Harper's New Monthly Magazine. No. XVI.—September, 1851—Vol. III. Various
the charges brought against him by Salicetti, remained in Paris for two or three months. He lived in the most frugal manner, spending no money or time in dissipation or amusements. He passed most of his hours in the libraries, reading volumes of solid worth, and seeking the conversation of distinguished men. Without any exhibition of vanity, he seemed to repose great reliance upon his own powers, and was never abashed in the slightest degree by the presence of others, of whatever rank or attainments. Indeed he seemed, even then, to be animated by the assurance that he was destined for some great achievements. His eye was surveying the world. He was meditating upon the rise and fall of empires. France, Europe even, seemed too small for his majestic designs. He studied with intense interest the condition of the countless myriads of men who swarm along the rivers and the hill-sides of internal Asia; and dreamed of being himself the founder of an Empire there, in comparison with which the dynasties of Europe should be insignificant. Indeed he never, in all his subsequent career, manifested the least surprise in view of his elevation. He rose from step to step, regarding each ascent as a matter of course, never shrinking in the least degree from assuming any weight of responsibility, and never manifesting the slightest embarrassment in taking the command from the hands of gray-headed veterans.
While in Paris, he was, on the famous morning of the 20th of June, 1792, walking with his friend Bourrienne, along the banks of the Seine, when he saw a vast mob of men, women, and boys, with hideous yells and frantic gestures, and brandishing weapons of every kind, rolling like an inundation through the streets of the metropolis, and directing their steps toward the palace of the imprisoned monarch. Napoleon ran before them that he might witness their proceedings. Climbing, by an iron fence, upon the balustrade of a neighboring building, he saw the squalid mass of thirty thousand miscreants break into the garden of the Tuileries, swarm through the doors of the regal mansion, and, at last, compel the insulted and humiliated king, driven into the embrasure of a window, to put the filthy red cap of Jacobinism upon his brow. This triumph of the drunken vagrants, from the cellars and garrets of infamy, over all law and justice, and this spectacle of the degradation of the acknowledged monarch of one of the proudest nations on the globe, excited the indignation of Napoleon to the highest pitch. He turned away from the sight as unendurable, exclaiming, "The wretches! how could they suffer this vile mob to enter the palace! They should have swept down the first five hundred with grape shot, and the rest would have soon taken to flight."
New scenes of violence were now daily enacted before the eyes of Napoleon in the streets of Paris, until the dreadful 10th of August arrived. He then again saw the triumphant and unresisted mob sack the palace of the Tuileries. He witnessed the king and the royal family driven from the halls of their ancestors, and followed by the frenzied multitude, with hootings, and hissings, and every conceivable insult, in momentary peril of assassination, until they took refuge in the Assembly. He saw the merciless massacre of the faithful guards of the king, as they were shot in the garden, as they were pursued and poniarded in the streets, as they were pricked down with bayonets, from the statues upon which they had climbed for protection, and in cold blood butchered. He saw, with his bosom glowing with shame and indignation, the drunken rioters marching exultingly through the streets of the metropolis, with the ghastly heads of the slaughtered guards borne aloft, upon the points of their pikes, as the trophies of their victory.
These hideous spectacles wrought quite a revolution in the mind of Napoleon. They effectually arrested the progress of all his tendencies toward democracy. He had been a great admirer of constitutional liberty in England, and a still greater admirer of republican liberty in America. He now became convinced that the people of France were too ignorant and degraded for self-government, that they needed the guidance and control of resistless law. He hated and despised the voluptuousness, the imbecility, and the tyranny of the effete monarchy. He had himself suffered most keenly from the superciliousness of the old nobility who grasped at all the places of profit and honor, merely to gratify their own sensuality, and left no career open to merit. Napoleon had his own fortune to make, and he was glad to see all these bulwarks battered down, which the pride and arrogance of past ages had reared to foster a worthless aristocracy; and to exclude the energetic and the aspiring, unaided by wealth and rank, from all the avenues of influence and celebrity. On the other hand the dominion of the mob appeared to him so execrable that he said, "I frankly declare that if I were compelled to choose between the old monarchy and Jacobin misrule, I should infinitely prefer the former." Openly and energetically, upon all occasions, fearless of consequences, he expressed his abhorrence of those miscreants who were trampling justice and mercy beneath their feet, and who were, by their atrocities, making France a by-word among all nations. This is a key to the character of Napoleon. Those opposing forces guided his future career. He ever, subsequently, manifested the most decisive resolution to crush the Jacobins. He displayed untiring energy in reconstructing in France a throne invincible in power, which should govern the people, which should throw every avenue to greatness open to all competitors, making wealth, and rank, and influence, and power the reward of merit. Napoleon openly avowed his conviction that France, without education and without religion, was not prepared for the republicanism of the United States. In this sentiment La Fayette and most of the wisest men of the French nation fully concurred. With an arm of despotic power he crushed every lawless outbreak. And he gathered around his throne eminent abilities, wherever he could find them, in the shop of the artisan, in the ranks of the army, and in the hut of the peasant. In France at this time, there was neither intelligence, religion, nor morality, among the masses. There was no reverence for law either human or divine. Napoleon expressed his high approval of the constitutional monarchy of England, and declared that to be the model upon which he would have the new government of France constructed. He judged that France needed an imposing throne, supported by an illustrious nobility and by a standing army of invincible power, with civil privileges cautiously and gradually disseminated among the people. And though in the pride of subsequent success he was disposed to gather all power into his own hands, few persons could have manifested during so long a reign, and through the temptations of so extraordinary a career, more unwavering consistency.
One evening he returned home from a walk, through the streets of the tumultuous metropolis, in which his ears had been deafened by the shouts of the people in favor of a new republican constitution. It was in the midst of the reign of terror, and the guillotine was drenched in blood. "How do you like the new constitution?" said a lady to him. He replied, hesitatingly, "Why, it is good in one sense, to be sure; but, all that is connected with carnage, is bad," and then, as if giving way to an outburst of sincere feeling, he exclaimed, emphatically, "No! no! no! away with this constitution. I do not like it!"
The republicanism of the United States is founded on the intelligence, the Christianity, and the reverence for law so generally prevalent throughout the whole community. And should that dark day ever come, in which the majority of the people will be unable to read the printed vote which is placed in their hands, and lose all reverence for earthly law, and believe not in God, before whose tribunal they must finally appear, it is certain that the republic can not stand for a day. Anarchy must ensue, from which there can be no refuge but in a military despotism.
In these days of pecuniary embarrassment Napoleon employed a bootmaker, a very awkward workman, but a man who manifested very kindly feelings toward him, and accommodated him in his payments. When dignity and fortune were lavished upon the first consul and the emperor, he was frequently urged to employ a more fashionable workman. But no persuasions could induce him to abandon the humble artisan who had been the friend of his youthful days. Instinctive delicacy told him that the man would be more gratified by being the shoemaker of the emperor, and that his interests would thus be better promoted than by any other favors he could confer.
A silversmith, in one of Napoleon's hours of need, sold him a dressing-case upon credit. The kindness was never forgotten. Upon his return from the campaign of Italy, he called, rewarded him liberally, and ever after employed him, and also recommended him to his marshals and to his court in general. In consequence the jeweler acquired an immense fortune.
Effects must have their causes. Napoleon's boundless popularity in the army and in the nation, was not the result of accident, the sudden outbreak of an insane delusion. These exhibitions of an instinctive and unstudied magnanimity won the hearts of the people as rapidly as his transcendent abilities and Herculean toil secured for him renown.
Napoleon with his political