Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, 1769-1821 -- Fiction
There is one thing that it would be very wrong to keep back from you.
While he was in Egypt, in the desert not far away from Syria, _the Red
Man_ had appeared to him on the mountain of Moses, in order to say,
"Everything is going on well." Then again, on the eve of victory at
Marengo, the Red Man springs to his feet in front of the Emperor for the
second time, and says to him:
"You shall see the world at your feet; you shall be Emperor of the
French, King of Italy, master of Holland, ruler of Spain, Portugal, and
the Illyrian Provinces, protector of Germany, saviour of Poland, first
eagle of the Legion of Honor and all the rest of it."
That Red Man, look you, was a notion of his own, who ran on errands and
carried messages, so many people say, between him and his star. I myself
have never believed that; but the Red Man is, undoubtedly, a fact.
Napoleon himself spoke of the Red Man who lived up in the roof of the
Tuileries, and who used to come to him, he said, in moments of trouble
and difficulty. So on the night after his coronation Napoleon saw him
for the third time, and they talked over a lot of things together.
Then the Emperor goes straight to Milan to have himself crowned King of
Italy, and then came the real triumph of the soldier. For every one
who could write became an officer forthwith, and pensions and gifts of
duchies poured down in showers. There were fortunes for the staff that
never cost France a penny, and the Legion of Honor was as good as an
annuity for the rank and file; I still draw my pension on the strength
of it. In short, here were armies provided for in a way that had never
been seen before! But the Emperor, who knew that he was to be Emperor
over everybody, and not only over the army, bethinks himself of the
bourgeois, and sets them to build fairy monuments in places that had
been as bare as the back of my hand till then. Suppose, now, that you
are coming out of Spain and on the way to Berlin; well, you would see
triumphal arches, and in the sculpture upon them the common soldiers are
done every bit as beautifully as the generals!
In two or three years Napoleon fills his cellars with gold, makes
bridges, palaces, roads, scholars, festivals, laws, fleets, and harbors;
he spends millions on millions, ever so much, and ever so much more to
it, so that I have heard it said that he could have paved the whole of
France with five-franc pieces if the fancy had taken him; and all this
without putting any taxes on you people here. So when he was comfortably
seated on his throne, and so thoroughly the master of the situation,
that all Europe was waiting for leave to do anything for him that he
might happen to want; as he had four brothers and three sisters, he said
to us, just as it might be by way of conversation, in the order of the
day:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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