THE CAUSE OF CITIZEN-GENERAL BONAPARTE'S ILL-HUMOR  
Bonaparte returned to the Palace Serbelloni. He was indeed in a bad humor.
While he was hardly at the beginning of his career, had hardly reached the dawn of his vast renown, calumny was already persecuting him with her endeavors to rob him of the merit of his incredible victories, which were comparable only to those of Alexander, Hannibal, or C?sar. Men said that Carnot laid out his military plans, and that his pretended military genius merely followed step by step the written directions of the Directory. They also said that he knew nothing of the matter of administration, and that Berthier, his chief of staff, attended to everything.
He saw the struggle which was taking place in Paris against the partisans of royalty, then represented by the Clichy Club, as they had been represented two years earlier by the Section Le Peletier.
Bonaparte's two brothers, in their private correspondence, urged him to take a stand between the royalists, that is to say the counter-revolution, and the Directory, which still stood for the Republic, greatly diverted no doubt from its original starting-point and its original aim, but the only standard nevertheless around which republicans could rally.
In the majority of the two councils ill-will against him was patent. Party leaders were incessantly wounding his self-esteem by their speeches and their writings. They belittled his glory, and decried the merits of the admirable army with which he had conquered five others.
[Pg 447]
He had attempted to enter civil affairs. He had been ambitious to become one of the five directors in the stead of the one who had resigned.
If he had succeeded in that attempt he was confident that he would in the end have been sole director. But they had objected to his age—twenty-eight—as an obstacle, since he would have to be at least thirty to become a director. He had therefore withdrawn, not daring to ask an exception in his favor, and thus violate that constitution for the maintenance of which he had fought on the 13th Vendémiaire.
The directors, moreover, were far from desiring him for a colleague. The members of this body did not disguise the jealousy with which Bonaparte's genius inspired them, nor did they hesitate to proclaim that they were offended at his haughty manner and assumption of independence.
It grieved him to think that they styled him a furious demagogue, and called him the "Man of the 13th Vendémiaire," whereas, on the 13th Vendémiaire, he had been only the "Man of the Revolution," in other words, of the public interests.
His instinctive inclination was, if not toward the Revolution, at least against the royalists. He was therefore pleased to note the republican spirit of the Revolution and to encourage it. His first success at Toulon had been against the royalists, his victory on the 13th Vendémiaire had also been against royalist forces. What were the five armies which he had defeated? Armies which supported the cause of the Bourbons; in other words, royalist armies.
But that which, at this period of all others, when he was wavering between the safe r?le of Monk and the dangerous r?le of C?sar, made him fling high the banner of the Republic, was his innate presentiment of his future grandeur. Even more than that, it was the proud feeling which he shared with C?sar that he would rather be the first man in a country town than the second in Rome.
Indeed, no matter how exalted a rank the king might[Pg 448] confer upon him, even though it be that of Constable of France, that king would still be above him, casting a shadow upon his brow. Mounting with the aid of a king, he would never be more than an upstart; mounting by his own unaided efforts, he would be no upstart—he would stand upon his own feet.
Under the Republic, on the contrary, he was already head and shoulders above the other men, and he could but continue to grow taller and taller. Perhaps his glance, piercing though it was, had not yet extended to the vast horizon which the Empire revealed to him; but there was in a republic an audacity of action and a breadth of enterprise which suited the audacity of his genius and the breadth of his ambition.
As sometimes happens with men who are destined to greatness, and who perform impossible deeds—not because they are predestined to them, but because some one had prophesied that they would do them, and they thereafter regard themselves as favorites of Providence—the most insignificant facts, when presented in certain lights, often led to momentous resolves with Bonaparte. The duel which he had just witnessed, and the soldiers' quarrel respecting the words monsieur and citizen, had brought before him the whole question that was then agitating France. Faraud, in naming his general, Augereau, as an inflexible exponent of democracy, had indicated to Bonaparte the agent he was seeking to second him in his secret plans.
More than once Bonaparte had reflected upon the danger of a Parisian revolt which would either overthrow the Directory, or oppress it as the Convention had been oppressed, and which would lead to a counter-revolution, or, in other words, the victory of the royalists, and to the accession of some prince of the house of Bourbon. In that case Bonaparte had fully determined to cross the Alps with twenty-five thousand men, and march upon Paris by way of Lyons. Carnot, with his sharp nose, had no doubt scented his design, for he sent him the following letter:
[Pg 449]
People ascribe to you a thousand projects, each one more absurd than the other. They cannot believe that a man who has achieved so much can be content to remain a simple citizen.
The Directory also wrote him:
We have noticed, citizen-general, with the utmost satisfaction, the proofs of attachment which you are constantly giving to the cause of liberty and the Constitution of the Year III. You can count ............