The Life, Exile and Conversations with Napoleon - Emmanuel-Auguste-Dieudonné Las Cases

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to him, and, after minutely examining every part of it, he presented it to me, saying, “I have had it in my possession a long time, I made use of it on the morning of the battle of Austerlitz. It must go to young Emanuel,” said he, turning to my son; “when he is thirty or forty years old, we shall be no more. This will but enhance the value of the gift; he will say when he shews it, the Emperor Napoleon gave this to my father at St. Helena.” I received the precious gift with a kind of reverential feeling, and I preserve it as a valuable relic.

      Passing from that to the examining of a large cabinet, he looked over some portraits of his own family, and some presents which he had personally received. These consisted of the portraits of Madame, of the Queen of Naples, of the daughters of Joseph, of his brothers, of the King of Rome, &c.; an Augustus and a Livia, both exceedingly rare; a Continence of Scipio and another antique of immense value given to him by the Pope; a Peter the Great, on a box; another box with a Charles V.; another with a Turenne; and some, which were in daily use, covered with a collection of medallions of Cæsar, Alexander, Sylla, Mithridates, &c. Next came some snuff-boxes, ornamented with his own portrait set in diamonds. He then looked for one without diamonds, and not finding it, he called his valet-de-chambre to enquire about it: unfortunately this portrait still remained in the town along with the greater part of his effects; I felt mortified at receiving this intelligence, I could not help thinking that I had been a loser by this mischance.

      The Emperor then examined several snuff-boxes which Louis XVIII. had left on his table at the Tuileries at the time of his precipitate departure. On one of these were represented, on a black ground, the portraits of Louis XVI., of the Queen, and of Madame Elizabeth, executed in paste in imitation of ivory, and fantastically arranged. They formed three crescents placed back to back in the shape of an equilateral triangle, and groups of cherubs closely interwoven composed the external border. Another box presented a water-colour sketch of a hunt, which had no other claim to merit than the circumstance of its being attributed to the pencil of the Duchess of Angoulême. A third was surmounted with a portrait, which appeared to be that of the Countess of Provence. These three boxes were of simple and even ordinary execution; and could possess no other value than that which their history attaches to them.

      On the Emperor’s arrival in Paris on the evening of the 20th of March, he found the King’s study precisely in the state in which it had been used; all his papers still remained on the tables. By the Emperor’s desire, these tables were pushed into the corners of the apartment, and others brought. He gave orders that nothing should be touched, intending to examine the papers at his leisure: and as the Emperor himself quitted France without returning to the Tuileries, the King must have found his study and his papers nearly as he had left them.

      The Emperor took a hasty glance at some of the papers. He found among them several letters from the King to M. d’Avary at Madeira, where the latter died; they were written in the King’s own hand, and had doubtless been sent back to him. He found also some confidential letters of the King’s, likewise in his own hand. But how came they there? How had they been returned to him? That would be difficult to explain. They consisted of five or six pages, written in very elegant language, and displaying some sense; but very abstract and metaphysical. In one of them, the Prince said to the lady whom he addressed:—“Judge, Madam, how much I love you; I have left off mourning for your sake.” “And here,” said the Emperor, “the idea of the mourning was followed up by a succession of long paragraphs, quite in an academic style.” The Emperor could not imagine to whom it had been written, or what the mourning alluded to; I could not assist his conjectures on either of these points.

      Two or three days after the Emperor had replaced a certain individual at the head of a celebrated institution, he found on one of the tables a memoir from that very person, which, from the terms in which it was couched with reference to himself and the whole of his family, would certainly have prevented him from signing the re-appointment.

      There were also many other documents of the same nature: but the most complete records of baseness, deceit, and villany, were found in the apartments of M. Blacas, grand-master of the wardrobe, and minister of the household: these were filled with plans, reports, and petitions of every kind. There were few of these papers in which the writers did not put themselves forward at the expense of Napoleon, whom they were far from expecting to return. They formed altogether such a mass that the Emperor was obliged to appoint a committee of four persons to examine them; he now thinks he was to blame in not having confided that office to a single individual, and with such injunctions that he might have felt confident nothing was suffered to escape. He has since had reason to believe that these papers might have afforded some salutary hints respecting the treachery which surrounded him on his return from Waterloo.

      Among the rest there was a long letter from one of the female attendants of the Princess Pauline. This voluminous letter was expressed in very coarse language with regard to the princess and her sisters; and described the Emperor, to whom the writer always alluded under the title of that man, in the worst possible colours. This had not been thought sufficient; part of it had been erased and interlined by another hand, in order to bring forward Napoleon in the most scandalous manner; and on the margin, in the hand of the interlineator, were written the words fit to be printed. A few days more, and this libel would probably have been published.

      An upstart woman, who held a distinguished rank in the state, and who had been overwhelmed with acts of kindness from the Emperor, wrote in a great hurry to her friend, another upstart, to acquaint her with the famous decision of the Senate respecting the forfeiture and proscription of Napoleon. The letter contained the following: “My dear friend, my husband has just returned: he is tired to death; but his efforts have carried it; we are delivered from that man, and we shall have the Bourbons. Thank God, we shall now be real Countesses!” &c.

      Among these papers, Napoleon experienced the mortification to meet with some containing very improper remarks respecting himself personally; and those too in the very hand writing of individuals who only the day before had assembled round him, and were already in the enjoyment of his favours.

      The first impulse of his indignation was to determine that they should be printed, and to withdraw his protection: a second thought restrained him. “We are so volatile, so inconstant, so easily led away,” said he, “that, after all, I could not be certain that those very people had not really and spontaneously come back to my service: in that case, I should have been punishing them at the very time when they were returning to their duty. I thought it better to seem to know nothing of the matter, and I ordered all their letters to be burnt.”

       Table of Contents

      28th—31st. My son and I prosecuted our labours without intermission. His health, however, began to be affected; he felt a pain in his chest. My eyes also grew weak: these were really the effects of our excessive occupation. Indeed, we had gone through an amazing quantity of work: we had already nearly arrived at the end of the Campaign of Italy. The Emperor, however, did not yet find that he had sufficient occupation. Employment was his only resource, and the interest which his first dictations had assumed furnished an additional motive for proceeding with them. The Campaign of Egypt was now about to be commenced. The Emperor had frequently talked of employing the Grand Marshal on this subject.

      Those of our party who were lodged in the town were badly accommodated, and were dissatisfied at being separated from the Emperor. They were harassed by the constraint and mortifications to which they were subjected. I suggested to the Emperor that he should set us all to work at the same time, and proceed at once with the Campaigns of Italy and Egypt, the history of the Consulate, the return from the Island of Elba, &c. The time, I observed, would then pass more quickly; this great work, the glory of France, would advance more rapidly, and the gentlemen who resided in the town would be less unhappy. The idea pleased the Emperor, and from that moment one or two of his suite came regularly every day to write from his dictation, the transcript of which they brought

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