Bonaparte has been reproached with having murdered liberty. The historians of the nineteenth century and the romantic poets united in cursing the smooth-haired Corsican. Far be it from us to plead Not Guilty. All the same we must not overlook the fact that the damsel tanned by the sun of Messidor was already in very bad condition on the eve of the 18th Brumaire, Mathieu Dumas, a man who had served the Republic by bringing Louis XVI back to Varennes, hit on this ingenious argument to justify the coup detat: * Bonaparte was not attacking liberty, for it no longer existed/
CHAPTER II. RETURN TO OLD HABITS
Tumult at the theatre ~ The day after the coup d'etat - Old friends reappear - New 'Year's Day, the Carnival — The new 'Messieurs 9 - Conversion of a musician
ON THE evening of the 19th Brumaire, year VIII, there was a crowded audience at the Theatre Feydeau. In spite of the strange rumours afloat since the day before, and the movements of troops to be seen that very morning on the boulevards, politics had not prevented the devotees of comic opera from coming to see a new play, L'Auteur dans son menage.
It was progressing very peaceably when suddenly the actors stopped. The one playing the principal part, that of the author himself in his home, advanced to the footlights without so much as throwing off his dressing-gown or his nightcap, and shouted in a loud voice:
'Citizens! General Bonaparte has escaped being assassinated at Saint-Cloud by traitors to the country!'
It is easy to imagine the panic that seized the audience. Amid the tumult one scream overpowered the others, coming from Box No. Two with its gilded grating, where Pauline Bonaparte was having a fit of hysterics. Beside her, Madame Laetitia, equally horrified but more mistress of herself, leaned for support on Mme Permon and her daughter, the future Duchesse d'Abrantes. These ladies had dined together; they knew, of course, that there was thunder in the air, but they were so little alarmed that they had come to end their evening at the theatre. And now chance, in its brusque fashion, had acquainted them with the coup d'etat.
Fortunately the announcement was merely a fanciful com-mumqu6 issued by order of Fouche for the purpose of exciting public opinion. At the moment when the canard took wing, Bonaparte had already secured his victory, and if the Feydeau audience had been able to transport itself to Saint-Cloud it would have witnessed, not a drama but a far more comical scene than In any opera of that description —the hair-raising nocturnal sitting thought up by Lucien and his brother in the attempt to legalize' the somewhat brutal operation of that afternoon.
The picture is worthy of Roman history. Some dozens of deputies, recruited as best they could be in the avenues of the park and the suburban restaurants — the same who, only two hours before, had escaped from the Orangery by jumping out of a window — now re-entered it docilely by the door, resumed their seats by candle-light and signed without demur the death certificate of the Directory. Still hardly recovered from their fright, they voted for everything they were asked to: the appointment of the Consuls, the adjournment of the
Assembly They carried the pardoning of insults so far as to decree that the soldiers, 'and especially the Grenadiers', had deserved well of their country, and listened without a smile to their president Lucien singing the praises of this memorable day: 'Citizens, Liberty, born in the Tennis Court at Versailles., had dragged itself towards you, a prey by turns to inconsequence, weakness, the convulsive ailments of childhood. Today it has donned its toga virilis*
Finely said, indeed... and as it was growing late and everybody was dead sleepy, victors and vanquished took leave of one another, shouting 'Vive la Republique!'
We may pass over the political side of this conjuring trick, which was to remain the model of its kind, and take note only of the climatic change it produced in France at the time. We must beware of imagining that life changed suddenly merely because new men had settled into the Luxembourg. Brumaire had been well received by the capital, but without excessive rejoicing. The rebirth of confidence was marked only by certain symptoms: the bankers found a little money with which to set public finances going again; 1 the rate of exchange was doubled in a week and, incredible phenomenon, Zowis, real louis dor, began to chink again at the bottom of certain pockets.
1 The day after Brumaire Gaudin, Minister of Finance, had nothing left in the Treasury but the miserable sum of 77,000 frs., the entire fortune of France.
Other no less favourable signs were noted by the press. In the Gazette de France of 1st Frimaire, for instance, exactly twelve days after the coup d'etat, there appeared the following paragraph: "Landed properties in the neighbourhood of Paris, which had so far failed to find either buyers or lenders, are now finding both... dismantled apartments are being refurnished, carriages are coming out of the livery stables.... And yet there is not an ecu more than before; none has come from abroad by diligence, no Potosi mine has been discovered in France since the 18th Brumaire/
But this was something of a flash in the pan. After the surgical operation it had just undergone - an operation in which the sword had taken the place of the surgeon's knife — the country continued to be a patient so seriously ill that its convalescence would call for all sorts of precautions. So many events could not have been brought about in the last ten years without upsetting a number of things to which the mass of Frenchmen clung. In this matter as in others, Bonaparte intended to make reparation. But whereas he had gone straight to the mark in politics, he preferred to temporize in the realm of manners.
Although he still proclaimed his fidelity to the Revolution, he was not blind to the fact that by making a clean sweep of the past it had singularly complicated the present. Certain customs it had suppressed by a stroke of the pen were worth re-establishing. But it was better to do nothing in a hurry. Let the public revert of its own accord to its old habits, and the Government would turn a blind eye, however much this might annoy the little Jacobin rags, the Citoijen Frangais and the rest.
The first thing to be restored to favour was that old friend of the old regime: New Year's Day. Treated as suspect by the Convention, vaguely tolerated by the Directory, it was handed back to the Parisians two and a half months after Brumaire. Imagine their joy at recovering the traditional hamper, to be filled with the traditional offerings at Berthe-lofs, the famous confectioner of the Palais-Royal! There, at number fifty-three in the Stone Gallery, the gapers swarmed in front of a shop window crowded with marrons glaces, pistachio nuts and mushrooms made of sugar, multicoloured sugared almonds and, of course, bonbons a la Bonaparte. The young lady assistants were thrilled by a visit of the Second Consul of the Republic, the solemn, big-bellied Cambaceres. They were astonished, too, at the number of carriages drawing up at the door of their shop. The same thing was happening in the Rue des Lombards, the headquarters of the other confectioners. In front of one of their shops, according to a police report, 137 carriages were counted in one day. From which we may conclude that Paris, so long deprived of means of transport, was by now rather better supplied.
This reappearance of coaches would permit many people to get through the onerous duty calls and card-leaving without fatigue. The German tourist Reichardt was amused to see seven or eight young gentlemen crowding into a single carriage with all sorts of provisions — bottles, pies and so forth -'While a hired servant left the visiting-cards at the doors of the patrons, masters and colleagues of these slaves of etiquette, they themselves were gaily consuming their provisions in defiance of cold and boredom/ No better way of digesting Berthelot's sweetmeats could be imagined.