The Modern Regime, vol 1 | Page 7

has no Jacobin or royalist inclination. His features, even, are so calm "as to provoke many hostile and distrustful stares, as someone who is unknown and suspicious." - Similarly, after the 31st of May and the 2nd of June, his "Souper de Beaucaire" shows that if he condemns the departmental insurrection it is mainly because he deems it futile: on the side of the insurgents, a defeated army, no position tenable, no cavalry, raw artillerymen, Marseilles reduced to its own troops, full of hostile sans-culottes and so besieged, taken and pillaged. Chances are against it: "Let the impoverished regions, the inhabitants of Vivaris, of the Cevennes, of Corsica, fight to the last extremity, but if you lose a battle and the fruit of a thousand years of fatigue, hardship, economy, and happiness become the soldier's prey."[25] Here was something with which the Girondists could be converted! - None of the political or social convictions which then exercised such control over men's minds have any hold on him. Before the 9th of Thermidor he seemed to be a "republican montagnard," and we follow him for months in Provence. "the favorite and confidential adviser of young Robespierre," "admirer" of the elder Robespierre,[26] intimate at Nice with Charlotte Robespierre. After the 9th of Thermidor has passed, he frees himself with bombast from this compromising friendship: "I thought him sincere," says he of the younger Robespierre, in a letter intended to be shown, "but were he my father and had aimed at tyranny, I would have stabbed him myself." On returning to Paris, after having knocked at several doors, he takes Barras for a patron. Barras, the most brazen of the corrupt, Barras, who has overthrown and contrived the death of his two former protectors.[27] Among the contending parties and fanaticisms which succeed each other he keeps cool and free to dispose of himself as he pleases, indifferent to every cause and concerning himself only with his own interests. - On the evening of the 12th of Vend��miaire, on leaving the Feydeau theatre, and noticing the preparations of the sectionists,[28] he said to Junot:
"Ah, if the sections put me in command, I would guarantee to place them in the Tuileries in two hours and have all those Convention rascals driven out! "
Five hours later, summoned by Barras and the Conventionalists, he takes "three minutes" to make up his mind, and, instead of "blowing up the representatives," he mows down the Parisians. Like a good condotti��re, he does not commit himself, considers the first that offers and then the one who offers the most, only to back out afterwards, and finally, seizing the opportunity, to grab everything. - He will more and more become a true condotti��re, that is to say, leader of a band, increasingly independent, pretending to submit under the pretext of the public good, looking out only for his own interest, self-centered, general on his own account and for his own advantage in his Italian campaign before and after the 18th of Fructidor.[29] He is, however, a condotti��re of the first class, already aspiring to the loftiest summits, "with no stopping-place but the throne or the scaffold,"[30] "determined[31] to master France, and through France Europe. Without distraction, sleeping only three hours during the night," he plays with ideas, men, religions, and governments, exploiting people with incomparable dexterity and brutality. He is, in the choice of means as of ends, a superior artist, inexhaustible in glamour, seductions, corruption, and intimidation, fascinating, and yet more terrible than any wild beast suddenly released among a herd of browsing cattle. The expression is not too strong and was uttered by an eye-witness, almost at this very date, a friend and a competent diplomat: "You know that, while I am very fond of the dear general, I call him to myself the little tiger, so as to properly characterize his figure, tenacity, and courage, the rapidity of his movements, and all that he has in him which maybe fairly regarded in that sense."[32]
At this very date, previous to official adulation and the adoption of a recognized type, we see him face to face in two portraits drawn from life, one physical, by a truthful painter, Gu��rin, and the other moral, by a superior woman, Madame de Sta?l, who to the best European culture added tact and worldly perspicacity. Both portraits agree so perfectly that each seems to interpret and complete the other. "I saw him for the first time,"[33] says Madame de Sta?l, "on his return to France after the treaty of Campo-Formio. After recovering from the first excitement of admiration there succeeded to this a decided sentiment of fear." And yet, "at this time he had no power, for it was even then supposed that the Directory looked upon him with a good deal of suspicion."