LITMIR.BIZ

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in Talleyrand’s anteroom were two eminent people desirous of meeting him: the old admiral and circumnavigator Bougainville and the celebrated writer and bluestocking baroness Germaine de Staël, whom he barely acknowledged in his haste to get down to business with the minister. It was their first meeting, and Talleyrand was enchanted, noting that ‘twenty battles won sit so well with youth, a fine look, pallor and a kind of exhaustion’. After an hour’s confabulation they set off to meet the five Directors, whom they found assembled in Barras’s quarters at the Luxembourg Palace. Bonaparte was greeted warmly by Barras himself and one other Director, the hideously ugly Louis-Marie Lareveillère-Lepaux, a dreamer more interested in horticulture and his pet project of a new religion, Theophilanthropy, than in the minutiae of government. The more practical and dominant Jean-François Reubell was amicable, but the remaining two, Lazare Carnot and Charles-Louis Letourneur, were hostile. They were incensed by the Treaty of Campo Formio and its destruction of the Venetian Republic. While they were powerless to do anything about it, given the popularity of Bonaparte and the universal joy at the coming of peace, they had shown their feelings by giving him command of the Army of England and delegating him to the congress of Rastatt – both designed to keep him away from Paris.1

      After his meeting Bonaparte stayed to dine with Barras, and then went home. As news of his return spread, people wondered what his next move would be. He was still commander of the Army of Italy, he had been placed in command of that of England, and as president of the French delegation to the congress of Rastatt he had overall command of French troops in Germany. A number of units were making their way across France to the Channel coast, passing within reach of Paris. Bonaparte was therefore in a position to stage a military coup, and many expected him to act. There would be little resistance, as the great hope of the royalists, General Pichegru, had been sent to Guyana and the leader of the extreme left, Gracchus Babeuf, guillotined. But as the Republic was not under threat he had no credible motive.2

      He was to return to Rastatt in a little over a week, and in the meantime he kept the door of his house firmly shut, instructing his servant to admit nobody and even to refuse to accept calling cards. To his intense irritation, the Directors had decided to hold a ceremony in his honour on 10 December, and he could not wriggle out of it. But afterwards he went to ground once more, and at dinner the following day, to which he had invited a handful of distinguished intellectuals, he talked metaphysics to the philosophically-minded Abbé Sieyès, poetry to the poet Chénier and geometry to the mathematician Laplace.3

      He only ventured out in civilian dress, his face hidden by a hat, and when he went to the theatre he sat at the back of his box. While the Directory was wary of him, he was afraid lest it feel threatened enough to resort to extreme measures. He could not avoid going to a banquet for eight hundred guests held in his honour by the two chambers on 24 December in the great gallery of the Louvre, hung with the paintings he had sent back from Italy, but he ate nothing. When dining out he partook only of dishes he had seen others taste, and otherwise confined himself to tamper-proof boiled eggs.4

      On 25 December the Institute of Arts and Sciences elected him a member. He was genuinely thrilled. ‘The real conquests, the only ones which come with no regrets, are those one makes over ignorance,’ he wrote in his letter of acceptance. ‘The most honourable occupation, and that most useful to all nations, is to contribute to the extension of human thought,’ he went on, declaring that the real greatness of the French Republic should lie there. The following day he took his seat, between his friends Monge and Berthollet. He would attend over a dozen of the Institute’s meetings over the next three months, acquiring a pool of admirers among the intellectual elite of France. He would spend hours with scientists, acting the eager pupil or astounding them by his knowledge, flattering them with his deferential interest, declaring that war, which might be necessary at times, was a lowly trade that could not aspire to the level of an art or a science such as theirs. Although his friendship with Monge, twice his age, Berthollet and some of the others was heartfelt, his courting of the intellectuals was calculated. The same went for the artistic establishment. Astonishingly for someone as impatient as him, he spent no less than three hours sitting for the painter Jacques Louis David. ‘Oh, my friends, what a head he has! It is pure, it is magnificent, it has the beauty of antiquity!’ David exclaimed afterwards. ‘In all, my friends, this is a man to whom in those days altars would have been raised, yes, my friends, yes, my dear friends! Bonaparte is my hero!’5

      His membership of the Institute also allowed him to sidestep a thorny issue when the Directory insisted he attend the ceremony held annually on 21 January celebrating the execution of Louis XVI. He tried to exempt himself by arguing that he did not hold any public position, protesting that the supposed celebration was inappropriate given that it commemorated a national disaster, that no government, only a faction would ever celebrate the death of a man, and that it brought no credit to the Republic or ease its relations with the other states of Europe, most of which were monarchies. The Directors were adamant, fearing that his absence would be interpreted as a sign of defiance and give heart to royalists. He eventually agreed to attend in the ranks and uniform of the Institute, thereby underlining that his attendance was purely official and did not reflect his views.

      He was careful to maintain good relations with the Directors, and Lareveillère-Lepaux was delighted by his modesty, his simplicity of dress, his apparent domesticity and his declared interest in Theophilanthropy. Consistently self-effacing, Bonaparte was all things to all men – the Prussian minister was flattered when he sang the praises of Frederick the Great, dismissing his own victories as the result of ‘good luck and some hard work’.6

      As commander of the Army of England, Bonaparte was supposed to invade it. He saw France as the new Rome and Britain as Carthage, and his vanity would have been caressed by the success of a play entitled Scipion l’Africain in which audiences picked out parallels between him and Scipio. Another, on the fall of Carthage, made even more obvious allusions to the heroics he was about to embark on. But it is doubtful that he ever considered the possibility seriously.7

      A week after his return to Paris, on 13 December, he issued his first orders relative to the invasion, and over the next days had a number of meetings with the minister of the navy. The French navy had been irredeemably damaged by the Revolution; crews had mutinied and discipline could not be restored for ideological reasons. By 1792 all but two out of nine admirals and three out of eighteen rear-admirals had left, along with three-quarters of the captains. Training replacements was impossible, as most of the ships were confined to port by the British blockade, and after the loss of so many at Toulon, the French navy was not up to carrying out an operation of the sort envisaged.

      It is doubtful that Bonaparte felt any desire to invade England. He nurtured an admiration for the British, condemned the Directory’s failure to make peace the previous summer, and reproached Barras for the belligerence of his speech at the ceremony of 10 December. He conferred with Wolfe Tone and other Irish revolutionaries, but was unimpressed. If he had intended to carry through the plan he would have applied himself to the task with his usual determination, spending his nights poring over maps and inspecting embarkation ports, identifying landing places and organising the invasion force. He did none of these, and did not present the Directory with a plan for over a month, while in the past he had produced them in a matter of days. It is doubtful that the Directors themselves believed in the possibility of a successful invasion.8

      The arrival of Josephine on 30 December put an end to Bonaparte’s low-profile life. On the same day, the rue Chantereine was renamed rue de la Victoire, and that evening they went to the theatre. Four days later they attended a party given in their honour by Talleyrand, a grand affair for some two hundred guests, widely commented on for its lavish scale and ancien-régime elegance. The rooms were decorated with trees and foliage, with backdrops presenting views of a military camp. The ladies wore scanty ‘Greek’ dresses, and while Josephine stood out, Bonaparte was self-effacing in

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