The Age of Elegance (28 page)

"Oh, no," the
y would reply to those who com
miserated with them on the ignorance in which the tyrant's Press had kept them, "we had our Gazettes!"
¹

All this made British observers doubt the ability of the French to live quietly under a constitutional monarchy and parliamentary system. It was only a few months since a British Foreign Office official had reported that the Napoleonic government was so ruthlessly imposed and so efficiently centralised that it could never be destroyed. Now that it had suddenly collapsed, it was hard to see how the people could govern themselves without it. Their
C
orps Le
gislatif
was a joke; everyone wore uniform and members wishing to speak rushed to the rostrum like a charge of cavalry, shouting and pushing one another about while a gesticulating president vainly rang his bell for order. The nation had no more respect for it than it had for itself. "Bah! Napoleon knew how to talk to such fellows," a young officer told an inquirer. "
'Corps Legislatif, je vous ab
olirai: senateurs,garde
z a vous
That's the way!"
²

For, having no independent local and national leaders, the French at the end of the Revolution and its wars were politically children. They obeyed only the rod. When Napoleon and his centralised despotism fell they were lost. They did not even attempt to defend their country against invasion. Those in authority transferred their allegiance
en bloc
to the new Government, though it was based on principles diametrically opposite to those to which they had so long adhered and sycophantically acclaimed. They were as sycophantic about the new. The higher placed they were, and the nearer the seat of power, the more so.

None were quicker to change than those who owed most to Napoleon. His Marshals' titles and pensions had been guaranteed with the Restoration settlement. Now incongruously mingling with
emigri
dukes and marquises, they grouped themselves in their broad, red imperial ribbons around their new master, enjoying, as a lady from England wrote, their emoluments. They made him look, she thought, like Daniel in the lions' den. Except for the handsome Ney, with his fair curling hair, and Victor, who was admitted to have a

¹
Stanley, 105. "The slavery of the Press had been so hideous a dream that they stared at our conversation as if awakening out of a dream." Haydon, I, 259. See
idem,
256-7, 276; Campbell, II, 246; Bury, I, 264; Mercer, II, 31. 263.

2
Wansey, 30; Brownlow,
87; Stanley, 129-30; Simpson, 133-4

gentlemanly appearance, they struck the English as an unprepossessing lot. The Duke of Dantzig squinted, Soult and Augureau were stout and vulgar, Davout had so cruel, cunning and malevolent a face that he made an honest Hampshire squire feel sick. Though Massena was conceded a kind of evil dignity and was said to be very gallant to the ladies, the plebeian faces of the rest were hard to distinguish from one another.
¹

It was symptomatic of the Bourbon genius for creating humiliating situations that of all Napoleon's lieutenants the King chose as Minister of War, Dupont, the capitulator of Baylen. It was as though James II, recalled to the throne after England's defeat in a naval war, had sent Kirby and Wade to the Admiralty.

To the officers and men of the
Grande Armee,
trudging home in their thousands from captivity or relegated to half-pay to make way for white-feathered popinjays, the Bourbons and their hangers-on appeared a pack of traitors. Their looks showed what shift they would give them if their Emperor ever returned to lead them.
"Quinze, seize'*
the sullen veterans called out as their officers numbered the ranks,
"dix-sept,
gros cochon,
dix-neufl"
Sent home to starve in their native villages, parade their wounds and weave sagas of faded glories, they spread everywhere their contempt for the crowned
embusque. A
British artillery officer, passing with his guns through a provincial town, tested the sincerity of the obsequious cries
o£"Vive le Roil
”
by murmuring
"Vive L’
Empereur."
Immediately men began to look at one another with sly, delighted expressions.
"Mais oui, monsieur
^“
they cried, slapping their thighs,
"vive VEmpereur, vive Napoleon!
^”

Therefore, though royalist audiences called nightly in the Paris theatres for
"Vive Henri Quatre" "La Belle Gabrielle'
and other Bourbon songs, few Englishmen who visited Paris in 1
8
14 expected to see the Restoration last. King Louis might look an excellent man, as one of them wrote, very benevolent and soft, but he would never be able to control a people half monkey and half tiger. After a year or two of enforced quiet, they would be at their old tricks again.

Yet an unexpected influence was at work to tranquillise France.

¹
"In the character of almost all these French military leaders there are such blots and stains that one sickens at the thought of being of the same species." Stanley, 196. See
idem,
136-9; Wansey, 100; Brownlow, 97, 182; Lord Coleridge, 228; Granville, I, 516.

Few people liked Talleyrand, least of all those whom his treacherous feat of legerdemain had restored to the throne. Napoleon, whose Foreign Minister he had been, had once described him as filth in silk stockings. He was the most consistent crook of his age; a politician perfectly adapted to the prevailing moral climate of his country and a disordered Europe. He had been trained at St.-Sulpice —a priest of the
ancien regime;
in youth his epicurean self-indulgence while holding high church preferment had shocked even the amoral aristocracy in which he grew up. For a quarter of a century, through storm and terror, he had lived, survived and triumphed by his wits. There were few crimes, including incest, of which he was not believed guilty. No one who saw his dirty, crafty, powdered face, with its half-closed eyes, villainous mouth, and slobbering, darting tongue, was left in any doubt as to the manner of man he was.

Yet he possessed an astonishing capacity for peaceful persuasion. Though with his club-foot and constant spitting and hawking he reminded some of an old, fuddled village schoolmaster, many of his countrywomen still found him irresistible. He had taken an exact measure of his fellow creatures. He had no wish to make them better or anything but what they were, nor did he attempt to impress them with his moral superiority. Instead, he addressed himself with unfailing tact and good humour to inducing them to do whatever should make him comfortable and secure. Being habitually idle, he relied on others for almost everything he did.

He had spent his youth in the most cultured society on earth, and his taste for pleasure and good living was exquisitely refined. He used to say that no one who had not lived before the Revolution had any idea how pleasant life could be. For all his coarse moral fibre, he was wholly civilised. Though he had contrived to live by democracy, he hated its drab social consequences. It followed that he wished, so far as was safe, to restore the life of privilege for his own enjoyment. As this was quite dissociated in his mind from any wish to ensure it for his class—for he was wholly without loyalty—he was able to do so while employing the revolutionary technique by which he had risen.

In this he served the future better than he knew or probably cared. After a quarter of a century in a France that was
parvenu
and restless, he wished to spend his remaining years in one that, while still favouring the adroit and cunning, should enable them to enjoy their spoils

in safety. He was the patron of the profiteer, the contractor and the banker, of such aristocrats, old and new, as had made their peace with Power and wished to stabilise things at the highest possible level of good living: of all whose bread was well buttered and who, knowing that any further change must be for the worst, wished to keep things as they were. An artificial
ancien regime
of those who had been clever and sharp enough to survive the Terror and Napoleon was not likely to endure except on a broad bottom of popular prosperity. Talleyrand, therefore, made it his business to give it one.

His political aims were twofold. He sought to make France comfortable and prosperous and, by securing for its facade of legitimate monarchy an honoured and respectable place in Europe, to satisfy its wounded vanity. Though neither an orator nor an administrator— he was so indolent that he could scarcely pen a long letter or dispatch —he understood, like Wellington, what could be done with time. In his prescient patience he had outlasted Napoleon. He now set himself to outlast the legend of his conquests. By guaranteeing, by his presence near the throne, the Revolutionary gains of the new
bourgeoisie
and peasantry, he gave a reluctant France time to settle down and exploit those gains. The natural wealth of the country, its traditional civilisation and the innate intelligence and capacity for enjoyment of its people, would in time, he saw, do the rest. They would turn to pleasure as flowers to the light.

For under the surface of the nerve-racked, turbulent France created by the Revolution was much that was gracious and instinct with new life. The frugal peasants toiling to improve their land, the industrious artificers in their neat clothes, the cheerful throngs of pleasure-seekers, oblivious of class or nationality, flocking to some
fete-champetre
or gliding to music in painted barges along the tranquil rivers on summer holidays, were earnest of a happier future, if only the national mind could be deflected from thoughts of conquest. So were the puppet-theatres and the crowds, all bustle and loquacity, on the tree-lined boulevards, the delicate, elegant toys in the shop windows, the opera dancers with their skill and grace, the grisettes with their speaking eyes and tripping gaiety, the universal sweetness of address that marked the very gamins of the streets.
"Pardon, monsieur"
a beggar boy, rebuffed, cried with a bow to a Scottish visitor,
"une autre occasion!"
For all their vices and blackguardism the French people were artists in liv
ing. Haydon, walking in the
meadows near Magny, heard a violin and, on entering, found a party dancing in the cool of the summer evening with the grace inherent in their race. When a great mineralogist entered the lecture room at the Jardin des Plantes the entire audience rose to show its respect for learning.
¹

By creating a moratorium on war and revolution Talleyrand gave such shoots the opportunity to grow. When a generation later another Napoleon seized the throne of France, the itch to conquer had gone out of her. The Grand Nation had become the land of the artist and academician, the peasant and the
bon-vivant.
By ceasing to be gigantic, in Talleyrand's words, she had grown great. It happened so gradually that no one realised it had happened at all; the French in 1870 still thought they were a conquering race. But when they left the theatre of Offenbach for the theatre of war, they found that it was not so. For all their valour they no longer enjoyed fighting.

In the international sphere Talleyrand's service to France was more spectacular. In diplomacy he had no equals. His country's conquerors were aristocrats by birth who had been belatedly made realists by experience: he himself had been both when most of them were in the schoolroom. He had dealt with them in the days of their collaboration; they had known him as their dreaded master's unjust steward who had done them favours on the sly and bid them say nothing. He could talk their language, whether of the
ancien regime
or the thieves' kitchen. His conversation, matching his furrowed, disillusioned face, was that of a cynic, but also a gentleman; he was without the professional wit's pedantry, yet every now and then could come out with some
mot
winch was never forgotten. His genius lay in simplification and clarification: the Aladdin's lamp which brave men sometimes fashion for themselves in a revolutionary age.

It was Talleyrand who had prevailed upon the Czar to bring back the Bourbons and, in doing so, to grant France a liberal peace. Without his resource and address Castlereagh could not have persuaded the victorious war lords to agree to a restoration for which they had such scant sympathy and for which in France there seemed scarcely any support. But this limping renegade with his crooked face and

¹
Haydon, I, 246-8, 249, 251, 260-1, 270, 277; Wansey, 12; De Selincourt, II, 902; Dudley, 255-6; Gronow, II, 299; Mercer, II, 30, 89, 128, 264; Simpson, 105, 107, 125, 143-4; Bury, I, 263-4;
Marlay Letters,
265-6; Stanley, 99, 124-5. And see an interesting passage in Greville (Suppl.), I, 86-7.

body made the impressionable Alexander see that a Bourbon restoration was the way to tranquillise the country and that the only alternative was a Jacobin Republic. Anything in between, Talleyrand explained, would be an intrigue that could not last. Convinced by that beguiling tongue, the Czar abandoned his romantic projects of a Napoleonic Regency or of a new dynasty under his
protege,
Bernadotte.

Having, as the restored King's Foreign Minister, negotiated a peace which left a vanquished France larger than in the days of the Grand Monarch, Talleyrand prepared to assert her right to a leading place in the councils of Europe. The objective he set himself was the destruction of the united front which Russia, Austria, Prussia and Great Britain had formed at Chaumont. For unless he could dissolve this twenty-years league against France, her people, when they recovered from their defeat, were certain to challenge both it and the settlement it guaranteed. The old cycle of revolution and war would then begin again.

Since the enemy commanded the bigger battalions, Talleyrand formulated no detailed plan of campaign. Like Wellington under similar circumstances, he prepared to wait upon their mistakes and exploit them as they arose. His strength was that he knew exactly what he wanted and, representing a new Government, was not hampered by previous entanglements.

For those with whom he had to negotiate, though they had bound themselves to act together, had not freed themselves thereby from earlier commitments. These, since they conflicted, were bound to involve them in dispute. Russia, who had received Sweden's Finnish provinces as the price of earlier subservience to Napoleon, had in 1
8
12 regained that country's goodwill by promising her Norway, the ancient fief of the pro-French King of Denmark. Britain, grateful for any ally, had underwritten this lamentable transaction. A year later Russia had secured Prussia's alliance by undertaking to restore to her territories as extensive as those she had enjoyed before Jena. Russia, Prussia and Britain had acknowledged Austria's claim to the territories of the extinguished Venetian Republic and to suzerainty in Italy as compensation for her lost Belgian provinces. The Austrian Chancellor, Metternich, in return for an offer of military aid and in gratitude, it was rumoured, for the favours of his wife, Napoleon's sister, had secretly guaranteed to J
oachim Murat—an innkeeper's son
—his usurped Neapolitan throne. For, despite the claims of legitimacy, this promised better for a Habsburg hegemony beyond the Alps than a return of the lawful Bourbon house.

Of these conflicting commitments the most embarrassing was that by which Russia had bound herself to double Prussia's size and population. Most of the promised increase was based on rights derived from flagrant aggressions during the early years of the Wars. By partitioning Poland two decades before, Russia, Austria and Prussia had enlarged their territories at the cost of allowing France to dominate Europe. It had been their preoccupation in this which had enabled the Revolutionary armies to overrun Germany. The subsequent occupation of Vienna, Berlin and Moscow had been a just retribution.

After Jena, Napoleon had seized most of Prussia's Polish spoils, including the former capital, and re-constituted them as the Duchy of Warsaw, making much play in his words, though not in his deeds, of Polish nationality and patriotism. To this he had added after his victory in 1809 part of Austrian Poland—Cracow and part of Galicia —placing the whole under the nominal sovereignty of his puppet, the King of Saxony. Early in 1813 all these territories—the whole of eighteenth-century Poland except the portion still remaining in Austria's hands—had been liberated and occupied by Russian armies.

Unless, therefore, Russia was prepared to hand back to Prussia the latter's Polish territory—and nothing had been said of this in the Russo-Prussian Treaty of Kalisch—she was committed to supporting an equivalent aggrandisement of that State in central and western Europe. It seemed unlikely, after her armies had been the chief instrument in liberating Europe, that she would now withdraw them without some compensation for the sacrifices she had made. Expansion to the west through Poland had been her goal for at least half a century.

Moreover, the Czar of Russia was inspired by progressive ideals. For many years he had had a Polish mistress and a Polish Minister. He profoundly regretted the rape of Poland by his grandmother, Catherine the Great, and her foreign allies. He wished to make amends by reuniting and restoring that ancient kingdom. He wished to become its king. As its liberator, it seemed to him his duty to humanity.

It was never easy to turn Alexander from his duty to humanity. He loved, he said, to sit on his terrace and busy himself with the welfare of mankind.
¹
He loved praise. He wished to satisfy his allies, the Prussians. He wished—within reason—to please the Poles; he wished to reward his subjects and free them from the bugbear of attack from the West. As the heir of Peter the Great, it was his mission to open the door of Europe to Russia. As God's vicegerent, it was his duty to extend his beneficent sway and liberate the oppressed.

It was difficult for statesmen of commoner clay to deal with a man so devout. He always seemed to have one foot in heaven and one on earth—and Russian earth at that. There were times when his attitude was scarcely of this world. When he entered Paris he assured the city fathers that he had come, not to conquer, but to learn the wish of France and to carry it out for the good of her people. It was not surprising that simple folk far removed from the realities of state regarded him as more than mortal.

Unfortunately the results of his actions were often different from those he intended. When by a magnanimous gesture he liberated— without the slightest provision for their journey—the French prisoners in Russia, they not only died in thousands on the roads but carried typhus into every city of Europe. When he chivalrously granted a safe-conduct to a beautiful Frenchwoman captured in the fighting near Paris, she was immediately raped by Cossacks. Holy Russia was like that. And, for all his liberalism and passion for western civilisation, the Czar was a Russian and not a western ruler. He had acquired the Slav passion for arguing with flawless logic from premises arrived at by mysterious higher processes. And as he seldom stopped talking, was exceedingly vain and, when thwarted, invincibly suspicious, he presented a problem to his ministers and colleagues.