XIV. to fear as to prove that he had less self-control CHAP. in moments of danger than the common run of peaceful citizens; but on all of them he showed that, though he had chosen to set himself heroic tasks, his temperament was ill-fitted for the hour of battle and for the crisis of an adventure. For, besides that (in common with the bulk of mankind) he was without resource and presence of mind when he imagined that danger was really quite close upon him, his complexion and the dismal looks he wore in times of trial were always against him. From some defect perhaps in the structure of the heart or the arterial system, his skin, when he was in a state of alarm, was liable to be suffused with a greenish hue. This discoloration might be a sign of high moral courage, because it would tend to show that the spirit was warring with the flesh; but still it does not indicate that condition of body and soul which belongs to a true king of men in the hour of danger, and enables him to give heart and impulsion to those around him. It is obvious, too, that an appearance of this sort would be damping to the ardour of the bystanders. Several incidents show that between the 2d and the 4th of December the President was irresolute and keenly alive to his danger. The long-pondered plan of election which he had promulgated on the 2d of December he withdrew the next day, in obedience to the supposed desire of the Parisian multitude. He took care to have always close to his side the immense force of cavalry, to which he looked ast XIV. CHAP. the means of protecting his flight; and it seems that, during a great portion of the critical interval, the carriages and horses required for his escape were kept ready for instant use in the stable-yard of the Elysée. Moreover, it was at this time that he suffered himself to resort to the almost desperate resource of counterfeiting the names of men represented as belonging to the Consultative Commission. But perhaps his condition of mind may be best inferred from the posture in which history catches him whilst he nestled under the wing of the army. When a peaceful citizen is in grievous peril, and depending for his life upon the whim of soldiers, his instinct is to take all his gold and go and offer it to the armed men, and tell them he loves and admires them. What, in such stress, the endangered citizen would be impelled by his nature to do, is exactly what Louis Bonaparte did. The transaction could not be concealed, and the imperial historian seems to have thought that, upon the whole, the best course was to give it an air of classic grandeur by describing the soldiers as the 'conquerors' of a rugged Greek word, and by calling a French coin an 'obolus.' 'There ' remained,' said he, 'to the President, out of all 'his personal fortune, out of all his patrimony, a sum of fifty thousand francs. He knew that in certain memorable circumstances the troops 'had faltered in the presence of insurrection, 'more from being famished than from being 'defeated; so he took all that remained to him, XIV. even to his last crown-piece, and charged Col- CHAP. 'onel Fleury to go to the soldiers, conquerors ' of demagogy, and distribute to them, brigade by brigade, and man by man, this his last obolus.' * The President had said, in one of his addresses to the army of Paris, that he would not bid them advance, but would himself go the foremost and ask them to follow him. If it was becoming to address empty play-actor's words of that sort to real soldiers, it certainly was not the duty of the President to act upon them; for there could not well be any such engagement in the streets of Paris as would make it right for a literary man (though he was also the chief of the State) to go and affect to put himself at the head of an army inured to war; but still there was a contrast between what was said and what was done, which makes a man smile as he passes. The President had vowed he would lead the soldiers against the foe, and instead, he sent them all his money. There is no reason to suppose that the change of plan was at all displeasing to the troops; and this bribing of the armed men is only adverted to here as a means of getting at the real state of the President's mind, and thereby tracing up to its cause the massacre of the 4th of December. Another clue, leading the same way, is to be found in the Decree by which the President enacted that combats with insurgents at home should count for the honour and profit of the troops in the same way as though they were * Granier de Cassagnac, vol. ii. p. 431. XIV. CHAP. fought against a foreign enemy.* It is true that this decree was not issued until the massacre of the 4th was over, but of course the temper in which a man encounters danger is to be gathered in part from his demeanour immediately after the worst moment of trial; and when it is found that the chief of a proud and mighty nation was capable of putting his hand to a paper of this sort on the 5th of December, some idea may be formed of what his sensations were on the noon of the day before, when the agony of being in fear had not as yet been succeeded by the indecorous excitement of escape. Of Jerome Of his son. Whilst Prince Louis Bonaparte was hugging the knees of the soldiers, his uncle Jerome Bonaparte fell into so painful a condition as to be unable to maintain his self-control, and he suffered himself to publish a letter in which he not only disclosed his alarm, but even showed that he was preparing to separate himself from his nephew ; for he made it appear (as he could do, perhaps, with strict truth) that although he had got into danger by showing himself in public with the President on the 2d of December, he was innocent of the plot, and a stranger to the counsels of the Elysée. His son (now called Prince Napoleon) Decree of the 5th, inserted in the 'Moniteur' of the 7th December: Lorsq'une troupe organisée aura contribuée par 'des combats à rétablir l'ordre sur un point quelconque du ter'ritoire, ce service sera compté comme service de campagne.' Article 1, 'Annuaire,' Appendix, p. 70.—Note to 4th Edition. + The letter will be found in the Annual Register.' It seems to have been sent at 10 o'clock at night on the 4th of December; XIV. was really, they say, a strong disapprover of the CHAP. President's acts, and it was natural that he should be most unwilling to be put to death or otherwise ill-treated upon the theory that he was the cousin and therefore the accomplice of Louis, for of that theory he wholly and utterly denied the truth. Any man, however firm, might well resolve that, happen what might to him, he would struggle hard to avoid being executed by mistake; and it seems unfair to cast blame on Prince Napoleon for trying to disconnect his personal destiny from that of the endangered men at the Elysée, whose counsels he had not shared. Still, the sense of being cast loose by the other Bonapartes, could not but be discouraging to Prince Louis, and to those who had thrown in their lot with him. of Maupas. Maupas, or De Maupas, was a man of a fine, Bodily state large, robust frame, and with florid healthy looks; but it sometimes happens that a spacious and strong-looking body of that sort is not so safe a tabernacle as it seems for man's troubled spirit. It is said that the bodily strength of Maupas collapsed in the hour of danger, and that, at a critical part of the time between the night of the 2d of December and the massacre of the 4th, he had the misfortune to fall ill. but the writer evidently did not know that the insurrection at that time was so near its end as it really was, and his letter may therefore be taken as a fair indication of the state of his mind in the earlier part of the day. The advice and the mild remonstrance contained in the letter might have been given in private by a man who had not lost his calm, but the fact of allowing such a letter to be public discloses Jerome's motives. |