According to etiquette the Emperor signed the marriage contracts of all his colonels, but he rarely paid this honour to officers of a lower rank; if they wished for it they had to acquaint the Minister for War with their reasons. I based my application on the fact of the Emperor having said to me just before Marengo, and soon after my father's death, 'If you behave well, and follow in his footsteps, it will be I who will act as your father.' Since that day I had been eight times wounded, and was conscious of having always done my duty. Clarke, the minister, a rough man, who nearly always rejected such applications, admitted that mine deserved consideration, and promised to present it. In a few days I was ordered to present myself at Compiègne and bring the notary with the marriage contract. When we arrived, the Emperor was out coursing—not that he cared much for this exercise, but he rightly thought that he ought to imitate the old French kings. The matter had therefore to be put off till the next day, at which the notary, who had business in Paris, was much distressed; but there was no help for it. Next day we were presented to the Emperor, and my marriage contract was signed in the room where, twenty years later, I was often on duty with the Orleans princes.

In these short interviews Napoleon was most affable. He asked several questions of the notary: inquired if the young lady was pretty, what was her dowry, and so on; and when I took leave he said that he would like me to have a good post, and that he would, before long, reward me for my good service. Then I did think that I was as good as colonel; and my hopes rose higher yet when, as I left the room, General Mouton, Count of Lobau, assured me that my name was on the list of field-officers who were to receive regiments, an assurance all the more welcome that the Count of Lobau was in charge of that department of the War Office which dealt with promotions. I returned to Paris, therefore, with a joyful heart, and was married on November 11.

Happy in the bosom of my family, I was daily awaiting my commission as colonel, when I was informed by the minister that I had been appointed as major to the 1st Mounted Chasseurs, then in garrison at the other end of Germany. This was a severe blow. As a major I had already been thrice wounded and served two campaigns, and it was hard to have to serve again with that rank, nor, after what the Emperor and the Count of Lobau had said, could I understand why I was thus treated. However, the latter soon explained it.

After the promotion of Pelet and Casablanca, I was the senior major on Masséna's staff. But M. Barain, the artillery captain, whom I have mentioned as having lost an arm at Wagram, and who, though he had been promoted to major with a view to his service in the arsenals, had insisted on accompanying Masséna to Portugal, possessed relations whose influence with the marshal was considerable. Through his intervention Masséna was persuaded to recommend Barain for promotion, and the Emperor, yielding with some hesitation to the same influence, made him colonel.

If I have seemed to make too much of my disappointment over this affair it must be remembered that at that time the commanders of regiments were important persons. I have known several colonels decline the rank of general, and ask as a special favour to be left at the head of their regiments.

From Masséna I received the following letter, as my sole reward for three campaigns served under him and three wounds received:

PARIS, November 24,1811.

MY DEAR MARBOT,—I forward your commission, which has been sent to me. As you know, I asked for your promotion; and it is a matter of twofold regret to me that I failed to obtain it, and that I am losing your services. I appreciate them highly, and, so far as you are concerned, they are independent of the rewards which they entitle you to claim, and will always earn you the esteem of those under whom you may happen to serve. You may be sure of mine, and equally sure of my regret and my sincere attachment,

MASSÉNA.

I did not expect to see him again; but the maréchale wishing, as she wrote, to make my wife's acquaintance, invited us to dinner. Of her I have nothing but good to say, ever since I met her at Antibes, her native place, on my way back from Genoa; so I accepted. Masséna came up to me with fresh expressions of regret, and proposed that he should apply for my nomination as officer of the Legion of Honour. I replied that, as he could do nothing for me when I was on his staff, I would not trouble him further, and would try to secure my promotion for myself; and so slipped off into the crowd of guests. I never met the marshal again, though I continued to visit his wife and son, who were both my very good friends.

I may as well give here some details of Masséna's life. As is usually the case with famous men, his biography has been very incorrectly written. André Masséna was born May 6, 1758, at Turbia, near Monaco. His grandfather, a respectable tanner, had three sons, Jules, Augustin, and Marcel. The two elder went to Nice and set up a soap-factory; Marcel entered the French service; Jules died poor and of his five children, three, including André, were taken up by the uncle, Augustin, who, after having them taught to read and write, employed them in his soap-works. André, however, was of too adventurous a disposition to settle to business, and at the age of thirteen ran away from his uncle's house, and went to sea as a cabin-boy in a merchantman accompanied by a cousin named Bavastro, who became in the wars of the Empire the most famous privateer in the Mediterranean. As for André, two years of hardship disgusted him with a sailor's life, and in 1775 he enlisted as a private in the Royal Italian regiment, where his uncle Marcel was sergeant-major. I knew this Marcel Masséna in 1800, when he was commandant of the fortress of Antibes. He was a serious and able man, much esteemed by his colonel, M. Chauvet d'Arlon. The colonel kindly extended his patronage to André, put him in the way of acquiring a fair knowledge of French, and in a few years promoted him to regimental staff-sergeant. He even held out to him the hope of becoming sub-lieutenant in the mounted police; but André was tired of waiting, and left the army when his time expired. On returning to civil life he rejoined his cousin Bavastro; and the two together carried on a smuggling business on a large scale, both by sea and across the land frontier. In this way Masséna acquired a thorough knowledge of the mountain paths, which was of great service to him later on, when he commanded troops in those districts. The hard life of a smuggler, with its constant need for keeping an eye on the movements of the preventive men and concealing his own, insensibly produced in Masséna the intelligence, watchfulness, and activity so essential to a good officer. Having amassed a little capital he married a French woman, Mlle Lamarre, daughter of a surgeon at Antibes, and was settled in that town, doing a small trade in olive oil and dried fruits, when the Revolution supervened. Then, under the impulse of his military tastes, he left his wife and his shop and enlisted in the volunteers of the Var. His knowledge of military theory and practice soon earned him the post of adjutant, and when war broke out his courage and activity quickly raised him to the rank of colonel and then of major-general. He commanded the camp called des milles fourches, which comprised the artillery company commanded by Captain Napoleon Buonaparte, under whom he was in after days to serve in Italy. At the siege of Toulon he distinguished himself by taking Forts Lartigues and St. Catherine, earning his promotion to lieutenant-general, and after the capture of the town returned to the Army of Italy, and was conspicuous in all the engagements between the Mediterranean coast and Piedmont.

Intelligent, restlessly active, and of undaunted courage, Masséna had become a famous man, but a serious mistake committed early in the campaign of 1796 went near to ruin his whole career. General Bonaparte had just taken the chief command of the army, which brought his former superior, Masséna, under his orders. Masséna was commanding the advanced guard, and had beaten an Austrian corps near Cairo. Learning that the enemy's officers had left a good supper all ready prepared in a neighbouring village inn, he and some of his officers thought they would take advantage of this windfall. They left the division encamped on the top of a high hill; but meantime, the Austrians having recovered from their alarm returned to the attack at daybreak, and charged the French corps. Our men, though taken by surprise, defended themselves bravely, but as their general was not there to lead them, they were pushed back to the edge of the plateau, and would certainly have been heavily defeated by the superior number of the enemy. Just then, Masséna, having made his way through the Austrian skirmishers, hurried up by a path which he knew of old, and appeared in front of his troops. In their indignation they received him with well-deserved hootings, but the general, little perturbed, resumed the command, and marched forward with his division to rejoin the army. It was then seen that one battalion, which had been posted the day before on an isolated spur, had no practicable road by which they could descend without going a long way round, and exposing themselves to the enemy's fire. Masséna made his way alone, climbing the steep slope on hands and knees, towards this battalion, and on reaching it addressed the men, assuring them that if they would do as he did, he would get them out of their fix. Then, ordering them to sheath bayonets, he sat down on the snow at the edge of the slope, and, pushing himself with his hands, slid down to the bottom. The soldiers, shouting with laughter, did the same thing, and in the twinkling of an eye the whole battalion was out of range of the astonished Austrians. This way of descending, much like that which the Swiss peasants call glissading, 1had certainly never before been employed by regular troops. Extraordinary as it may seem, the story is none the less true; I have not only been assured of it by various generals and other officers who were then in Masséna's division, but nine years afterwards, when Marshal Augereau received the Emperor and all the marshals at La Houssage, I heard them chaffing Masséna about the new mode of retreat which he used on that occasion. It is stated that on the day when Masséna employed this comical expedient, to which he had been well accustomed in his smuggling days, General Bonaparte, thinking that as a very young commander-in-chief it was his duty to show especial severity towards officers who failed in their duty, gave orders that Masséna should he tried by court-martial on a charge of having abandoned his post, which would involve the penalty of death, or at least, dismissal. But just as he was about to be put under arrest, the battle of Montenotte began, and after the complete rout of the Austrian army, to which Masséna so largely contributed, there could not well be any talk of trying him. So his fault was forgotten, and he was able to continue his glorious career.

He distinguished himself at Lodi, Milan, Verona, Arcola, but above all, at Rivoli, and his success gained him from General Bonaparte the famous nickname, 'The spoilt child of victory.' After the preliminaries of peace had been signed at Lisbon, he was commissioned to take the draft to the Government, and was received in Paris with the strongest marks of admiration. But his triumph was tarnished by his always prevailing fault of extreme avarice. General Duphot, French ambassador at Rome, had been assassinated; the task of taking vengeance was entrusted to part of the Army of Italy, under the command, at first, of Berthier, and when he was called away to Egypt, of Masséna. Very soon after the arrival of that general, the army began to complain that it was in a state of destitution, without clothing or food, while those who had the management were drawing millions from the Papal States and living in luxury. At length, a deputation of one hundred officers was sent to demand from Masséna an account of his expenditure; but whether he had no defence to offer, or refused to recognize an act of insubordination, he declined to clear himself, and as the troops persisted, found himself obliged to leave Rome, and surrender the command of the army. On his return to France he published a justificatory statement, addressed to his comrades, but neither they nor the public accepted it; and his annoyance was increased when Bonaparte started for Egypt without replying to a letter which he wrote him on the subject.

However, when war again broke out with the coalition formed by England, Russia, and Austria, Masséna's military talents could not well be spared, and the Directory lost no time in putting him in command of the force to which the defence of Switzerland was to be entrusted. After some considerable successes, he was beaten with loss by the Austrians, in consequence of an over-hasty attack on the defile of Feldkirch. At the same time the Army of the Rhine, under Jourdan, was defeated by the Archduke Charles at Stockach, and that of Italy, at Novi, by Souvaroff, General Joubert being killed. The Austrians were threatening Alsace and Lorraine; Souvaroff was crossing the St. Gothard into Switzerland; and France, on the point of being invaded in two quarters, felt that her only hope was in Masséna, nor was her hope disappointed.

Bernadotte and the Directory impatiently sent messenger after messenger with orders to Masséna to give battle; 2but he, knowing that the defeat of his army would mean irretrievable ruin to the country, allowed no threats of dismissal to move him. Like Fabius or Catinat, he would not strike till he could strike decisively, taking advantage of some opportunity when he might for a moment have the superiority. The moment came when the incapable General Korsakoff had imprudently advanced on Zurich with 50,000 Russians and Bavarians, there to await Souvaroff, who was bringing 55,000 men from Italy. Flinging himself like a lion on Korsakoff before Souvaroff could come up, Masséna surprised him in his camp at Zurich, beat him, and broke up his troops, driving them with immense loss to the Rhine. Then moving upon Souvaroff he defeated him as he had done his lieutenant. In these engagements 30,000 of the enemy were killed or taken, fifteen stand of colours and sixty guns captured, the independence of Switzerland confirmed, and France saved from invasion. Masséna's fame was never so high nor so honourable, and he and his army were thrice thanked by the Legislature.

Meanwhile the Government and the country, torn by factions, were throwing on each other the responsibility alike for internal disorder and reverses abroad. The Directory was tottering under the contempt of the public, and it was clear that things could not go on in the present fashion. Then came the 18th Brumaire, and Bonaparte as First Consul headed the new Government, Masséna, a nullity in politics, took no hand in this revolution, and had no great love for the new state of things, but accepted the command of the Army of Italy, which my father, as senior general of division, had held momentarily on the death of General Championnet. So careless had the Directory been that Masséna found his army in utter misery, I have already mentioned the efforts which he made to put the troops on a good footing in face of the destitution which then prevailed along the Genoese coast; and I need not tell that part of my story over again. I will merely say that by his courage physical and moral, and his knowledge of the art of war, Masséna covered himself with glory. He again saved France from invasion, when by the obstinacy of his defence of Genoa, he allowed the First Consul time to concentrate at Dijon the reserve army with which he crossed the Alps, and beat the Austrians at Marengo. After that victory, the command of the army was left in Masséna's hands, but the old complaints soon broke out again. Remonstrances were heard from all sides, requisitions were levied on various pretexts, and yet the troops were not paid. On hearing of the state of affairs, the First Consul suddenly, and without explanation, removed Masséna from the command. Returning then into private life, he showed his dissatisfaction by refusing to vote for Bonaparte's appointment as Consul for life, nor would he show himself at the new court. None the less the First Consul gave him a sword of honour, inscribed with all the victories in which he had borne a share. Also when he seized the imperial crown, he included Masséna in his first list of marshals, and named him Grand Cordon of the Legion of Honour. On this Masséna's opposition ceased; he voted for the Empire, and attended the ceremonies of consecration and coronation at the Tuileries.

When France was in 1805 threatened for the third time by a coalition, the duty fell to Masséna of defending North Italy against the Archduke Charles. He not only saved Lombardy, but he attacked the enemy, and drove him beyond the Tagliamento; penetrating even to Carniola, where, by forcing the Archduke to halt, and face him every day, he delayed him till he was too late to save Vienna, or join the Russian army which was beaten at Austerlitz. The Emperor, however, did not seem to appreciate Masséna's services in this campaign very highly. He accused him of not acting with his wonted vigour—but this did not prevent him from being shortly sent to conquer the kingdom of Naples.

In a month the French had occupied the whole country, except the fortress of Gaeta, and this Masséna took after a vigorously sustained siege. During his attack on that town, he experienced a very keen annoyance, which he never got over. An immense sum which, he asserted, belonged to him, was confiscated by the Emperor. The story is curious enough to be worth telling.

Under the conviction that the best way to compel the English to sue for peace was to destroy their commerce by forbidding the importation of their goods into the Continent, Napoleon used to have these goods seized and burnt in every country subject to his authority; that is, in more than half of Europe. But the love of gold is powerful, and trade is cunning; and thus a system of smuggling without risk had been devised. The method was that arrangements were made with English merchants under which they sent out vessels to be captured by our privateers, who brought them into some of the numerous ports between Pomerania and the Bay of Naples which were occupied by our troops. The next act was to unlade the packages and land them so as to escape confiscation; but this had already been provided for. The extent of coast line being too great to be watched throughout by regular preventive officers, the duty was done by soldiers under the orders of the general in command of the kingdom or province. An authorization from one of these was sufficient to pass in the bales of goods, and after this the merchants dealt with the ‘protector.' This was called a ‘licence.' 3This new style of trade began as early as 1806, when Bernadotte was occupying Hamburg and part of Denmark. That marshal acquired by this means considerable sums, and whenever he wished to testify his satisfaction with any person, he would grant him a licence, and the receiver would sell it to some merchant. This practice gradually extended, and even reached the Emperor's court, where chamberlains and ladies-in-waiting got the ministers to give them licences. It was kept from Napoleon's knowledge, but he found it out, or suspected it. In order, however, not to interfere too abruptly with the habits of the conquered countries, he tolerated the abuse outside France, provided that it was carried on with secrecy; but strange to say of so great a man, as soon as he learnt that anyone had carried his illicit games too far, he made him disgorge. Thus, on hearing that the commissary Michaux, head of the administrative department in Bernadotte's army, had lost 300,000 francs at one sitting in a gambling house at Paris, he ordered an aide-de-camp to write to him saying that the 'Invalides' was in want of cash, and bidding him pay up 300,000 francs. Michaux did so without loss of time, out of his profits on licences.

You may suppose that Masséna had not been behindhand in this business. In partnership with General Solignac, his chief of staff, he flooded every port in the kingdom of Naples with licences. The Emperor, hearing that he had deposited three millions with a banker at Leghorn, and General Solignac 600,000 at the same time, wrote to the marshal, asking for the loan of a million, and requesting 200,000 from the chief of the staff; just a third of the profits which each had made, so that as you see he did not shear them too close. But at sight of this new kind of draft, Masséna, shrieking as though his bowels were being torn out, replied to Napoleon that he was the poorest of the marshals, had a numerous family to maintain, and was over head and ears in debt; he regretted, therefore, that he could not send him anything. General Solignac made a similar answer, and both were congratulating themselves on having thus taken in the Emperor, when the son of the Leghorn banker arrived posthaste, announcing that the inspector of the French treasury had called on his father, escorted by the commissary of police and several gendarmes, ordered the cash book to be handed over to him, and given a receipt for the 3,600,000 francs paid in by the marshal and General Solignac, adding that this sum belonged to the army and had been entrusted on deposit to those two personages. The Emperor, he said, ordered it to remitted at once, either in specie or negotiable bills, and the receipts given to Masséna and Solignac might be cancelled. The seizure had been made in due legal form, and the banker, who, indeed, lost nothing by it, was powerless to oppose it. He fell ill, but did not venture to address any remonstrance to the Emperor, who was at that time in Poland and summoned him. After the Peace of Tilsit the title of Duke of Rivoli and a pension of 300,000 francs were the reward of his services, but they never consoled him for what he had lost at Leghorn. In spite of his cautious habits he was heard sometimes to cry: 'I was fighting in his service, and he was cruel enough to take away my little savings which I had invested at Leghorn.' 4

I have already related the glorious part which the marshal took in the campaign of 1809. To reward his conduct at the battles of Essling and Wagram, the Emperor made him Prince of Essling with a further pension of 500,000 francs, in addition to the 300,000 which he had as Duke of Rivoli, and 200,000 as marshal and commander-in-chief. The new-made prince did not increase his expenditure by a halfpenny.

The campaigns in Spain and Portugal were Masséna's last, and as I have related, they were not fortunate. His mind was not what it was, so that these two campaigns added nothing to his glory, but rather diminished his reputation as a general, and the 'spoilt child of victory' experienced reverses when he might and ought to have been victorious.

Masséna was lean and spare, below the middle height; he had a highly expressive Italian face. The bad points in his character were want of candour, a tendency to bear malice, harshness, and avarice. He had much natural ability, but his adventurous youth and low origin never gave him a chance of studying, and he was totally lacking in what is called cultivation. He was a born general; his courage and tenacity did the rest. In the best days of his military career he saw accurately, decided promptly, and never let himself be cast down by reverses. As he grew old he pushed caution to the point of timidity, in fear of compromising the reputation he had earned. He hated reading, and thus had no knowledge of what had been written about war; it was an inspiration with him, and Napoleon judged him rightly when he said in his memoirs that when Masséna arrived on the field of battle he did not know what he should do, and circumstances decided him.

It is a mistake to represent Masséna, as some have done, as a stranger to flattery, speaking the truth to the Emperor, frankly, and even, indeed, a little brusquely. Under his rough hide Masséna was a cunning courtier. The following was a curious instance of this. One day the Emperor, accompanied by several marshals, among them Masséna, was shooting in the forest of Fontainebleau, and fired at a pheasant. The shot, badly aimed, went in Masséna's direction, and one pellet destroyed his left eye. No one but the Emperor had fired at the moment, and he was certainly the involuntary author of the accident; but Masséna, realising that his eye was gone and it would do him no good to call attention to the clumsiness which had been the cause of his wound, while the Emperor would be grateful to him for diverting attention from himself, attacked Prince Berthier, who had not yet fired, for his reckless shooting. Napoleon and all those present quite understood this courtier-like discretion, and every attention was paid to Masséna by his master.

With all his avarice, the conqueror of Zurich would have given half his fortune to have been born in France, and not on the left bank of the Var. He disliked nothing so much as the Italian termination of his name. He always wrote e for a in his signature, and when he spoke to his eldest son called him Massène. But the public never accepted the change, and in spite of him who had made it famous the name of Masséna prevailed.

The campaign in Portugal affected Masséna's health so much that he was obliged to rest and recruit at Nice. He passed the whole of 1812 there, but when Napoleon, on his return from Russia, found it necessary to use all his resources, considering that Masséna's name might yet be of service, he employed him as governor of the 8th military division. When the allies invaded France in 1814, Masséna, who had, indeed, few troops at his disposal, did nothing to check their advance. On April 15 he made his submission to the Duke of Angoulême, who created him commander of the order of St. Louis, but did not make him a peer of France, on the plea that he was born a foreigner and had not been naturalized, as if the victories of Rivoli and Zurich, the defence of Genoa, and a whole list of glorious battles in the cause of France were not as valid as any papers of naturalization. The affront thus done to Masséna produced a very bad effect on public opinion and that of the army, and had as much to do as anything with the natural irritation against Louis XVIII.'s Government and the consequent return of the Emperor. When he landed on March 1, 1815, and marched towards Paris at the head of a thousand grenadiers, Masséna was taken by surprise and much perplexed by the unforeseen event. He tried to stem the torrent by collecting some regiments of the line, and calling out the National Guard of Marseilles; but on learning that the Duke of Angoulême had been forced to capitulate at La Palud, Masséna sent his son to Louis XVIII. to let him know that he must not count on him any longer. Rallying to the Imperial Government, he hoisted the tricolor flag on April 10 throughout his division, and locked up the Prefect of the Var, who was still for holding out. By this conduct Masséna satisfied neither side; the Emperor summoned him to Paris, and gave him a pretty cold reception.

When Napoleon committed the immense blunder of abdicating a second time in consequence of the battle of Waterloo, the chamber of representatives, which he had made the mistake of summoning before joining the army, seized the power and flamed a provisional government. Its first act was to assign to Masséna the command of the National Guard of Paris. He was too infirm to be able to perform the duties in person, but they wished to have a name which might stimulate the civil inhabitants and induce them to aid the army in the defence of the capital. Fouche's intrigues sowed discord among the members of the provisional government, and the plans of defence having been submitted to a military committee Masséna gave the opinion that Paris could not resist. Consequently an armistice was concluded, and the French army retired behind the Loire and was then disbanded. To punish Masséna for having deserted his cause, Louis XVIII. included him among Marshal Ney's judges, in the hope that, under the influence of personal dislike, he would condemn his unhappy colleague and thus stain his own illustrious name. He attempted, however, to decline, giving as a reason the disagreement which had existed between himself and Ney in Portugal. When this plea was rejected he joined that portion of the court which voted for sending Ney before the chamber of peers. They hoped thus to save him; but they would have done better if they had had the courage to try him themselves and acquit him. When Ney had been condemned by the peers and shot, so far from appeasing the rage of the royalist faction, his blood made them implacable, and they soon began to persecute Masséna himself. The people of Marseilles, whose benefactor he had been, denounced him before the Chamber of Deputies for peculation. There was no ground for the accusation, for he had been guilty of no exactions in Provence, and so the majority of the 'ideal' chamber, celebrated as it was for its hatred towards the famous men of the Empire, rejected the petition of the Marseilles people with contempt. It was at this sitting that Manuel, since become famous, first came into notice by his warm defence of Masséna. From that time onwards the marshal lived in retirement at his château of Rueil, and ended his glorious career in misfortune and solitude on April 4, 1817. He was fifty-nine years old.

When he died he had not yet received from the Government his new marshal's baton, and, as it is the custom to place this on a marshal's coffin, his son-in-law, General Reille requested Clarke, Duke of Feltre, the Minister of War, to forward it. But Clarke had become a furious legitimist, and made no reply to this fair request. Then General Reille let the court know that if the marshal's baton was not sent for the father-in-law's funeral, he would place conspicuously on the coffin the one which the Emperor had given him in former days, whereupon the Government agreed to send the emblem.

I have noted many blemishes in the life of this famous warrior, but they are covered by his renown and his signal services to France, and Masséna's memory will go down to posterity as that of one of the greatest captains of an age so fertile in illustrious soldiers.