The Secret of Napoleon's Success. 469 vainly complained at the War Office, at length determined to address himself directly to the Ministère Secrétaire d'Etat, Maret. He solicited the cross of the Legion of Honour for his aide-de-camp, Captain George Lafayette. It is a forgetfulness,' said Maret on the part of his Majesty, and of the minister of war, and if Captain Geo. Lafayette is not included in the forthcoming promotion, I give you my word, general, I shall cause him to be inserted.' A little time after this a list was made at the emperor's desire, but the name of Geo. Lafayette was not among the fortunate officers. Maret perceiving this, added the name at the bottom of the list in his own hand. The list was then, as in ordinary cases, submitted to the personal examination of the emperor. But no annotation of assent was placed in the emperor's handwriting opposite the name of Lafayette. Well!' said the Duke of Bassano, 'this is a mere oversight, but I'll try again.' "Šome months passed away, during which a glorious campaign augmented the chances of the young soldier's success. Bassano again came to the charge; again inscribed with his own hand, the same name; again placed it under the eyes of the emperor. But alas! with the same luckless result. Now thought the duke, this is a manifest injustice in the guilt of which I shall have no hand, but at all events there is nothing like tenacity, and I'll try a third time. And he did generously interpose a third time, but with no better result. Against so strong a resolve, so unhappy a prejudice on the part of the emperor, the Duke of Bassano deemed it vain any longer to struggle, but he thought himself bound under the circumstances to intimate to young Lafayette by a third person his opinion that he would do well to renounce a career which only presented a succession of dangers without the hope of promotion or reward." This was an act of calm courage on the part of the secretary which few men in the then state of France would have exhibited. It was a grave rebuke of an unjust prejudice, it was a lesson given to a man who did not in general bear lessons patiently, above all from inferiors-and who might of his mere will have struck the unfortunate giver of the lesson from off the list of his official servants. But Bonaparte was too shrewd, too wise a man to do this. On the contrary not a word, not a gesture, betrayed the slightest emotion of resentment against a minister who, after a first refusal, had the courage at the risk of displeasing his master twice again to renew a proposal which he knew would be disrelished. This is not the way to gain favour with the ordinary great in general, for Molière well says, "Et les plus prompts moyens de gagner leur faveur But, after all, what a wonderful man was this same Napoleon! How admirably did he gain the ascendancy over all who came into contact with him! How he was beloved by his soldiers-by his children as he called them-with whom he marched from the sands of Egypt to the snows of Russia. What was the secret of this? Employments were not monopolized either in virtue of birth or favour or fortune. Je ne dois des faveurs à personne,' said the little man with loftiness; 'quant aux récompenses, il dépend de chacun de les mériter, par de bons services rendus au pays.' This was the great secret of his success in every thing. The fittest men were chosen for the several places, regard being had only to their fitness. On this principle he conquered half the world, and he might have conquered another quarter of it had he but adhered to this the rule of his earlier life. ART. X.-1. Lettres Parisiennes, par Madame EMILE DE GIRARDIN (Vicomte de Launay). Parisian Letters by EMILY DE GIRARDIN, under the pseudonym of the Vicomte de Launay. Paris. 1843. 2. Paris im Frühjahr. 1843. Von. L. RELLSTAB. Leipzig. 1844. 3. Paris and its People. By the Author of 'Random Recollections of the House of Commons.' London. 1843. Of the myriads of books now yearly appearing which Time shall swallow up, so that they or their memory be no more seen, we hope this little work of Madame de Girardin's will not be one. Not that it is more innocent or intrinsically worthy of life than many others of its companions which will be handed over to the inevitable Destroyer; but it deserves to have a corner in a historical library, where even much more natural and meritorious publications might be excluded; just as a two-headed child will get a place in a museum-bottle, when an ordinary creature, with the usual complement of skull, will only go the way the sexton shows it. The Lettres Parisiennes' give a strange picture of a society, of an age, and of an individual. One or the other Madame Girardin exposes with admirable unconscious satire; and this is satire of the best and wholesomest sort. One is apt to suspect the moralist whose indignation makes his verse or points his wit; one cannot tell how much of personal pique mars the truth of his descriptions, or how many vices or passions are painted after the happy ever-present model himself; and while we read Swift's satires of a sordid, brutal, and wicked age, or Churchill's truculent descriptions of the daring profligates of his time, we know the first to be black-hearted, wicked, and envious, as any monster he represents, and have good reason to suspect the latter to be the dissolute ruffian whom he describes as a characteristic of his times. But the world could never be what the dean painted as he looked at it with his furious, mad, glaring eyes; nor was it the wild drunken place which Churchill, reeling from a tavern, fancied he saw reeling round about him. We might as well take the word of a sot, who sees four candles on the table where the sober man can only perceive two; or of a madman who peoples a room with devils that are quite invisible to the doctor. Our Parisian chronicler, whose letters appear under the pseudonym of the Vicomte de Launay, is not more irrational than his neighbours. The vicomte does not pretend to satirize his times more than a gentleman would who shares in the events which he depicts, and has a perfectly good opinion of himself and them; if he writes about trifles it is because his society occupies itself with such, and his society is, as we know, the most refined and civilized of all societies in this world; for is not Paris the European capital, and does he not speak of the best company there?-Indeed, and for the benefit of the vulgar and unrefined, the vicomte's work ought to be translated, and would surely be read with profit. Here might the discontented artisan see how his betters are occupied; here might the country gentleman's daughter who, weary of her humdrum village-retirement, pines for the delights of Paris, find those pleasures chronicled of which she longs to take a share; and if we may suppose possesses (as she does always in novels and often in real life) a sage father or guardian, or a reflective conscience of her own, either monitor will tell her a fine moral out of the Vicomte de Launay's letters, and leave her to ask is this the fashionable life that I have been sighing after-this heartless, false, and above all, intolerably wearisome existence, which the most witty and brilliant people in the world consent to lead? As for the man of the humbler class, if after musing over this account of the great and famous people he does not learn to be contented with his own condition, all instruction is lost upon him, and his mind is diseased by a confirmed enviousness which no reason or reality will cure. she Nor is the Vicomte de Launay's sermon, like many others, which have undeniable morals to them, at all dull in the reading; every page, on the contrary, is lively and amusing-it sparkles with such wit as only a Frenchman can invent-it abounds with pleasing anecdote, bright pictures of human life, and happy turns of thought. It is entirely selfish and heartless, but the accomplished author does not perceive this: its malice is gentlemanlike and not too illnatured: and its statements, if exaggerated, are not more so than good company warrants. In a society where a new carriage, or new bonnet, is a matter of the greatest importance, how can one live but by exaggerating? Lies, as it were, form a part of the truth of the system. But there is a compensation for this, as for most other things in life-and while one set of duties or delights are exaggerated beyond measure, another sort are depreciated correspondingly. In that happy and genteel state of society where a new carriage, or opera, or bonnet, become objects of the highest importance, morals become a trifling matter; politics futile amusement; and religion an exploded ceremony. All this is set down in the vicomte's letters, and proved beyond the possibility of a doubt. And hence the great use of having real people of fashion to write their own lives, in place of the humble male and female authors, who, under the denomination of the Silver Fork School, have been employed by silly booksellers in our own day. They cannot give us any representation of the real authentic genteel fashionable life, they will relapse into morality in spite of themselves, do what they will they are often vulgar, sometimes hearty and natural; they have not the unconscious wickedness, the delightful want of principle, which the great fashionable man possesses, none of the grace and ease of vice. What pretender can, for instance, equal the dissoluteness of George Selwyn's Letters, lately published?-What mere literary head could have invented Monsieur Suisse and his noble master? We question whether Mr. Beckford's witty and brilliant works could have been written by any but a man in the very best company; and so it is with the Vicomte de Launay,-his is the work of a true person of fashion, the real thing, (the real sham, some misanthropist may call it, but these are of a snarling and discontented turn,) and no mere pretender could have equalled them. As in the cases of George Selwyn and Monsieur Suisse, mentioned before, the De Launay Letters do not tell all, but you may judge by a part of the whole, of Hercules by his foot,-by his mere bow, it is said, any one (in high life) might judge his late Majesty George IV., to be the most accomplished man in Europe. And so with De Launay, though he speak but about the last new turban which the Countess wore at the opera, or of her liaison with the Chevalier you may see by the gravity with which he speaks of that turban, and the graceful lightness with which he recounts the little breakage of the seventh commandment in question, what is the relative importance of each event in his mind, and how (we may therefore pretty fairly infer) the beau monde is in the habit of judging them. Some French critics who have spoken of Vicomte de Launay's work, do, it is true, deny his claim to rank as a man of fashion, but there are delicate shades in fashion and politeness, which a foreigner cannot understand, and many a person will pass among us for well-bred, who is not what Mrs. Trollope calls la créme de la crême. The vicomte does not, as it would seem, frequent those great and solemn houses of the Faubourg St. Germain, where the ancient nobility dwell, (and which are shut to all the roture*)—but he is welcomed at the court of Louis Philippe, and the balls of the ambassadors (so much coveted by our nation in France)—he dances in all the salons of the Faubourg, and hẹ has a box at all the operas; if Monsieur de Castellane gives a private play, the Vicomte is sure to be in the front seats; if the gentlemensportsmen of the Jockey-club on the Boulevard have a racing or gambling match in hand, he is never far off: he is related to the chamber of deputies, and an influential party there, he has published poems, and plays, and commands a newspaper; and hence his opportunities of knowing poets, authors, and artists, are such as must make him a chronicler of no ordinary authenticity. It is of matters relating to all these people that the gay and voluble vicomte discourses; and if we may judge of the success of his letters by the number of imitations which have followed them, their popularity must have been very great indeed. Half-a-dozen journals at least have their weekly chronicle now upon the De Launay model, and the reader of the French and English newspapers may not seldom remark in the own correspondence' with which some of the latter prints are favoured, extracts and translations from the above exclusive sources, compiled by the ambassadors of the English press in Paris, for the benefit of their public here. It would be impossible perhaps for a journal here to produce any series of London letters similar in kind to those of which we are speaking. The journalist has not the position in London. which is enjoyed by his Parisian brother. Here the journal is every thing, and the writer a personage studiously obscure;—if a gentleman, he is somehow most careful to disguise his connexion with literature, and will avow any other profession but his own: if not of the upper class, the gentry are strangely shy and suspicious of him, have vague ideas of the danger of being shown up' by him, and will flock to clubs to manifest their mistrust by a black ball. Society has very different attentions for the Parisian journalists, and we find them admitted into the saloons of ambassadors, the cabinets of ministers, and the boudoirs of ladies of fashion. When shall we ever hear of Mr. This, theatrical critic for the Morning Post,' at Lady Londonderry's ball, or Mr. That, editor of the Times,' closeted with Sir Robert Peel, and assisting' the prime minister to prepare a great parliamentary paper or a Queen's Except as in the case of a rich American, who, though once a purser of a ship, has been adopted by the nobles of the Faubourg St. Germain, and is said to have cut the family at the Tuileries,' and all his old acquaintances of the Chaussée d'Antin. |