met by a fire which scattered them at once. That night Paris was quiet. The next day Napoleon was made general of division. On October 26th he was appointed general-in-chief of the Army of the Interior.
At last the opportunity he had sought so long and so eagerly had come. It was a proud position for a young man of twenty-six, and one may well stop and ask how he had obtained it. The answer is not difficult for one who, dismissing the prejudices and superstitions which have long enveloped his name, studies his story as he would that of an unknown individual. He had won his place as any poor and ambitious boy in any country and in any age must win his—by hard work, by grasping at every opportunity, by constant self-denial, by courage in every failure, by springing to his feet after every fall.
He succeeded because he knew every detail of his business (“There is nothing I cannot do for myself. If there is no one to make powder for the cannon I can do it”); because neither ridicule nor coldness nor even the black discouragement which made him write once to Joseph, “If this state of things continues I shall end by not turning out of my path when a carriage passes,” could stop him; because he had profound faith in himself. “Do these people imagine that I want their help to rise? They will be too glad some day to accept mine. My sword is at my side, and I will go far with it.” That he had misrepresented conditions more than once to secure favor, is true; but in doing this he had done simply what he saw done all about him, what he had learned from his father, what the oblique morality of the day justified. That he had shifted opinions and allegiance, is equally true; but he who in the French Revolution did not shift opinion was he who regarded “not what is, but what might be.” Certainly in no respect had he been worse than his environment, and in many respects he had been far above it. He had struggled for place, not that he might have ease, but that he might have an opportunity for action; not that he might amuse himself, but that he might achieve glory. Nor did he seek honors merely for himself; it was that he might share them with others.
PEN PORTRAIT OF BONAPARTE IN PROFILE.
The first use Bonaparte made of his power after he was appointed general-in-chief of the Army of the Interior, was for his family and friends. Fifty or sixty thousand francs, assignats, and dresses go to his mother and sisters; Joseph is to have a consulship; “a roof, a table, and carriage” are at his disposal in Paris; Louis is made a lieutenant and his aide-de-camp; Lucien, commissioner of war; Junot and Marmont are put on his staff. He forgets nobody. The very day after the 13th Vendémiaire, when his cares and excitements were numerous and intense, he was at the Permons, where Monsieur Permon had just died. “He was like a son, a brother.” This relation he soon tried to change, seeking to marry the beautiful widow Permon. When she laughed merrily at the idea, for she was many years his senior, he replied that the age of his wife was a matter of indifference to him so long as she did not look over thirty.
The change in Bonaparte himself was great. Up to this time he had gone about Paris “in an awkward and ungainly manner, with a shabby round hat thrust down over his eyes, and with curls (known at that time as oreilles des chiens) badly powdered and badly combed, and falling over the collar of the iron-gray coat which has since become so celebrated; his hands, long, thin, and black, without gloves, because, he said, they were an unnecessary expense; wearing ill-made and ill-cleaned boots.” The majority of people saw in him only what Monsieur de Pontécoulant, who took him into the War Office, had seen at their first interview; “A young man with a wan and livid complexion, bowed shoulders, and a weak and sickly appearance.”
But now, installed in an elegant hôtel, driving his own carriage, careful of his person, received in every salon where he cared to go, the young general-in-chief is a changed man. Success has had much to do with this; love has perhaps had more.
Chapter IV
Napoleon’s Courtship and Marriage—His Devotion to Josephine
In the five months spent in Paris before the 13th Vendémiaire, Bonaparte saw something of society. One interesting company which he often joined, was that gathered about Madame Permon at a hotel in the Rue des Filles Saint-Thomas. This Madame Permon was the same with whom he had taken refuge frequently in the days when he was in the military school of Paris, and whom he had visited later, in 1792, when lingering in town with hope of recovering his place in the army. On this latter occasion he had even exposed himself to aid her and her husband to escape the fury of the Terrorists and to fly from the city. Madame Permon had returned to Paris in the spring of 1795 for a few weeks, and numbers of her old friends had gathered about her as before the Terror, among them, Bonaparte.
Another house—and one of very different character—at which he was received, was that of Barras. The 9th Thermidor, as the fall of Robespierre is called, released Paris from a strain of terror so great that, in