The Napoleon of the People | Page 5

after mess; and his eyes, look you, traveled all over
the world as if it had been a man's face. The next thing he did was to
turn up in Italy; it was just as if he had put his head out of the window
and the sight of him was enough; they gulp down the Austrians at

Marengo like a whale swallowing gudgeons! /Haouf/! The French
Victories blew their trumpets so loud that the whole world could hear
the noise, and there was an end of it.
"We will not keep on at this game any longer!" say the Germans.
"That is enough of this sort of thing," say the others.
Here is the upshot. Europe shows the white feather, England knuckles
under, general peace all round, and kings and peoples pretending to
embrace each other. While then and there the Emperor hits on the idea
of the Legion of Honor. There's a fine thing if you like!
He spoke to the whole army at Boulogne. "In France," so he said,
"every man is brave. So the civilian who does gloriously shall be the
soldier's sister, the soldier shall be his brother, and both shall stand
together beneath the flag of honor."
By the time that the rest of us who were away down there in Egypt had
come back again, everything was changed. We had seen him last as a
general, and in no time we find that he is Emperor! And when this was
settled (and it may safely be said that every one was satisfied) there was
a holy ceremony such as was never seen under the canopy of heaven.
Faith, France gave herself to him, like a handsome girl to a lancer, and
the Pope and all his cardinals in robes of red and gold come across the
Alps on purpose to anoint him before the army and the people, who
clap their hands.
There is one thing that it would be very wrong to keep back from you.
While he was in Egypt, in the desert not far away from Syria, /the Red
Man/ had appeared to him on the mountain of Moses, in order to say,
"Everything is going on well." Then again, on the eve of victory at
Marengo, the Red Man springs to his feet in front of the Emperor for
the second time, and says to him:
"You shall see the world at your feet; you shall be Emperor of the
French, King of Italy, master of Holland, ruler of Spain, Portugal, and
the Illyrian Provinces, protector of Germany, saviour of Poland, first
eagle of the Legion of Honor and all the rest of it."
That Red Man, look you, was a notion of his own, who ran on errands
and carried messages, so many people say, between him and his star. I
myself have never believed that; but the Red Man is, undoubtedly, a
fact. Napoleon himself spoke of the Red Man who lived up in the roof
of the Tuileries, and who used to come to him, he said, in moments of

trouble and difficulty. So on the night after his coronation Napoleon
saw him for the third time, and they talked over a lot of things together.
Then the Emperor goes straight to Milan to have himself crowned King
of Italy, and then came the real triumph of the soldier. For every one
who could write became an officer forthwith, and pensions and gifts of
duchies poured down in showers. There were fortunes for the staff that
never cost France a penny, and the Legion of Honor was as good as an
annuity for the rank and file; I still draw my pension on the strength of
it. In short, here were armies provided for in a way that had never been
seen before! But the Emperor, who knew that he was to be Emperor
over everybody, and not only over the army, bethinks himself of the
bourgeois, and sets them to build fairy monuments in places that had
been as bare as the back of my hand till then. Suppose, now, that you
are coming out of Spain and on the way to Berlin; well, you would see
triumphal arches, and in the sculpture upon them the common soldiers
are done every bit as beautifully as the generals!
In two or three years Napoleon fills his cellars with gold, makes
bridges, palaces, roads, scholars, festivals, laws, fleets, and harbors; he
spends millions on millions, ever so much, and ever so much more to it,
so that I have heard it said that he could have paved the whole of
France with five-franc pieces if the fancy had taken him; and all this
without putting any taxes on you people here. So when he was
comfortably seated on his