The Companions of Jehu by Alexandre Dumas (red scrolls of magic .txt) 📕

“I say that for flatterers. You have pretended, it is said, that you returned to France because our armies were destroyed, because France was threatened, the Republic at bay. You may have left Egypt with that fear; but once in France, all such fears must have given way to a totally different belief.”

“I ask no better than to believe as you do,” replied Bonaparte, with sovereign dignity; “and the more grand and powerful you prove France to be, the more grateful am I to those who have secured her grandeur and her power.”

“Oh, the result is plain, general! Three armies defeated; the Russians exterminated, the Austrians defeated and forced to fly, twenty thousand prisoners, a hundred pieces of cannon, fifteen flags, all the baggage of the enemy in our possession, nine generals taken or killed, Switzerland free, our frontiers safe, the Rhine our limit—so much for Masséna’s contingent and the situation of Helvetia. The Anglo-Russian army twice defeated, utterly discouraged, abandoning its artillery, baggage, munitions of war and commissariat, even to the women and children who came with the British; eight thousand French prisoners; effective men, returned to France; Holland completely evacuated—so much for Brune’s contingent and the situation in Holland. The rearguard of General Klénau forced to lay down its arms at Villanova; a thousand prisoners and three pieces of cannon fallen into our hands, and the Austrians driven back beyond Bormida; in all, counting the combats at la Stura and Pignerol, four thousand prisoners, sixteen cannon, Mondovi, and the occupation of the whole region between la Stura and Tanaro—so much for Championnet’s contingent and the situation in Italy. Two hundred thousand men under arms, forty thousand mounted cavalry; that is my contingent, mine, and the situation in France.”

“But,” asked Bonaparte satirically, “if you have, as you say, two hundred thousand soldiers under arms, why do you want me to bring back the fifteen or twenty thousand men I have in Egypt, who are useful there as colonizers?”

“If I ask you for them, general, it is not for any need we may have of them, but in the fear of some disaster over taking them.”

“What disaster do you expect to befall them, commanded by Kléber?”

“Kléber may be killed, general; and who is there behind Kléber? Menou. Kléber and your twenty thousand men are doomed, general!”

“How doomed?”

“Yes, the Sultan will send troops; he controls by land. The English will send their fleet; they control by sea. We, who have neither land nor sea, will be compelled to take part from here in the evacuation of Egypt and the capitulation of our army.

“You take a gloomy view of things, general!”

“The future will show which of us two have seen things as they are.”

“What would you have done in my place?”

“I don’t know. But, even had I been forced to bring them back by way of Constantinople, I should never have abandoned those whom France had intrusted to me. Xenophon, on the banks of the Tigris, was in a much more desperate situation than you on the banks of the Nile. He brought his ten thousand back to Ionia, and they were not the children of Athens, not his fellow citizens; they were mercenaries!”

From the instant Bernadotte uttered the word Constantinople, Bonaparte listened no longer; the name seemed to rouse a new train of ideas in his mind, which he followed in solitary thought. He laid his hand on the arm of the astonished Bernadotte, and, with eyes fixed on space, like a man who pursues through space the phantom of a vanished project, he said: “Yes, yes! I thought of it. That is why I persisted in taking that hovel, Saint-Jean-d’Acre. Here you only thought it obstinacy, a useless waste of men sacrificed to the self-love of a mediocre general who feared that he might be blamed for a defeat. What should I have cared for the raising of the siege of Saint-Jean-d’Acre, if Saint-Jean-d’Acre had not been the barrier in the way of the grandest project ever conceived. Cities! Why, good God! I could take as many as ever did Alexander or Cæsar, but it was Saint-Jean-d’Acre that had to be taken! If I had taken Saint-Jean-d’Acre, do you know what I should have done?”

And he fixed his burning eyes upon Bernadotte, who, this time, lowered his under the flame of this genius.

“What I should have done,” repeated Bonaparte, and, like Ajax, he seemed to threaten Heaven with his clinched fist; “if I had taken Saint-Jean-d’Acre, I should have found the treasures of the pasha in the city and three thousand stands of arms. With that I should have raised and armed all Syria, so maddened by the ferocity of Djezzar that each time I attacked him the population prayed to God for his overthrow. I should have marched upon Damascus and Aleppo; I should have swelled my army with the malcontents. Advancing into the country, I should, step by step, have proclaimed the abolition of slavery, and the annihilation of the tyrannical government of the pashas. I should have overthrown the Turkish empire, and founded a great empire at Constantinople, which would have fixed my place in history higher than Constantine and Mohammed II. Perhaps I should have returned to Paris by way of Adrianople and Vienna, after annihilating the house of Austria. Well, my dear general, that is the project which that little hovel of a Saint-Jean-d’Acre rendered abortive!”

And he so far forgot to whom he was speaking, as he followed the shadows of his vanished dream, that he called Bernadotte “my dear general.” The latter, almost appalled by the magnitude of the project which Bonaparte had unfolded to him, made a step backward.

“Yes,” said Bernadotte, “I perceive what you want, for you have just betrayed yourself. Orient or Occident, a throne! A throne? So be it; why not? Count upon me to help you conquer it, but elsewhere than in France. I am a Republican, and I will die a Republican.”

Bonaparte shook his head as if to disperse the thoughts which held him in the clouds.

“I, too, am a Republican,” said he, “but see what has come of your Republic!”

“What matter!” cried Bernadotte. “It is not to a word or a form that I am faithful, but to the principle. Let the Directors but yield me the power, and I would know how to defend the Republic against her internal enemies, even as I defended her from her foreign enemies.”

As he said these words, Bernadotte raised his eyes, and his glance encountered that of Bonaparte. Two naked blades clashing together never sent forth lightning more vivid, more terrible.

Josephine had watched the two men for some time past with anxious attention. She saw the dual glance teeming with reciprocal menace. She rose hastily and went to Bernadotte.

“General,” said she.

Bernadotte bowed.

“You are intimate with Gohier, are you not?” she continued.

“He is one of my best friends, madame,” said Bernadotte.

“Well, we dine with him the day after to-morrow, the 18th Brumaire; dine there yourself and bring Madame Bernadotte. I should be so glad to know her better.”