Two drawings by Norblain de la Gourdaine, also in the collection of the Musee Carnavalet, depict the most attractive scenes. Under the chestnut-trees of the Tuileries, young women in light dresses are seated near the ornamental lake. They have no eyes for anything but an officer bending his enormous plume towards them, apparently delighted with the effect he is producing. Confronted by such a charming idyll, one is led to suppose that the Paris of those days doted upon these valiant soldiers, so attentive to the fair sex, as heroical and gallant as could be desired. Yet the contemporary memoirs and newspapers, and still more the police bulletins, seem bent on proving to us that relations between the military and the people of Paris were, on the contrary, very strained.
In spite of a flattering legend, the evidence against the Napoleonic troopers accumulates; admirable under fire, they too often appear, when on furlough, mere vulgar swashbucklers, drunkards, scroungers and ravishers. Exchanging blows, forcing their way into shops, drinking, and settling their bills by insults, harrying women, insulting and even beating them up on occasion, such were their most usual peccadilloes. Made for the life of the camp rather than for that of the barracks, treating the street like a conquered country, they had a moral law of their own that was the complete negation of morality; they thought they were above the law-that having bravely allowed their own heads to be punched, they had the right to punch other people's, and because they had thrashed the enemy it was lawful to thrash the bourgeois.
Delightful principles, which they applied conscientiously, but which were naturally not to the taste of peaceable people. The handsome soldiers were applauded when they paraded on the Carrousel, but for the rest of the time they were the terror of Paris.
As all well-ordered charity begins at home, they started by fighting one another. Between man and man, regiment and regiment, any quarrel arising was settled by a duel. One day when the Minister of Police was walking in the Bois de Boulogne, he witnessed a tournament in the grand manner between the 12th Hussars and the 15th Light Infantry. 'Four men from each corps were fighting one another, while the main body occupied the walks to prevent the combatants from being separated/
As he was not fond of blows, and happened to be in civilian dress, Fouche did not attempt to intervene. He contented himself with drawing up a report. But how many times would he and Dubois have to record similar affrays! Hardly a month, hardly a week would go by without soldiers of all arms, guides, artillerymen, dragoons, members of the Consular Guard, drawing swords in the pleasure gardens of Vaugirard or at the Barriere du Maine, behind the Jansenist mill.
Rivalries between corps, questions of service, affairs of prostitutes, anything was sufficient excuse for a quarrel. The finest duel of all was undoubtedly the one fought in the middle of the Champs-Elysees by two horsemen of the Guard, naked to the waist, before an attentive audience of strollers of both sexes, A session well calculated to demonstrate the bravery of the military and the curiosity of the ladies.
That bullies should cleave each other in two might be permissible at a pinch, but their brutality became intolerable when they attacked perfectly inoffensive citizens. If a passerby brushed against them, however lightly, or bumped into them by accident, they would accept no apology, but fell upon the unfortunate man. The son of the proprietor of the Cafe de Valois had his skull cleft in this way; a young man was cut to pieces by an infantry sergeant outside the door of the Senate; at the Barriere de Charonne soldiers killed a civilian; in the plain of Montrouge three soldiers disembowelled a stranger, under the pretext that he had looked at them in an insulting manner'. Sometimes our gay dogs operated in numbers: a party of mamelukes pillaged the shop of a caterer in the Rue d'Argenteuil and drank up his bottles of anisette cordial, forgetting that the law of the Prophet forbids alcohol; a unit of the 20th Light Infantry cleared out a cabaret in the Rue de Vaugirard; gendarmes of a picked corps went to beat up conscripts in an inn at Saint-Cloud; infantrymen of the 18th fought a regular battle in a wine-shop in Montmartre and broke twenty-three window-panes. There was no end to the exploits of these heroes on the spree, for whom the sword was a dangerous companion.
French soldiers have always prided themselves on courting the ladies. Under the Empire, unfortunately, they did not select them too well. Their conquests usually consisted of loiterers of the worst type, those that the police kept their eyes on, round the Place de Greve and the evil haunts of the Palais-Royal Sometimes they constituted themselves their champions and prevented the guard from arresting them, at others they had disputes of a sentimental order with them and gave them the sort of punishment that marks an epoch in a woman's life.
Far worse was it when they attacked respectable girls, forced the door of some woman's shop, hustled a woman distributing handbills on the Pont-Neuf, or took advantage of an unknown woman, six of them together, on the embankment of the Port-au-Ble, and then threw her in the river, for the sole purpose of making her forget this good, or bad, quarter of an hour.
Lest the picture seem too gloomy, however, we must admit that the troopers' amusements were not always so macabre; often they merely gave vent to their native joviality. They went in for delicate jokes, in the streets and in public resorts, which would have the greatest success when recounted at night in the barrack-room. One incident, which occurred at
the Palais-Royal, and is narrated in a police bulletin, will serve as an example.
'Yesterday evening a soldier was amusing himself by making water through the grating on the tables and the guests in the underground cafe of the Caveau. The cafe waiter came up in haste to reproach the soldier with the indecency of his behaviour, whereupon the soldier set about him with a stick and seriously injured him/
If ever the old French gaiety were to be at an ebb, it is plain that the army would take upon itself to restore their sense of humour to the Parisians.
In officer circles the tone was of course somewhat different, but they showed many of the same defects.
To begin with, the habit of fighting one another for more or less absurd reasons. Men who, on the field of battle, would assist each other at the peril of their own lives, would agree to meet, nobody knows why, in a clearing of the Bois de Boulogne or an avenue at Mousseaux, and next morning Commandant Duchatel would wound Capitaine Sibuet, Major de Sainte-Croix put paid to Lieutenant-Colonel Sicaud de Mariole, and General Grenier kill General Destaing in cold blood.
Sometimes the seconds caught the infection of the duel. Thus a certain Capitaine Millet, after exchanging insults with the representative of the opposite party, put a bullet through his head and ran off as fast as his legs would carry him. They called this settling an affair of honour.
Towards civilians the arrogance of the officers knew no bounds. When they went into a cafe to have a look at the Moniteur or the Debats, they tore the paper out of the hands of the bourgeois reading it, without a word of apology, and the man took care not to protest if he valued his ears. It was the custom now to let these gentlemen do as they liked.
The most elementary rules of everyday life, such as those governing the traffic, were not made for them, in their opinion. They could be seen galloping hard through the streets, at the risk of knocking people down. One of Berthier's aides-de-camps overturned a greengrocer's barrow; his friend Edmond de Perigord injured a street porter; another smashed in the window of a grocer's shop.
These young madmen were only following the example of their superior officers, who would not allow themselves to be held up by anybody, quarrelled with the Customs officers when they were travelling., like General Thiebault, or refused to pay dues on entering Paris, like the Colonel of the Empress's dragoons, who attacked the official in charge of the Barriere de FEcole, tore his rifle out of his hands and broke his leg.