LITMIR.BIZ

      6

       France or Corsica

      Napoleone had much explaining to do when he reached Paris two weeks later, at the end of May 1792. More than one damning report of his activities in Ajaccio had reached the capital, and he had been denounced in the Legislative Assembly by the Corsican deputies Carlo Maria Pozzo di Borgo and Marius Peraldi, no friends of the Buonaparte since the National Guard elections in which their brothers had been trounced. Peraldi had made up his mind that the family had ‘never, under whatever regime, had any merit other than spying, treachery, vice, impudence and prostitution’. Pozzo di Borgo was more amenable, and Napoleone managed to placate him.1

      Napoleone also needed to placate the war ministry, since he had overstayed his leave and could be classed as a deserter. Fortunately for him, war had broken out against Austria barely a month before, and since the emigration of thousands of officers had left a shortage, the ministry was not about to deprive the army of a trained officer on account of a squabble between small-town Corsicans. Colonel Maillard’s denunciation was passed to the ministry of justice, and although this had received similar unfavourable reports from other quarters, the matter rested there.2

      The day after his arrival in Paris, on 29 May, Napoleone unexpectedly met an old friend from Brienne, Fauvelet de Bourrienne. Bourrienne had not pursued a military career but had joined the diplomatic service, which took him to Vienna and Warsaw, and he was now at a loose end. The two young men teamed up, sharing what little money they had and thinking up ways of making some more. Napoleone also found friendship at the home of his mother’s childhood friend Panoria Permon, a beautiful woman of doubtful virtue who presided over what appears to have been something of a gaming house in which she received Corsicans and others.3

      On 16 June he visited his sister Maria-Anna at Saint-Cyr. ‘She is tall, well-formed, has learned to sew, read, write, dress her hair, dance and also a few words of history,’ he reported to Joseph Fesch, but he was worried that she had lost touch with her roots and become ‘an aristocrat’, and feared that if she had known he was a supporter of the Revolution she would never have agreed to see him. But his own attitude to the Revolution was about to be tested.4

      A couple of days later, on 20 June, he met up with Bourrienne for lunch at a restaurant in the rue Saint-Honoré. On coming out they saw a crowd of several thousand men and women armed with pikes, axes, swords, guns and sticks making for the Tuileries. They followed, and took up position on the terrace of the Tuileries gardens, from which they watched as the mob surged up to the palace, broke down the doors, overpowered the national guards on duty and swept inside. Napoleone could not hide his indignation, and when he saw the king submitting to don a red cap of liberty and appear at the window to drink the health of the people, he exploded. ‘Che coglione!’ he reportedly exclaimed, disgusted that nobody had prevented the rabble from storming the palace, and declared that if he had been the king things would have turned out differently. He kept returning to the subject, making pessimistic prognoses for the future. ‘When one sees all this close up one has to admit that the people are hardly worth the trouble we take to win their favour,’ he wrote to Lucien two weeks later, adding that the scenes he had witnessed made their scrape in Ajaccio look like child’s play.5

      A week later, on 10 July, he was reintegrated into the artillery with the rank of captain, and awarded six months’ back-pay. Although he was ordered to rejoin his regiment, he was in two minds as to what course to take. He had put the finishing touches to his Lettres sur la Corse, which was now ready for the printer, but as he admitted to Joseph, the political context was unfavourable. He was beginning to think that his future might lie in France, and advised Joseph to get himself elected to the Legislative Assembly in Paris, as Corsica was becoming peripheral. At the same time, he urged him to encourage Lucien to remain close to Paoli. ‘It is more likely than ever that this will all end in our gaining independence,’ he wrote, suggesting they keep their options open.6

      Lucien failed to get taken on as a secretary to Paoli. He was seventeen, exalted and rebellious. His spirit was, as he put it himself in a letter to Joseph, gripped by boundless ‘enthusiasm’; he had looked inside himself and was ‘developing’ his character in a ‘strongly pronounced way’. His soul had been set on fire by reading the immensely fashionable Edward Young’s poem Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality, and he had been inspired to discover his identity through writing. He was composing a poem about Brutus, and his pen flew over the paper ‘with astonishing velocity’. ‘I correct little; I do not like rules which restrain genius and I do not observe any,’ he wrote. He had also embraced the most radical revolutionary ideals. He assured Joseph that he ‘felt the courage to kill tyrants’ and would rather die with a dagger in his hand than in a bed surrounded by priestly ‘farce’.7

      Warned by his younger brother Louis that Lucien was about to take a step that ‘might well compromise the general interest of the family’, Napoleone wrote to him more

Скачать книгу