Napoleonic Literature
Memoirs of Constant - Vol. I
Preface to the English Edition
By Imbert de Saint-Amand
HISTORY is, of all branches of literature, that which has made the most progress. Like science it now rests upon both analysis and synthesis and disdains details no more than generalities. The time is past when historians studied neither the character of their personages nor what one might call the stage decorations amid which the events treated of took place. Psychology and local color have regained their rights. History was formerly a simple monochrome; it is now a splendid fresco. One of the causes of this happy change is the extreme importance that memoirs have come to have. Their authors are just so many ocular and auricular witnesses who defile in turn before their contemporaries or before posterity, and whose depositions, reciprocally rectified, furnish public opinion with the means of rendering its judgments upon men and things. Thanks to memoirs, the remark of Michelet is realized: "History is the resurrection of the dead." It is memoirs that have prompted it to use at the same time the telescope and the magnifying-glass. The passion for detail has nothing puerile about it. The infinitely little play a great rôle in nature and in history, as Pasteur and Taine have demonstrated.

In proportion as the popularity of the novel diminishes, that of memoirs increases. We begin to realize that there are no inventions so impressive as reality. Could a novelist, however great his genius, ever find as extraordinary, as pathetic, and as attractive material as the destinies of Marie-Antoinette and Napoleon? What character imagined by Alexandre Dumas or by Balzac can be compared with the Martyr Queen or with the modern Charlemagne? We witness at this moment in the New World as in the Old the triumph of what might be called Napoleonic literature. Chateaubriand has said in his Mémoires d'Outre Tombe: " The world belongs to Bonaparte—that which the spoiler could not finish conquering, his fame usurps. Living, he failed of the world; dead, he possesses it." One may add that in no legend is there more poetry than there is in his history. When the Shah of Persia came to Paris under the presidency of Marshal MacMahon, the first visit of the Asiatic sovereign was to the tomb of the Emperor at the Invalides, and before descending into the crypt he respectfully took off his sword as if he dared not appear armed before the shade of the great man. What country of the universe is there in which the echo of this magic name Napoleon has not vibrated. The giant of battles, the victor of Austerlitz, the vanquished of Waterloo, the captive of Saint-Helena is the principal personage of the epoch, which is itself but a series of phenomenal wonders. No century has produced a man so extraordinary, so great an artist in prestige and glory.

M. George Duruy, son of the celebrated historian, has recently written in the introduction to the Memoirs of Barras which he has just published: "The Emperor continues tranquilly to dominate the century, on the threshold of which his colossal figure stands. Such is the statue of Memnon at the entrance of the Egyptian desert. Sacrilegious hands have tried to disfigure the calm visage of granite which the centuries had respected, but so long as men shall exist they will pause pensive at the foot of the giant image and measure their littleness by its grandeur. Thus will posterity stand before the sphinx with enigmatic and sovereign countenance— Napoleon." The events in which the man of destiny took part present themselves to our mind in proportions as epic and as grandiose as if they dated back to the most distant ages, and the heroes of the Empire have already become lyric personages like the legionaries of Cæsar or the Knights of Charlemagne. Since the striking success of the Memoirs of General Marbot which, amusing as a novel, are sublime as an epic poem, the popularity of all publications relating to the imperial epoch is continually increasing. Unpublished memoirs like those of General Thiébault, of Marshal Castellane, of Planal de la Faye, are printed. Old memoirs are republished, such as those of General de Ségur, of Bourrienne, of Baron de Méneval, and of Constant, the valet de chambre of Napoleon I.; and the resurrection of these works which seemed forgotten produces perhaps a greater effect than did their first appearance.

The Memoirs of Constant, the reprint of which has just been very favorably received in France, merit, we believe, the honor of being translated and published in the United States. No man had a nearer view of Napoleon I.; and no one has given more exact details regarding the great man's character. M. Frédéric Masson, in his interesting books, entitled, one, Napoléon et les Femmes, and the other, Napoléon chez lui: La Journée de l'Empereur aux Tuileries, and M. Lévy in his work, Napoléon intime, have borrowed largely from the Memoirs of Constant, and the modest but authentic account of the Emperor's valet de chambre will never be disdained by any historian.

Constant was born December 22,1778, at Péruelz, a city which became French upon the reunion of Belgium with France and which was then included in the department of Jemmapes. His father, who had been the Prince de Croi's maître d'hotel, kept at the baths of Saint-Amand, an establishment where persons lodged who came for the waters. The future valet de chambre of Napoleon was brought up by the liberality of the Count de Lure, head of one of the oldest families of Valenciennes, who had him given a good education on an estate situated near Tours. Toward the end of 1799 Constant entered the service of Eugene de Beauharnais. A month after he was attached to the household of the wife of General Bonaparte, and one day at the end of March, 1800, the First Consul glanced at him during the dinner and, after having examined and scrutinized him from head to foot, said to him: "Young man, should you like to follow me on the campaign?" Constant replied with much emotion that he would like nothing better. From the departure of Napoleon for the campaign of Marengo, whither he followed him, to the departure from Fontainebleau, where he was obliged to leave him, that is, during fourteen consecutive years, he was only absent from him on two occasions, one of three and the other of seven or eight days. Outside of these extremely brief furloughs, the latter of them rendered necessary by his health, he was as inseparable from the Emperor as his shadow.

Constant was perfectly right in saying: "Nothing that relates to great men is to be disdained. Posterity is eager to know the smallest circumstance connected with their kind of life, their characteristic traits, their tastes, their most trivial habits. I remember," he adds, "that I never had so much pleasure at the theatre as the day I saw for the first time the charming play, the Deux Pages. Fleury, who played the part of Frederick the Great, rendered the slow walk, the abrupt speech, the brusque movements, and even the near-sightedness of the monarch so perfectly, that from the moment of his entrance the whole house broke out into applause. . . . I feel some pride, I confess, at the thought that these Memoirs may succeed in giving something of the pleasure I have endeavored to depict here, and that in a future, no doubt still distant but nevertheless certain to come about, the artist, who wishes to make the greatest man of this time live and move again before the public, will be compelled, if he desires to be a faithful imitator, to form himself upon the portrait which better than any one I am able to sketch from nature."

The resemblance of the portrait of the Emperor by Constant is, we believe, perfect. The valet de chambre dissembles neither the weaknesses nor the defects of his master, but he admires sincerely the genius of the sovereign and the winning qualities of the man. "It has been maintained," says he, "that no man is a hero to his valet. I beg to be allowed to be of a different opinion. However near at hand one was accustomed to see the Emperor, he was always a hero, and there was also much to be gained by seeing in him the man, intimately and minutely. At a distance one could feel only the prestige of his fame and power; approaching nearer one enjoyed still further, with surprise, all the charm of his conversation, all the simplicity of his family life, and, I do not hesitate to add, the habitual benevolence of his character."

The Memoirs of Constant contradict these lines addressed to Napoleon by Lamartine:

Napoleon was not the impassive man, with heart of bronze, that the poet of the Méditations repre sents. "I can only speak," says Constant, "of the hero en déshabillé, and at that time he was always kind and patient, rarely unjust. He took a real interest in you and received with pleasure and good nature the attentions of those he liked. The hardness of the Emperor and his brutality towards women are part of the thousand and one calumnies of which he has been the object. He was not always galant, but he was never coarse; he professed the greatest veneration for a woman of exemplary conduct, made much of self-respecting family circles, and disliked cynicism whether in behavior or in language." Let us add that the testimony of Bourrienne and of the Baron de Méneval, who were both secretaries of the great man, agrees thoroughly with that of Constant. Bourrienne says: "Bonaparte was susceptible, kind, accessible to pity; he loved children greatly, and it is rare that a bad man has an inclination for children; in the daily routine of private life he was full of good nature and indulgence for human weakness." The Baron de Méneval thus expressed himself: "In the midst of his family Napoleon appeared truly a father. There was an inexpressible charm about this abnegation of his grandeur. I could not get over my surprise at seeing this simplicity of conduct in a man who, from a distance, seemed so imposing. I expected rudenesses and unevenness of temper. Instead I found Napoleon patient, easy to live with, in nowise exacting, of a gaiety that was not seldom boisterous and jesting, and sometimes of a winning good humor."

We may consider this passage of Constant's Memoirs as their summing up: "I must make the avowal that only after having left the Emperor's service did I comprehend all the immensity of his greatness. Attached to his service almost from the beginning of the Consulate, at a period when I was still very young, he had grown great, so to say, without my perceiving it, and I had especially seen in him, on account of the nature of my service, an excellent master even more than a great man. But what a contrary effect from that which it produces ordinarily did separation have upon me! Even to-day I often wonder at the bold frankness with which I have dared to sustain before the Emperor things I thought true; but his kindness seemed to encourage me to do so, for very often, instead of being vexed at my vivacities, he used to say to me gently, with a benevolent smile, 'Come, come, Monsieur Constant, do not get angry.' Adorable kindness in a man of so lofty a rank! Well, I hardly perceived this, in the interior of his chamber; but since then I have felt all its worth."

Napoleon gains in being studied from the standpoint of intimacy. The mask falls, the man remains, and the hero does not vanish.

The vogue of Constant's Memoirs when they first appeared in 1830 was very great. At that epoch the imperial epic exercised over the French nation such an ascendancy that if the Duke de Reichstadt had been restored to liberty by Austria, everything indicates that the Son of the Man, as the heir of the victor of Austerlitz was then called, would have been proclaimed emperor. To-day the re- establishment of the Empire is no longer in question in France, but the prestige of Napoleon has never been more striking there. At Paris the Military Exposition of the Avenue des Champs-Elysées has been an enthusiastic success. Like religion, glory has its relics. During the months of May and June, 1895, an enormous crowd visited with pious eagerness the historical museum where so many objects that belonged to the Emperor and his companions in arms were displayed. The organizers of this exhibition belonged to all parties. One of them, a young officer and a son of M. Carnot, said: "I would that the entire army might pass through these halls and steep themselves here in heroism."

The present moment was well chosen for bringing out anew memoirs such as those of Constant, not only in France but in the United States. It may be said that the two names best known in the great American republic are those of Washington and Napoleon. Is there in the United States a garret or a hovel into which these two names have not penetrated? New York, the Paris of the New World, has begun a movement of Napoleonic literature which is spreading in all the cities of the Union, and it will not be long before the imperial epic will be as well known by Americans as by the French themselves.

In the domain of thought a species of electric current has been established between the United States and France. The force that unites the two great sister republics is not only a community of institutions, it is the possession of the same taste for the arts, for letters and history. The finest pictures of the modern French school belong to Americans. The artists most in vogue in France repair to the United States to seek a fresh affirmation of their success. We may say that in all departments French reputations renew their youth, as it were, in the country of Washington. One of the causes of this sympathy is the remembrance, more active than ever, of the American War of Independence, in which the French had a noble share. The citizens of the Union desire to understand all French annals from that epoch to our own time. The military accounts of the Revolution and the Empire interest them all the more in that they also have had their battles, and that they only have to stamp on the ground to cause immense and magnificent armies to issue from it. The combatants of the War of Secession, Northern and Southern alike, showed no less heroism than the French volunteers of 1792. And after the struggle the reconciliation of victors and vanquished was based on a sentiment of mutual esteem and military confraternity. The resonant echo of the imperial epoch in the United States is wholly natural. A genius like Napoleon was certain to be admired by a nation which, after having triumphed in the contests of commerce and industry, has proved that when the occasion arose, it could be a great warlike nation as well.
 

 IMBERT DE SAINT-AMAND.



1. You grew great without pleasure, you fell without a murmur— Nothing human beat under your thick armor—Without love and without hate, you lived only to pass—Like the eagle reigning alone in the heavens—You had only a look to measure the earth with—And talons with which to seize it. Return to paragraph text.

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