The Court of the Empress Josephine | Page 5

standpoint of a
philosopher, we shall find but little difference between a steward and a
chamberlain, between a chambermaid and a lady of the palace. We may
go further and say that as soon as they have places and money at their
disposal, republicans have courtesies, as much as monarchs, and
everywhere and always there are to be found people ready to bow low
if there is anything on the ground that they can pick up. Revolutions
alter the forms of government, but not the human heart; afterwards, as
before, there exist the same pretensions, the same prejudices, the same
flatteries. The incense may be burned before a tribune, a dictator, or a
Caesar, there are always the same flattering genuflections, the same
cringing.
The new Empire began most brilliantly, but there was no lack of
morose criticism. The Faubourg Saint Germain was for the most part
hostile and scornful. It looked upon the high dignitaries of the Empire
and on the Emperor himself as upstarts, and all the men of the old
régime who went over to him they branded as renegades. The title of

"Citizen" was suppressed and that of "Monsieur" restored, after having
been abandoned in conversation and writing for twelve years. Miot de
Mélito tells us in his Memoirs that at first public opinion was opposed
to this change; even those who at the beginning had shown the greatest
repugnance to being addressed as Citizen, disliked conferring the title
of Monsieur upon Revolutionists and the rabble, and they pretended to
address as Citizen those whom they saw fit to include in this class.
Many turned the new state of affairs to ridicule. The Parisians, always
of a malicious humor, made perpetual puns and epigrams in abundance.
The Faubourg Saint Germain, in spite of a few adhesions from personal
motives, preserved an ironical attitude. General de Ségur, then a captain
under the orders of the Grand Marshal of the Palace, observed that in
1804, with the exception of several obscure nobles, either poor or
ruined, and others already attached to Napoleon's civil and military
fortune, many negotiations and various temptations were required to
persuade well-known persons to appear at the court as it was at first
constituted. He goes on: "As a spectator and confidant of the means
employed, I witnessed in those early days many refusals, and some I
had to announce myself. I even heard many bitter complaints on this
subject. I remember that in reply I mentioned to the Empress my own
case, and told her what it had cost me to enlist under the tricolor, and
then to enter the First Consul's military household. The Empress
understood me so well that she made to me a similar confidence,
confessing her own struggles, her almost invincible repugnance, at the
end of 1795, in spite of her feeling for Bonaparte, before she could
make up her mind to marry the man whom at that time she herself used
to call General Vendémiaire."
Although Josephine had become Empress, she remained a Legitimist,
and saw clearly the weak points in the Empire. At the Tuileries, in the
chamber of Marie Antoinette, she felt out of place; she was surprised to
have for Lady of Honor a duchess of an old family, and her sole
ambition was to be pardoned by the Royalists for her elevation, to the
highest rank. Napoleon, too, was much concerned about the Bourbons,
in whom he foresaw his successors, "One of his keenest regrets," wrote
Prince Metternich, "was his inability to invoke legitimacy as the
foundation of his power. Few men have felt more deeply than he the
precariousness and fragility of power when it lacks this foundation, its

susceptibility to attack."
After recalling the Emperor's attempt to induce Louis XVIII. to
abandon his claims to the throne, Prince Metternich goes on: "In
speaking to me of this matter, Napoleon said: 'His reply was noble, full
of noble traditions. In those Legitimists there is something outside of
mere intellectual force.'" The Emperor, who, at the beginning of his
career, displayed such intense Republican enthusiasm, was by nature
essentially a lover of authority and of the monarchy. He would have
liked to be a sovereign of the old stamp. His pleasure in surrounding
himself with members of the old aristocracy attests the aristocratic
instincts of the so-called crowned apostle of democracy. The few
Republicans who remained faithful to the principles were indignant
with these tendencies; it was with grief that they saw the reappearance
of the throne; and thus, from different motives the unreconciled
Jacobins and the men of Coblentz who had not joined the court,
showed the same feeling of bitterness and of hostility to the Empire.
The trial of General Moreau made clear the germs of opposition which
existed in a latent condition. It