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Folk Tales Every Child Should Know by Various

V >> Various >> Folk Tales Every Child Should Know




"That was his last thunder-clap in Egypt. He said to himself, seeing the
way things were going in Paris, 'I am the saviour of France; I know it,
and I must go.' But, understand me, the army didn't know he was going,
or they'd have kept him by force and made him Emperor of the East. So
now we were sad; for He was gone who was all our joy. He left the
command to Kleber, a big mastiff, who came off duty at Cairo,
assassinated by an Egyptian, whom they put to death by empaling him on a
bayonet; that's the way they guillotine people down there. But it makes
'em suffer so much that a soldier had pity on the criminal and gave him
his canteen; and then, as soon as the Egyptian had drunk his fill, he
gave up the ghost with all the pleasure in life. But that's a trifle we
couldn't laugh at then. Napoleon embarked in a cockleshell, a little
skiff that was nothing at all, though 'twas called 'Fortune;' and in a
twinkling, under the nose of England, who was blockading him with ships
of the line, frigates, and anything that could hoist a sail, he crossed
over, and there he was in France. For he always had the power, mind you,
of crossing the seas at one straddle.

"Was that a human man? Bah!

"So, one minute he is at Frejus, the next in Paris. There, they all
adore him; but he summons the government. 'What have you done with my
children, the soldiers?' he says to the lawyers. 'You're a mob of
rascally scribblers; you are making France a mess of pottage, and
snapping your fingers at what people think of you. It won't do; and I
speak the opinion of everybody.' So, on that, they wanted to battle
with him and kill him--click! he had 'em locked up in barracks, or
flying out of windows, or drafted among his followers, where they were
as mute as fishes and as pliable as a quid of tobacco. After that
stroke--consul! And then, as it was not for him to doubt the Supreme
Being, he fulfilled his promise to the good God, who, you see, had kept
His word to him. He gave Him back His churches, and reestablished His
religion; the bells rang for God and for him: and lo! everybody was
pleased; _primo_, the priests, whom he saved from being harassed;
_secundo_, the bourgeois, who thought only of their trade, and no longer
had to fear the _rapiamus_ of the law, which had got to be unjust;
_tertio_, the nobles, for he forbade they should be killed, as,
unfortunately, the people had got the habit of doing.

"But he still had the Enemy to wipe out; and he wasn't the man to go to
sleep at a mess-table, because, d'ye see, his eye looked over the whole
earth as if it were no bigger than a man's head. So then he appeared in
Italy, like as though he had stuck his head through the window. One
glance was enough. The Austrians were swallowed up at Marengo like so
many gudgeons by a whale! Ouf! The French eagles sang their paeans so
loud that all the world heard them--and it sufficed! 'We won't play that
game any more,' said the German. 'Enough, enough!' said all the rest. To
sum up: Europe backed down, England knocked under. General peace; and
the kings and the peoples made believe kiss each other. That's the time
when the Emperor invented the Legion of Honour--and a fine thing, too.
'In France'--this is what he said at Boulogne before the whole
army--'every man is brave. So the citizen who does a fine action shall
be sister to the soldier, and the soldier shall be his brother, and the
two shall be one under the flag of honour.'

"We, who were down in Egypt, now came home. All was changed! He left us
general, and hey! in a twinkling we found him EMPEROR. France gave
herself to him, like a fine girl to a lancer. When it was done--to the
satisfaction of all, as you may say--a sacred ceremony took place, the
like of which was never seen under the canopy of the skies. The Pope and
the cardinals, in their red and gold vestments, crossed the Alps
expressly to crown him before the army and the people, who clapped
their hands. There is one thing that I should do very wrong not to tell
you. In Egypt, in the desert close to Syria, the RED MAN came to him on
the Mount of Moses, and said, 'All is well.' Then, at Marengo, the night
before the victory, the same Red Man appeared before him for the second
time, standing erect and saying: 'Thou shalt see the world at thy feet;
thou shalt be Emperor of France, King of Italy, master of Holland,
sovereign of Spain, Portugal, and the Illyrian provinces, protector of
Germany, saviour of Poland, first eagle of the Legion of Honour--all.'
This Red Man, you understand, was his genius, his spirit--a sort of
satellite who served him, as some say, to communicate with his star. I
never really believed that. But the Red Man himself is a true fact.
Napoleon spoke of him, and said he came to him in troubled moments, and
lived in the palace of the Tuileries under the roof. So, on the day of
the coronation, Napoleon saw him for the third time; and they were in
consultation over many things.

"After that, Napoleon went to Milan to be crowned king of Italy, and
there the grand triumph of the soldier began. Every man who could write
was made an officer. Down came pensions; it rained duchies; treasures
poured in for the staff which didn't cost France a penny; and the Legion
of Honour provided incomes for the private soldiers--of which I receive
mine to this day. So here were the armies maintained as never before on
this earth. But besides that, the Emperor, knowing that he was to be the
emperor of the whole world, bethought him of the bourgeois, and to
please them he built fairy monuments, after their own ideas, in places
where you'd never think to find any. For instance, suppose you were
coming back from Spain and going to Berlin--well, you'd find triumphal
arches along the way, with common soldiers sculptured on the stone,
every bit the same as generals. In two or three years, and without
imposing taxes on any of you, Napoleon filled his vaults with gold,
built palaces, made bridges, roads, scholars, fetes, laws, vessels,
harbours, and spent millions upon millions--such enormous sums that he
could, so they tell me, have paved France from end to end with
five-franc pieces, if he had had a mind to.

"Now, when he sat at ease on his throne, and was master of all, so that
Europe waited his permission to do his bidding, he remembered his four
brothers and his three sisters, and he said to us, as it might be in
conversation, in an order of the day, 'My children, is it right that the
blood relations of your Emperor should be begging their bread? No. I
wish to see them in splendour like myself. It becomes, therefore,
absolutely necessary to conquer a kingdom for each of them--to the end
that Frenchmen may be masters over all lands, that the soldiers of the
Guard shall make the whole earth tremble, that France may spit where she
likes, and that all the nations shall say to her, as it is written on my
copper coins, '_God protects you!_' 'Agreed!' cried the army. 'We'll go
fish for thy kingdoms with our bayonets.' Ha! there was no backing down,
don't you see! If he had taken it into his head to conquer the moon, we
should have made ready, packed knapsacks, and clambered up; happily, he
didn't think of it. The kings of the countries, who liked their
comfortable thrones, were, naturally, loath to budge, and had to have
their ears pulled; so then--Forward, march! We did march; we got there;
and the earth once more trembled to its centre. Hey! the men and the
shoes he used up in those days! The enemy dealt us such blows that none
but the grand army could have borne the fatigue of it. But you are not
ignorant that a Frenchman is born a philosopher, and knows that a little
sooner, or a little later, he has got to die. So we were ready to die
without a word, for we liked to see the Emperor doing _that_ on the
geographies."

Here the narrator nimbly described a circle with his foot on the floor
of the barn.

"And Napoleon said, 'There, that's to be a kingdom.' And a kingdom it
was. Ha! the good times! The colonels were generals; the generals,
marshals; and the marshals, kings. There's one of 'em still on his
throne, to prove it to Europe; but he's a Gascon and a traitor to France
for keeping that crown; and he doesn't blush for shame as he ought to
do, because crowns, don't you see, are made of gold. I who am speaking
to you, I have seen, in Paris, eleven kings and a mob of princes
surrounding Napoleon like the rays of the sun. You understand, of
course, that every soldier had the chance to mount a throne, provided
always he had the merit; so a corporal of the Guard was a sight to be
looked at as he walked along, for each man had his share in the victory,
and 'twas plainly set forth in the bulletin. What victories they were!
Austerlitz, where the army manoeuvred as if on parade; Eylau, where we
drowned the Russians in a lake, as though Napoleon had blown them into
it with the breath of his mouth; Wagram, where the army fought for three
days without grumbling. We won as many battles as there are saints in
the calendar. It was proved then, beyond a doubt, that Napoleon had the
sword of God in his scabbard. The soldiers were his friends; he made
them his children; he looked after us, he saw that we had shoes, and
shirts, and great-coats, and bread, and cartridges; but he always kept
up his majesty; for, don't you see, 'twas his business to reign. No
matter for that, however; a sergeant, and even a common soldier, could
say to him, 'my Emperor,' just as you say to me sometimes, 'my good
friend.' He gave us an answer if we appealed to him; he slept in the
snow like the rest of us; and, indeed, he had almost the air of a human
man. I who speak to you, I have seen him with his feet among the
grape-shot, and no more uneasy than you are now--standing steady,
looking through his field-glass, and minding his business. 'Twas that
kept the rest of us quiet. I don't know how he did it, but when he spoke
he made our hearts burn within us; and to show him we were his children,
incapable of balking, didn't we rush at the mouths of the rascally
cannon, that belched and vomited shot and shell, without so much as
saying, 'Look out!' Why! the dying must needs raise their heads to
salute him and cry, 'LONG LIVE THE EMPEROR!'

"I ask you, was that natural? would they have done that for a human man?

"Well, after he had settled the world, the Empress Josephine, his wife,
a good woman all the same, managed matters so that she did not bear him
any children, and he was obliged to give her up, though he loved her
considerably. But, you see, he had to have little ones for reasons of
state. Hearing of this, all the sovereigns of Europe quarrelled as to
which of them should give him a wife. And he married, so they told us,
an Austrian archduchess, daughter of Caesar, an ancient man about whom
people talk a good deal, and not in France only--where any one will
tell you what he did--but in Europe. It is all true, for I myself who
address you at this moment, I have been on the Danube, and have seen the
remains of a bridge built by that man, who, it seems, was a relation of
Napoleon in Rome, and that's how the Emperor got the inheritance of that
city for his son. So after the marriage, which was a fete for the whole
world, and in honour of which he released the people of ten years'
taxes--which they had to pay all the same, however, because the
assessors didn't take account of what he said--his wife had a little
one, who was King of Rome. Now, there's a thing that had never been seen
on this earth; never before was a child born a king with his father
living. On that day a balloon went up in Paris to tell the news to Rome,
and that balloon made the journey in one day.

"Now, is there any man among you who will stand up here and declare to
me that all that was human? No; it was _written above_; and may the
scurvy seize 'em who deny that he was sent by God himself for the
triumph of France!

"Well, here's the Emperor of Russia, that used to be his friend, he
gets angry because Napoleon didn't marry a Russian; so he joins with the
English, our enemies--to whom our Emperor always wanted to say a couple
of words in their burrows, only he was prevented. Napoleon gets angry
too; an end had to be put to such doings; so he says to us: 'Soldiers!
you have been masters of every capital in Europe, except Moscow, which
is now the ally of England. To conquer England, and India which belongs
to the English, it becomes our peremptory duty to go to Moscow,' Then he
assembled the greatest army that ever trailed its gaiters over the
globe; and so marvellously in hand it was that he reviewed a million of
men in one day. 'Hourra!'[9] cried the Russians. Down came all Russia
and those animals of Cossacks in a flock. 'Twas nation against nation, a
general hurly-burly, and beware who could; 'Asia against Europe,' as the
Red Man had foretold to Napoleon. 'Enough,' cried the Emperor, 'I'll be
ready.'

"So now, sure enough, came all the kings, as the Red Man had said, to
lick Napoleon's hand! Austria, Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, Poland, Italy,
every one of them were with us, flattering us; ah, it was fine! The
eagles never cawed so loud as at those parades, perched high above the
banners of all Europe. The Poles were bursting with joy, because
Napoleon was going to release them; and that's why France and Poland are
brothers to this day. 'Russia is ours,' cried the army. We plunged into
it well-supplied; we marched and we marched--no Russians. At last we
found the brutes entrenched on the banks of the Moskva. That's where I
won my cross, and I've got the right to say it was a damnable battle.
This was how it came about. The Emperor was anxious. He had seen the Red
Man, who said to him 'My son, you are going too fast for your feet; you
will lack men; friends will betray you.' So the Emperor offered peace.
But before signing, 'Let us drub those Russians!' he said to us. 'Done!'
cried the army. 'Forward, march!' said the sergeants. My clothes were in
rags, my shoes worn out, from trudging along those roads, which are very
uncomfortable ones; but no matter! I said to myself, 'As it's the last
of our earthquakings, I'll go into it, tooth and nail!' We were drawn up
in line before the great ravine--front seats, as 'twere. Signal given;
and seven hundred pieces of artillery began a conversation that would
bring the blood from your ears. Then--must do justice to one's
enemies--the Russians let themselves be killed like Frenchmen; they
wouldn't give way; we couldn't advance. 'Forward!' some one cried, 'here
comes the Emperor!' True enough; he passed at a gallop, waving his hand
to let us know we must take the redoubt. He inspired us; on we ran; I
was the first in the ravine. Ha! my God! how the lieutenants fell, and
the colonels, and the soldiers! No matter! all the more shoes for those
that had none, and epaulets for the clever ones who knew how to read.
'Victory!' cried the whole line; 'Victory!'--and, would you believe it?
a thing never seen before, there lay twenty-five thousand Frenchmen on
the ground. 'Twas like mowing down a wheat-field; only in place of the
ears of wheat put the heads of men! We were sobered by this time--those
who were left alive. The MAN rode up; we made the circle round him. Ha!
he knew how to cajole his children; he could be amiable when he liked,
and feed 'em with words when their stomachs were ravenous with the
hunger of wolves. Flatterer! he distributed the crosses himself, he
uncovered to the dead, and then he cried to us, 'On! to Moscow!' 'To
Moscow!' answered the army.

"We took Moscow. Would you believe it? the Russians burned their own
city! 'Twas a haystack six miles square, and it blazed for two days. The
buildings crashed like slates, and showers of melted iron and lead
rained down upon us, which was naturally horrible. I may say to you
plainly, it was like a flash of lightning on our disasters. The Emperor
said, 'We have done enough; my soldiers shall rest here.' So we rested
awhile, just to get the breath into our bodies and the flesh on our
bones, for we were really tired. We took possession of the golden cross
that was on the Kremlin; and every soldier brought away with him a small
fortune. But out there the winter sets in a month earlier--a thing those
fools of science didn't properly explain. So, coming back, the cold
nipped us. No longer an army--do you hear me?--no longer any generals,
no longer any sergeants even. 'Twas the reign of wretchedness and
hunger--a reign of equality at last. No one thought of anything but to
see France once more; no one stooped to pick up his gun or his money if
he dropped them; each man followed his nose, and went as he pleased
without caring for glory. The weather was so bad the Emperor couldn't
see his star; there was something between him and the skies. Poor man!
it made him ill to see his eagles flying away from victory. Ah! 'twas a
mortal blow, you may believe me.

"Well, we got to the Beresina, My friends, I can affirm to you by all
that is most sacred, by my honour, that since mankind came into the
world, never, never was there seen such a fricassee of any army--guns,
carriages, artillery-waggons--in the midst of such snows, under such
relentless skies! The muzzles of the muskets burned our hands if we
touched them, the iron was so cold. It was there that the army was saved
by the pontoniers, who were firm at their post; and there that
Gondrin--sole survivor of the men who were bold enough to go into the
water and build the bridges by which the army crossed--that Gondrin,
here present, admirably conducted himself, and saved us from the
Russians, who, I must tell you, still respected the grand army,
remembering its victories. And," he added, pointing to Gondrin, who was
gazing at him with the peculiar attention of a deaf man, "Gondrin is a
finished soldier, a soldier who is honour itself, and he merits your
highest esteem.

"I saw the Emperor," he resumed, "standing by the bridge, motionless,
not feeling the cold--was that human? He looked at the destruction of
his treasure, his friends, his old Egyptians. Bah! all that passed him,
women, army-waggons, artillery, all were shattered, destroyed, ruined.
The bravest carried the eagles; for the eagles, d'ye see, were France,
the nation, all of you! they were the civil and the military honour that
must be kept pure; could their heads be lowered because of the cold? It
was only near the Emperor that we warmed ourselves, because when he was
in danger we ran, frozen as we were--we, who wouldn't have stretched a
hand to save a friend. They told us he wept at night over his poor
family of soldiers. Ah! none but he and Frenchmen could have got
themselves out of that business. We did get out, but with losses, great
losses, as I tell you. The Allies captured our provisions. Men began to
betray him, as the Red Man predicted. Those chatterers in Paris, who had
held their tongues after the Imperial Guard was formed, now thought he
was dead; so they hoodwinked the prefect of police, and hatched a
conspiracy to overthrow the empire. He heard of it; it worried him. He
left us, saying: 'Adieu, my children; guard the outposts; I shall return
to you,' Bah! without him nothing went right; the generals lost their
heads, the marshals talked nonsense and committed follies; but that was
not surprising, for Napoleon, who was kind, had fed 'em on gold; they
had got as fat as lard, and wouldn't stir; some stayed in camp when they
ought to have been warming the backs of the enemy who was between us and
France.

"But the Emperor came back, and he brought recruits, famous recruits; he
changed their backbone and made 'em dogs of war, fit to set their teeth
into anything; and he brought a guard of honour, a fine body
indeed!--all bourgeois, who melted away like butter on a gridiron.

"Well, spite of our stern bearing, here's everything going against us;
and yet the army did prodigies of valour. Then came battles on the
mountains, nations against nations--Dresden, Luetzen, Bautzen. Remember
these days, all of you, for 'twas then that Frenchmen were so
particularly heroic that a good grenadier only lasted six months. We
triumphed always; yet there were those English, in our rear, rousing
revolts against us with their lies! No matter, we cut our way home
through the whole pack of the nations. Wherever the Emperor showed
himself we followed him; for if, by sea or land, he gave us the word
'Go!' we went. At last, we were in France; and many a poor foot-soldier
felt the air of his own country restore his soul to satisfaction, spite
of the wintry weather. I can say for myself that it refreshed my life.
Well, next, our business was to defend France, our country, our
beautiful France, against, all Europe, which resented our having laid
down the law to the Russians, and pushed them back into their dens so
that they couldn't eat us up alive, as northern nations, who are dainty
and like southern flesh, have a habit of doing--at least, so I've heard
some generals say. Then the Emperor saw his own father-in-law, his
friends whom he had made kings, and the scoundrels to whom he had given
back their thrones, all against him. Even Frenchmen, and allies in our
own ranks, turned against us under secret orders, as at the battle of
Leipsic. Would common soldiers have been capable of such wickedness?
Three times a day men were false to their word--and they called
themselves princes!

"So, then, France was invaded. Wherever the Emperor showed his lion
face, the enemy retreated; and he did more prodigies in defending France
than ever he had done in conquering Italy, the East, Spain, Europe, and
Russia. He meant to bury every invader under the sod, and teach 'em to
respect the soil of France. So he let them get to Paris, that he might
swallow them at a mouthful, and rise to the height of his genius in a
battle greater than all the rest--a mother-battle, as 'twere. But there,
there! the Parisians were afraid for their twopenny skins, and their
trumpery shops; they opened the gates. Then the Ragusades began, and
happiness ended. The Empress was fooled, and the white banner flaunted
from the windows. The generals whom he had made his nearest friends
abandoned him for the Bourbons--a set of people no one had heard tell
of. The Emperor bade us farewell at Fontainebleau: 'Soldiers!'--I can
hear him now; we wept like children; the flags and the eagles were
lowered as if for a funeral: it was, I may well say it to you, it was
the funeral of the Empire; her dapper armies were nothing now but
skeletons. So he said to us, standing there on the portico of his
palace: 'My soldiers! we are vanquished by treachery; but we shall meet
in heaven, the country of the brave. Defend my child, whom I commit to
you. Long live Napoleon II!' He meant to die, that no man should look
upon Napoleon vanquished; he took poison, enough to have killed a
regiment, because, like Jesus Christ before his Passion, he thought
himself abandoned of God and his talisman. But the poison did not hurt
him.

"See again! he found he was immortal.

"Sure of himself, knowing he must ever be THE EMPEROR, he went for a
while to an island to study out the nature of these others, who, you may
be sure, committed follies without end. Whilst he bided his time down
there, the Chinese, and the wild men on the coast of Africa, and the
Barbary States, and others who are not at all accommodating, know so
well he was more than man that they respected his tent, saying to touch
it would be to offend God. Thus, d'ye see, when these others turned him
from the doors of his own France, he still reigned over the whole world.
Before long he embarked in the same little cockleshell of a boat he had
had in Egypt, sailed round the beard of the English, set foot in France,
and France acclaimed him. The sacred cuckoo flew from spire to spire;
all France cried out with one voice, 'LONG LIVE THE EMPEROR!' In this
region, here, the enthusiasm for that wonder of the ages was, I may say,
solid. Dauphine behaved well; and I am particularly pleased to know that
her people wept when they saw, once more, the gray top-coat. March first
it was, when Napoleon landed with two hundred men to conquer that
kingdom of France and of Navarre, which, on the twentieth of the same
month was again the French Empire. On that day our MAN was in Paris; he
had made a clean sweep, recovered his dear France, and gathered his
veterans together by saying no more than three words, 'I am here.'

"'Twas the greatest miracle God had yet done! Before _him_, did ever man
recover an empire by showing his hat? And these others, who thought
they had subdued France! Not they! At sight of the eagles, a national
army sprang up, and we marched to Waterloo. There, the Guard died at one
blow. Napoleon, in despair, threw himself three times before the cannon
of the enemy without obtaining death. We saw that. The battle was lost.
That night the Emperor called his old soldiers to him; on the field
soaked with our blood he burned his banners and his eagles--his poor
eagles, ever victorious, who cried 'Forward' in the battles, and had
flown the length and breadth of Europe, _they_ were saved the infamy of
belonging to the enemy: all the treasures of England couldn't get her a
tail-feather of them. No more eagles--the rest is well known. The Red
Man went over to the Bourbons, like the scoundrel that he is. France is
crushed; the soldier is nothing; they deprive him of his dues; they
discharge him to make room for broken-down nobles--ah, 'tis pitiable!
They seized Napoleon by treachery; the English nailed him on a desert
island in mid-ocean on a rock raised ten thousand feet above the earth;
and there he is, and will be, till the Red Man gives him back his power
for the happiness of France. These others say he's dead. Ha, dead! 'Tis
easy to see they don't know Him. They tell that fib to catch the people,
and feel safe in their hovel of a government. Listen! the truth at the
bottom of it all is that his friends have left him alone on the desert
isle to fulfil a prophecy, for I forgot to say that his name, Napoleon,
means 'lion of the desert.' Now this that I tell you is true as the
Gospel. All other tales that you hear about the Emperor are follies
without common-sense; because, d'ye see, God never gave to child of
woman born the right to stamp his name in red as _he_ did, on the earth,
which forever shall remember him! Long live Napoleon, the father of his
people and of the soldier!"

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