I ran without delay to the house of M. Maret, the Secretary of State, who knew me and had shown me much kindness. "Get ready at once," he said to me; "a courier will be starting this evening or tomorrow morning." I returned in haste to Malmaison to announce my near departure to Madame Bonaparte. She instantly had a good post-chaise prepared for me, and Thiébaut (that was the name of the courier I was to accompany) was charged to provide horses for me all along the road. M. Maret gave me eight hundred francs for my travailing expenses. This sum, which I was far from expecting, made me open my eyes, never had I beheld myself so rich. At four o'clock in the morning a messenger came from Thiébaut to notify me that everything was ready. I went to his house, where the post-chaise was waiting, and we set off.

I travelled very agreeably, sometimes in the post-chaise and sometimes as courier; in the latter case I took Thiébaut's place and he mine. I expected to rejoin the First Consul at Martigny, but his march had been so rapid that I only came up with him at the convent of Mont Saint-Bernard. On our way we were continually passing regiments on the march, and officers and soldiers who were hastening to rejoin their several corps. Their enthusiasm was inexpressible. Those who had made the Italian campaigns, rejoiced at returning to so beautiful a country, those who did not know it as yet, were burning to see the battlefield immortalized by French valor and the genius of the hero still marching at their head. They all acted as if going to a feast, and climbed the Valais mountains, singing. It was eight o'clock in the morning when I arrived at headquarters. Pfister announced me, and I found the Commander-in-Chief in the great lower hall of the hospice. He was taking his breakfast standing, along with his staff. As soon as he caught sight of me: "Ah! there you are, then, you rogue! Why didn't you come with me?" said he. I excused myself, saying that, to my great regret, I had received a countermand, or at least had been left behind at the moment of departure. "Lose no time, my friend," he added, "eat a mouthful quickly; we are going to start.'' From that moment I was attached to the special service of the First Consul in the capacity of ordinary valet de chambre, that is, in my turn. This service gave me very little to do. M. Hambart, chief valet de chambre of the First Consul, was in the habit of dressing him from head to foot.

Directly after breakfast we began to descend the mountain. Several persons slid down on the snow, very much as people roll down from the top of the Russian mountains in the Beaujon garden. I followed their example. They called it making a sledge. The Commander-in-Chief also slid down an almost perpendicular glacier in this way. His guide was an alert and courageous peasant whose future the First Consul assured for the rest of his life. Some young soldiers who had gone astray in the snow had been discovered, almost dead with cold, by the dogs of the religious, and transported to the hospice, where they had received all imaginable care and been speedily returned to life. The First Consul manifested his gratitude to the good fathers for such active and generous charity. Before quitting the hospice, where tables loaded with provisions were prepared for the soldiers as they climbed up, he left the pious monks, in recompense for the hospitality he and his companions had received, a considerable sum of money, and the vouchers for an annuity for the support of their convent.

That same day we scaled Mont Albaredo, but as this passage would have been impracticable for the cavalry and artillery, they were sent by way of the town of Bard, under the batteries of the fort. The First Consul had ordered them to pass it by night and on the gallop, and had had the wheels of the artillery wagons and the horses' feet wrapped in straw. These precautions were not sufficient completely to prevent the Austrians from hearing our troops, and the cannons of the fort never stopped firing grape-shot. But, luckily, the houses of the town sheltered our soldiers from the fire of their enemies, and more than half the army traversed the city without having much to suffer. As to the household of the First Consul, commanded by General Gardanne, and of which I was one, it went around the Fort of Bard. May 23, we forded a torrent which flowed between the town and the fort, with the First Consul at our head. He climbed afterwards, followed by General Berthier and several officers, a footpath up the Albaredo which commanded the fort and city of Bard. There, turning his pocket-glass on the opposing batteries, against whose fire nothing protected him but some bushes, he found fault with the disposal of the troops made by the officer charged with commanding the siege, and ordered new ones, whose effect would be, as he said himself, to make the place fall into his hands within a very short time, and rid him, henceforward, of the trouble given him by this fort, which, said he, had hindered him from sleeping the two days he had spent at the convent of Saint-Maurice. Then, extending himself at the foot of a fir tree, he fell into a sound slumber, the army meanwhile continuing its passage. Refreshed by this brief instant of repose, the First Consul went down the mountain again, continued his march, and we went to bed at Yorée, where he was to pass the night. The brave General Lannes, who commanded the vanguard, acted after a fashion as our quartermaster, seizing by main force every place that barred the road. It was only a few hours after he had forced his way into Yorée that we entered it.

Such was this miraculous passage of Mont Saint-Bernard. Horses, cannons, artillery wagons, immense stores, were all dragged or carried over glaciers which seemed inaccessible, and by roads apparently impracticable even for a single man. The Austrian cannons succeeded no better than the snow and ice in arresting the French army; so true it is that the genius and perseverance of the First Consul had communicated themselves, so to say, even to the least of his soldiers, and inspired them with a courage and force the results of which will one day seem fabulous.

June 2, which was the morrow of the passage of the Tessin, and the very day of our entrance into Milan, the First Consul learned that the Fort of Bard had been taken the day previous. Hence his arrangement of troops had promptly produced its effect, and the route of communication by way of the Saint-Bernard was cleared.

The First Consul entered Milan without having encountered much resistance. The whole population had thronged about his passage and he was received with a thousand acclamations. The confidence of the Milanese was redoubled when they learned that he had promised the assembled clergy to maintain the Catholic worship and clergy as they were established, and had made them take an oath of fealty to the Cisalpine Republic.

The First Consul remained some days in this capital, and I had time to cement a more intimate acquaintance with my colleagues. They were, as I have said, MM. Hambart, Roustan, and Hébert. We relieved each other every twenty-four hours at noon precisely. My first care, as it has always been when I have had to live with new faces, was to observe, as closely as I could, the character and temper of my comrades, so as to draw conclusions from them which would afterwards regulate my conduct where they were concerned, and to know in advance pretty much what I might have to hope or to fear from their acquaintance.

Hambart had an unlimited devotion to the First Consul, whom he had followed to Egypt; but he unfortunately had a sombre and misanthropic character, which made him extremely cross and disagreeable. The favor enjoyed by Roustan had probably contributed not a little toward augmenting this gloomy disposition. In his species of mania, he imagined himself the object of an altogether special surveillance. As soon as his service was ended. he would shut himself up in his room, and pass his entire leisure in the most doleful solitude. When the First Consul was in good humor he would joke him about this unsociability, and laughingly call him Mademoiselle Hambart. "Well, Mademoiselle, what are you doing all alone this way in your room? You are reading some bad novels there, no doubt, some worthless old books treating of princesses abducted and held in surveillance by a barbarous giant." To this poor Hambart would reply with a churlish air: "General, you doubtless know better than I do what I am doing," intending by these words an allusion to the espionage by which he believed himself surrounded. In spite of this unhappy disposition, the First Consul was very good to him. At the time of the journey to the camp of Boulogne he refused to follow the Emperor, who retired him with the post of porter to the palace of Meudon. Here he committed a thousand follies. His end was lamentable. During the Hundred Days, after an audience with the Emperor, he was seized with one of his spells, and threw himself with such force on a kitchen knife that the blade protruded two inches through his back. As it was thought in those days that I had the Emperor's wrath to dread, the rumor spread that it was I who had committed suicide, and this tragic death was announced as mine in several journals.

Hébert, valet de chambre ordinaire, was a very gentle young man, but excessively timid. Like all the rest of the household, he had the most devoted affection for the First Consul. It happened one day, in Egypt, that the latter, who had never been able to shave himself (it was I, as I shall relate hereafter with some details, that taught him how to do so), called for Hébert in the absence of Hambart, who usually shaved him, to perform that duty. As it had sometimes happened to Hébert, as a result of his great timidity, to cut his master's chin, the latter, who had a pair of scissors in his hand, said to Hébert as he approached, holding his razor: "Take good care, you rogue; if you cut me, I will poke my scissors into your belly." This threat, made with an air that was almost serious, but which was really nothing but a joke, such as I have repeatedly noticed the Emperor loved to make, produced such an impression on Hébert that he was unable to finish his work. He was seized with a convulsive trembling, his razor fell from his hands, and it was useless for the Commander-in-Chief to stretch out his neck and repeat with a laugh: "Come, finish then, you coward!" Hébert was not only obliged to stop there, but from that time forward he was obliged to relinquish the office of barber. The Emperor disliked this excessive timidity in those who served him; but that did not prevent him, when he had the château of Rambouillet renovated, from giving the place of porter there to Hébert, who had asked for it.

Roustan, so well known under the name of the Emperor's Mameluke, belonged to a good Georgian family. Carried off at the age of six or seven years and taken to Cairo, he had been brought up among the young slaves who serve the Mamelukes while awaiting the time when they shall be old enough to enter that warlike militia themselves. The Sheik of Cairo, when giving General Bonaparte a magnificent Arabian steed, had also given him Roustan and Ibrahim, another Mameluke who was afterwards attached to Madame Bonaparte's service under the name of Ali. It is known that Roustan became an indispensable accompaniment on every occasion when the Emperor appeared in public. He was a part of every journey, every cortege, and, what was most honorable of all, of every battle. In the brilliant staff which followed the Emperor, he shone above all the rest by the glitter of his rich Oriental costume. The sight of him produced a prodigious effect, especially on the common people and in the provinces. He was supposed to be in high credit with the Emperor, and this arose, according to certain credulous persons, from the fact that Roustan had saved his master's life by throwing himself between him and the sabre of an enemy about to strike him. I believe that this was an error. The altogether special favor of which he was the object was sufficiently accounted for by the habitual kindness of His Majesty for all those who were in his service. Moreover, this favor did not extend beyond the circle of the domestic relations. M. Roustan married a young and pretty Frenchwoman, named Mademoiselle Douville, whose father was the Empress Josephine's valet de chambre. When, in 1814 and 1815, some journals reproached him somewhat because he had not followed to the end the fortunes of him to whom he had always professed the greatest devotion, he replied that the family ties he had contracted forbade his leaving France, and that he could do nothing to disturb the happiness he enjoyed in his domestic life.

Ibrahim took the name of Ali on passing into Madame Bonaparte's service. He was of a more than Arabian ugliness and had a wicked glance. I recall a little circumstance concerning him which happened at Malmaison, and may give a notion of his character. One day when we were playing on the lawn of the château, I unintentionally caused him to fall, while running. Furious at his tumble, he picked himself up, drew his poniard which he never laid aside, and sprang toward me to strike me with it. I had laughed at first, like every one else, at his accident, and amused myself by making him run. But warned by the cries of my comrades, and turning round to see how near he was, I perceived at once both his weapon and his anger. I stopped instantly, my foot firm and my eye fixed on his poniard, and I was lucky enough to avoid the thrust, although it just brushed against my breast. Furious in my own turn, as may be readily believed, I seized him by his wide trousers and threw him ten feet away from me into the Malmaison river, which was barely two feet deep. The plunge quieted his senses in the first place, and, besides, his poniard had sunk to the bottom of the water, which rendered my man much less redoubtable. But he began to scream so loudly in his disappointment that Madame Bonaparte heard him, and as she overflowed with kindness for her Mameluke, I was roundly scolded. Nevertheless this poor Ali had such an unsociable temper that he quarrelled with everybody in the house, and was finally sent to Fontainebleau as château messenger.

I return to our campaign. June 13, the First Consul slept at Torre-di-Galifolo, where he had established his headquarters. The march of the army had not slackened since the day we entered Milan. General Murat had crossed the Po and seized Plaisance. General Lannes, although pushing ahead with his brave vanguard, had delivered a bloody battle at Montebello, a name he was afterwards to render illustrious by bearing it. The very recent arrival of Desaix, who came from Egypt, overwhelmed the Commander-in-Chief with joy and also gave additional confidence to the soldiers, by whom the brave and modest Desaix was adored. The First Consul had received him with the most frank and cordial friendship, and they immediately spent three consecutive hours alone together. At the close of this conference an order of the day announced to the army that General Desaix would take command of the Boudet division. I heard several persons belonging to the suite of General Desaix remark that his patience and evenness of temper had been put to rude tests during his voyage by adverse winds, forced delays, the tediousness of quarantine, and especially by the malicious proceedings of the English, who had for some time kept him prisoner on their fleet, in sight of the coast of France, notwithstanding that he was the bearer of a passport signed in Egypt by the English authorities, as a result of a capitulation reciprocally accepted. His resentment against them, therefore, was of the most ardent sort, and he said he keenly regretted that the enemies he would have to fight were not English. In spite of the simplicity of his tastes and habits, nobody was more athirst for glory than this brave General. All his wrath against the English sprang from the fear he had that he would not arrive in time to reap new laurels. He arrived but too soon, to find a glorious death, but alas! one so premature!

The celebrated battle of Marengo was delivered June 14. It began early and lasted all day. I remained at the quarters, with all the General's household. We were in a manner within reach of the cannon of the battle-field, and contradictory reports were all the time arriving. One would represent the battle as entirely lost, the next would give us the victory; there was a moment when the increase in the number of our wounded and the redoublement of the Austrian firing would make us believe for an instant that we were beaten; then all of a sudden some one would come to tell us that this apparent defeat was merely the result of a bold manœuvre of the First Consul, and that a charge made by General Desaix had assured the winning of the battle. But the victory cost France and the heart of the First Consul dear. Desaix, struck by a ball, had fallen dead on the instant, and the grief of his men having only exasperated their courage, they had routed the enemy at the point of the bayonet, the latter having been badly cut up already by a brilliant charge of General Kellermann.

The First Consul slept on the field of battle. In spite of the decisive victory just gained, he was full of sadness, and in the evening, before Hambart and me, he said several things which proved the profound affliction he experienced from the death of General Desaix: "That France had just lost one of her best defenders and he his best friend; that no one knew all the virtue there was in Desaix's heart and what genius in his head." Thus he consoled himself for his grief by eulogizing to everybody the hero who had just died on the field of honor. "My brave Desaix," he said again, " had always desired to die like this." Then he added, almost with tears in his eyes: "But need death have been so quick to grant his prayer!" There was not a soldier in our victorious army who did not share so justifiable an affliction. Rapp and Savary, the General's aides-de-camp, remained in the bitterest despair beside the body of their chief, whom, in spite of his youth, they called their father, more to express his inexhaustible kindness toward them than on account of the gravity of his character. As a consequence of his respect for his friend's memory, the Commander-in-Chief, although his staff was complete, attached these young officers to himself as aides-de-camp.

Commander Rapp (that was his rank then) was at this time what he has been all his life, good, full of courage, and universally beloved. His frankness, though sometimes a little rude, was pleasing to the Emperor. I have heard the latter eulogize his aide-de-camp a thousand times; he always called him my brave Rapp. This worthy General was not lucky in battles, and seldom took part in an affair without receiving some wound. Since I am already anticipating the course of events, I will say here that in Russia, on the eve of the battle of Moscow, I heard the Emperor say to General Rapp, who had arrived from Dantzic: "Attention, my hero; we are going to fight to-morrow; look out for yourself, fortune does not spoil you." "That is one of the perquisites of the trade," replied the General. "Rely on it, Sire, I will not do less than my best."

M. Savary maintained toward the First Consul that ardent zeal and boundless devotion which had attached him to General Desaix. If he lacked any one of General Rapp's qualities, it was certainly not that of bravery. Of all the men who surrounded the Emperor, not one was more absolutely devoted to his slightest will. I shall doubtless have occasion, during the course of these Memoirs, to recall some traits of this unexampled devotion, for which the Duke de Rovigo was so magnificently rewarded; but it is just to say that he at least did not wound the hand that had elevated him, and that he gave to the very end, and after the end of his former master (it is thus that it pleased him to style the Emperor), the not very well followed example of gratitude.

A decree of the government, in the following June, provided that the body of Desaix should be transported to the convent of the great Saint-Bernard, and a monument for him raised there in attestation of the regrets of France, and especially of those of the First Consul, in a spot where he had covered himself with immortal glory. 1

To come back to Desaix (it is to come very far back), the statue raised to him on the Place des Victoires was removed under the Empire by order of the government. As to the bust which may still be seen on the Place Dauphine, it would be difficult to imagine anything more shabby, blackened up, or neglected. That is the way that Desaix's bust is treated. On the other hand, Pichegru has statues of bronze. Return to paragraph text.