Tài liệu THE NAPOLEON OF THE PEOPLE doc

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world, and fight people without giving annoyance. Get it well into your heads to let
everything alone at first; for we shall have it all by and by! and forward!"
So far so good. But all those people had heard a prophecy of Napoleon, under the
name of Kebir Bonaberdis; a word which in our lingo means, "The Sultan fires a
shot," and they feared him like the devil. So the Grand Turk, Asia, and Africa have
recourse to magic, and they send a demon against us, named the Mahdi, who it was
thought had come down from heaven on a white charger which, like its master was
bullet-proof, and the pair of them lived on the air of that part of the world. There are
people who have seen them, but for my part I cannot give you any certain informations
about them. They were the divinities of Arabia and of the Mamelukes who wished
their troopers to believe that the Mahdi had the power of preventing them from dying
in battle. They gave out that he was an angel sent down to wage war on Napoleon, and
to get back Solomon's seal, part of their paraphernalia which they pretended our
general had stolen. You will readily understand that we made them cry peccavi all the
same.
Ah, just tell me now how they came to know about that compact of Napoleon's? Was
that natural?
They took it into their heads for certain that he commanded the genii, and that he went
from place to place like a bird in the twinkling of an eye; and it is a fact that he was
everywhere. At length it came about that he carried off a queen of theirs. She was the
private property of a Mameluke, who, although he had several more of them, flatly
refused to strike a bargain, though "the other" offered all his treasures for her and
diamonds as big as pigeon's eggs. When things had come to that pass, they could not
well be settled without a good deal of fighting; and there was fighting enough for
everybody and no mistake about it.
Then we are drawn up before Alexandria, and again at Gizeh, and before the
Pyramids. We had to march over the sands and in the sun; people whose eyes dazzled
used to see water that they could not drink and shade that made them fume. But we
made short work of the Mamelukes as usual, and everything goes down before the
voice of Napoleon, who seizes Upper and Lower Egypt and Arabia, far and wide, till
we came to the capitals of kingdoms which no longer existed, where there were
thousands and thousands of statues of all the devils in creation, all done to the life, and
another curious thing too, any quantity of lizards. A confounded country where any
one could have as many acres of land as he wished for as little as he pleased.
While he was busy inland, where he meant to carry out some wonderful ideas of his,
the English burn his fleet for him in Aboukir Bay, for they never could do enough to
annoy us. But Napoleon, who was respected East and West, and called "My Son" by
the Pope, and "My dear Father" by Mahomet's cousin, makes up his mind to have his
revenge on England, and to take India in exchange for his fleet. He set out to lead us
into Asia, by way of the Red Sea, through a country where there were palaces for
halting-places, and nothing but gold and diamonds to pay the troops with, when the
Mahdi comes to an understanding with the Plague, and sends it among us to make a
break in our victories. Halt! Then every man files off to that parade from which no one
comes back on his two feet. The dying soldier cannot take Acre, into which he forces
an entrance three times with a warrior's impetuous enthusiasm; the Plague was too
strong for us; there was not even time to say "Your servant, sir!" to the Plague. Every
man was down with it. Napoleon alone was as fresh as a rose; the whole army saw him
drinking in the Plague without it doing him any harm whatever.
There now, my friends, was that natural, do you think?
The Mamelukes, knowing that we were all on the sick-list, want to stop our road; but it
was no use trying that nonsense with Napoleon. So he spoke to his familiars, who had
tougher skins than the rest:
"Go and clear the road for me."
Junot, who was his devoted friend, and a first-class fighter, only takes a thousand men,
and makes a clean sweep of the Pasha's army, which had the impudence to bar our
way. Thereupon back we came to Cairo, our headquarters, and now for another story.
Napoleon being out of the country, France allowed the people in Paris to worry the life
out of her. They kept back the soldiers' pay and all their linen and clothing, left them to
starve, and expected them to lay down law to the universe, without taking any further
trouble in the matter. They were idiots of the kind that amuse themselves with
chattering instead of setting themselves to knead the dough. So our armies were
defeated, France could not keep her frontiers; The Man was not there. I say The Man,
look you, because that was how they called him; but it was stuff and nonsense, for he
had a star of his own and all his other peculiarities, it was the rest of us that were mere
men. He hears this history of France after his famous battle of Aboukir, where with a
single division he routed the grand army of the Turks, twenty-five thousand strong,
and jostled more than half of them into the sea, rrrah! without losing more than three
hundred of his own men. That was his last thunder-clap in Egypt. He said to himself,
seeing that all was lost down there, "I know that I am the saviour of France, and to
France I must go."
But you must clearly understand that the army did not know of his departure; for if
they had, they would have kept him there by force to make him Emperor of the East.
So there we all are without him, and in low spirits, for he was the life of us. He leaves
Kleber in command, a great watchdog who passed in his checks at Cairo, murdered by
an Egyptian whom they put to death by spiking him with a bayonet, which is their way
of guillotining people out there; but he suffered so much, that a soldier took pity on the
scoundrel and handed his flask to him; and the Egyptian turned up his eyes then and
there with all the pleasure in life. But there is not much fun for us about this little
affair. Napoleon steps aboard of a little cockleshell, a mere nothing of a skiff, called
the Fortune, and in the twinkling of an eye, and in the teeth of the English, who were
blockading the place with vessels of the line and cruisers and everything that carries
canvas, he lands in France for he always had the faculty of taking the sea at a stride.
Was that natural? Bah! as soon as he landed at Frejus, it is as good as saying that he
has set foot in Paris. Everybody there worships him; but he calls the Government
together.
"What have you done to my children, the soldiers?" he says to the lawyers. "You are a
set of good-for-nothings who make fools of other people, and feather your own nests
at the expense of France. It will not do. I speak in the name of every one who is
discontented."
Thereupon they want to put him off and to get rid of him; but not a bit of it! He locks
them up in the barracks where they used to argufy and makes them jump out of the
windows. Then he makes them follow in his train, and they all become as mute as
fishes and supple as tobacco pouches. So he becomes Consul at a blow. He was not the
man to doubt the existence of the Supreme Being; he kept his word with Providence,
who had kept His promise in earnest; he sets up religion again, and gives back the
churches, and they ring the bells for God and Napoleon. So every one is
satisfied: primo the priests with whom he allows no one to meddle; segondo, the
merchant folk who carry on their trades without fear of the rapiamus of the law that
had pressed too heavily on them; tertio, the nobles; for people had fallen into an
unfortunate habit of putting them to death, and he puts a stop to this.
But there were enemies to be cleared out of the way, and he was not the one to go to
sleep after mess; and his eyes, look you, traveled all over the world as if it had been a
man's face. The next thing he did was to turn up in Italy; it was just as if he had put his
head out of the window and the sight of him was enough; they gulp down the
Austrians at Marengo like a whale swallowing gudgeons!Haouf! The French Victories
blew their trumpets so loud that the whole world could hear the noise, and there was
an end of it.
"We will not keep on at this game any longer!" say the Germans.
"That is enough of this sort of thing," say the others.
Here is the upshot. Europe shows the white feather, England knuckles under, general
peace all round, and kings and peoples pretending to embrace each other. While then
and there the Emperor hits on the idea of the Legion of Honor. There's a fine thing if
you like!
He spoke to the whole army at Boulogne. "In France," so he said, "every man is brave.
So the civilian who does gloriously shall be the soldier's sister, the soldier shall be his
brother, and both shall stand together beneath the flag of honor."
By the time that the rest of us who were away down there in Egypt had come back
again, everything was changed. We had seen him last as a general, and in no time we
find that he is Emperor! And when this was settled (and it may safely be said that
every one was satisfied) there was a holy ceremony such as was never seen under the
canopy of heaven. Faith, France gave herself to him, like a handsome girl to a lancer,
and the Pope and all his cardinals in robes of red and gold come across the Alps on
purpose to anoint him before the army and the people, who clap their hands.
There is one thing that it would be very wrong to keep back from you. While he was in
Egypt, in the desert not far away from Syria,the Red Man had appeared to him on the
mountain of Moses, in order to say, "Everything is going on well." Then again, on the
eve of victory at Marengo, the Red Man springs to his feet in front of the Emperor for
the second time, and says to him:
"You shall see the world at your feet; you shall be Emperor of the French, King of
Italy, master of Holland, ruler of Spain, Portugal, and the Illyrian Provinces, protector
of Germany, saviour of Poland, first eagle of the Legion of Honor and all the rest of
it."
That Red Man, look you, was a notion of his own, who ran on errands and carried
messages, so many people say, between him and his star. I myself have never believed
that; but the Red Man is, undoubtedly, a fact. Napoleon himself spoke of the Red Man
who lived up in the roof of the Tuileries, and who used to come to him, he said, in
moments of trouble and difficulty. So on the night after his coronation Napoleon saw
him for the third time, and they talked over a lot of things together.
Then the Emperor goes straight to Milan to have himself crowned King of Italy, and
then came the real triumph of the soldier. For every one who could write became an
officer forthwith, and pensions and gifts of duchies poured down in showers. There
were fortunes for the staff that never cost France a penny, and the Legion of Honor
was as good as an annuity for the rank and file; I still draw my pension on the strength
of it. In short, here were armies provided for in a way that had never been seen before!
But the Emperor, who knew that he was to be Emperor over everybody, and not only
over the army, bethinks himself of the bourgeois, and sets them to build fairy
monuments in places that had been as bare as the back of my hand till then. Suppose,
now, that you are coming out of Spain and on the way to Berlin; well, you would see
triumphal arches, and in the sculpture upon them the common soldiers are done every
bit as beautifully as the generals!
In two or three years Napoleon fills his cellars with gold, makes bridges, palaces,
roads, scholars, festivals, laws, fleets, and harbors; he spends millions on millions,
ever so much, and ever so much more to it, so that I have heard it said that he could
have paved the whole of France with five-franc pieces if the fancy had taken him; and
all this without putting any taxes on you people here. So when he was comfortably
seated on his throne, and so thoroughly the master of the situation, that all Europe was
waiting for leave to do anything for him that he might happen to want; as he had four
brothers and three sisters, he said to us, just as it might be by way of conversation, in
the order of the day:
"Children, is it fitting that your Emperor's relations should beg their bread? No; I want
them all to be luminaries, like me in fact! Therefore, it is urgently necessary to
conquer a kingdom for each one of them, so that the French nation may be masters
everywhere, so that the Guard may make the whole earth tremble, and France may spit
wherever she likes, and every nation shall say to her, as it is written on my coins, 'God
protects you.'"
"All right!" answers the army, "we will fish up kingdoms for you with the bayonet."
Ah! there was no backing out of it, look you! If he had taken it into his head to
conquer the moon, we should have had to put everything in train, pack our knapsacks,
and scramble up; luckily, he had no wish for that excursion. The kings who were used
to the comforts of a throne, of course, objected to be lugged off, so we had marching
orders. We march, we get there, and the earth begins to shake to its centre again. What
times they were for wearing out men and shoe-leather! And the hard knocks that they
gave us! Only Frenchmen could have stood it. But you are not ignorant that a
Frenchman is a born philosopher; he knows that he must die a little sooner or a litter
later. So we used to die without a word, because we had the pleasure of watching the
Emperor do this on the maps.
[Here the soldier swung quickly round on one foot, so as to trace a circle on the barn
floor with the other.]
"There, that shall be a kingdom," he used to say, and it was a kingdom. What fine
times they were! Colonels became generals whilst you were looking at them, generals
became marshals of France, and marshals became kings. There is one of them still left
on his feet to keep Europe in mind of those days, Gascon though he may be, and a
traitor to France that he might keep his crown; and he did not blush for his shame, for,
after all, a crown, look you, is made of gold. The very sappers and miners who knew
how to read became great nobles in the same way. And I who am telling you all this
have seen in Paris eleven kings and a crowd of princes all round about Napoleon, like
rays about the sun! Keep this well in your minds, that as every soldier stood a chance
of having a throne of his own (provided he showed himself worthy of it), a corporal of
the Guard was by way of being a sight to see, and they gaped at him as he went by; for
every one came by his share after a victory, it was made perfectly clear in the bulletin.
And what battles they were! Austerlitz, where the army was manoeuvred as if it had
been a review; Eylau, where the Russians were drowned in a lake, just as if Napoleon
had breathed on them and blown them in; Wagram, where the fighting was kept up for
three whole days without flinching. In short, there were as many battles as there are
saints in the calendar.
Then it was made clear beyond a doubt that Napoleon bore the Sword of God in his
scabbard. He had a regard for the soldier. He took the soldier for his child. He was
anxious that you should have shoes, shirts, greatcoats, bread, and cartridges; but he
kept up his majesty, too, for reigning was his own particular occupation. But, all the
same, a sergeant, or even a common soldier, could go up to him and call him
"Emperor," just as you might say "My good friend" to me at times. And he would give
an answer to anything you put before him. He used to sleep on the snow just like the
rest of us—in short, he looked almost like an ordinary man; but I who am telling you
all these things have seen him myself with the grape-shot whizzing about his ears, no
more put out by it than you are at this moment; never moving a limb, watching
through his field-glass, always looking after his business; so we stood our ground
likewise, as cool and calm as John the Baptist. I do not know how he did it; but
whenever he spoke, a something in his words made our hearts burn within us; and just
to let him see that we were his children, and that it was not in us to shirk or flinch, we
used to walk just as usual right up to the sluts of cannon that were belching smoke and
vomiting battalions of balls, and never a man would so much as say, "Look out!" It
was a something that made dying men raise their heads to salute him and cry, "Long
live the Emperor!"
Was that natural? Would you have done this for a mere man?
Thereupon, having fitted up all his family, and things having so turned out that the
Empress Josephine (a good woman for all that) had no children, he was obliged to part
company with her, although he loved her not a little. But he must have children, for
reasons of State. All the crowned heads of Europe, when they heard of his difficulty,
squabbled among themselves as to who should find him a wife. He married an
Austrian princess, so they say, who was the daughter of the Caesars, a man of antiquity
whom everybody talks about, not only in our country, where it is said that most things
were his doing, but also all over Europe. And so certain sure is that, that I who am
talking to you have been myself across the Danube, where I saw the ruins of a bridge
built by that man; and it appeared that he was some connection of Napoleon's at Rome,
for the Emperor claimed succession there for his son.
So, after his wedding, which was a holiday for the whole world, and when they let the
people off their taxes for ten years to come (though they had to pay them just the same
after all, because the excisemen took no notice of the proclamation)—after his
wedding, I say, his wife had a child who was King of Rome; a child was born a King
while his father was alive, a thing that had never been seen in the world before! That
day a balloon set out from Paris to carry the news to Rome, and went all the way in
one day. There, now! Is there one of you who will stand me out that there was nothing
supernatural in that? No, it was decreed on high. And the mischief take those who will
not allow that it was wafted over by God Himself, so as to add to the honor and glory
of France!
But there was the Emperor of Russia, a friend of our Emperor's, who was put out
because he had not married a Russian lady. So the Russian backs up our enemies the
English; for there had always been something to prevent Napoleon from putting a
spoke in their wheel. Clearly an end must be made of fowl of that feather. Napoleon is
vexed, and he says to us:
"Soldiers! You have been the masters of every capital in Europe, except Moscow,
which is allied to England. So, in order to conquer London and India, which belongs to
them in London, I find it absolutely necessary that we go to Moscow."
Thereupon the greatest army that ever wore gaiters, and left its footprints all over the
globe, is brought together, and drawn up with such peculiar cleverness, that the
Emperor passed a million men in review, all in a single day.
"Hourra!" cry the Russians, and there is all Russia assembled, a lot of brutes of
Cossacks, that you never can come up with! It was country against country, a general
stramash; we had to look out for ourselves. "It was all Asia against Europe," as the
Red Man had said to Napoleon. "All right," Napoleon had answered, "I shall be ready
for them."
And there, in fact, were all the kings who came to lick Napoleon's hand. Austria,
Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, Poland, and Italy, all speaking us fair and going along with
us; it was a fine thing! The Eagles had never cooed before as they did on parade in
those days, when they were reared above all the flags of all the nations of Europe. The
Poles could not contain their joy because the Emperor had a notion of setting up their
kingdom again; and ever since Poland and France have always been like brothers. In
short, the army shouts, "Russia shall be ours!"
We cross the frontiers, all the lot of us. We march and better march, but never a
Russian do we see. At last all our watch-dogs are encamped at Borodino. That was
where I received the Cross, and there is no denying that it was a cursed battle. The
Emperor was not easy in his mind; he had seen the Red Man, who said to him, "My
child, you are going a little too fast for your feet; you will run short of men, and your
friends will play you false."
Thereupon the Emperor proposes a treaty. But before he signs it, he says to us:
"Let us give these Russians a drubbing!"
"All right!" cried the army.
"Forward!" say the sergeants.
My clothes were all falling to pieces, my shoes were worn out with trapezing over
those roads out there, which are not good going at all. But it is all one. "Since here is
the last of the row," said I to myself, "I mean to get all I can out of it."
We were posted before the great ravine; we had seats in the front row. The signal is
given, and seven hundred guns begin a conversation fit to make the blood spirt from
your ears. One should give the devil his due, and the Russians let themselves be cut in
pieces just like Frenchmen; they did not give way, and we made no advance.
"Forward!" is the cry; "here is the Emperor!"
So it was. He rides past us at a gallop, and makes a sign to us that a great deal depends
on our carrying the redoubt. He puts fresh heart into us; we rush forward, I am the first
man to reach the gorge. Ah!mon Dieu! how they fell, colonels, lieutenants, and
common soldiers, all alike! There were shoes to fit up those who had none, and
epaulettes for the knowing fellows that knew how to write Victory is the cry all
along the line! And, upon my word, there were twenty-five thousand Frenchmen lying
on the field. No more, I assure you! Such a thing was never seen before, it was just
like a field when the corn is cut, with a man lying there for every ear of corn. That
sobered the rest of us. The Man comes, and we make a circle round about him, and he
coaxes us round (for he could be very nice when he chose), and persuades us to dine
with Duke Humphrey, when we were hungry as hunters. Then our consoler distributes
the Crosses of the Legion of Honor himself, salutes the dead, and says to us, "On to
Moscow!"