CAMBACÉRÈS
Citizen First Consul, no scandal has ever besmirched my private life, and public order was never disturbed on my account. I have never compromised my dignity and most certainly not yours.
BONAPARTE
That is not important. You have been cautious. Your prudence has nonetheless not prevented Talleyrand from grouping all of us consuls in a formula which he amuses Paris by calling, “Hic, Haec, Hoc.”
CAMBACÉRÈS
Monsieur de Talleyrand is perhaps recalling his Church Latin.
BONAPARTE
Hic is the masculine demonstrative and has a certain emphasis. That’s me. Haec, the feminine demonstrative, is vaguely pejorative in tone. That’s you. Hoc, the neutral demonstrative, which is completely insulting, is poor Lebrun. I say this in the spirit of friendship, Cambacérès. Don’t be too Haec.
CAMBACÉRÈS
General, I will speak with the same frankness with which you are showing me. When I was young I visited the girls just as all the boys did, but I took no great pleasure there and never stayed for long. As soon as I was finished, I said, “Adieu, messieurs!” and left.
BONAPARTE
My dear friend, I have as much reason to be cautious about women as you do, and neither Madame de Staël nor Madame Récamier will change my mind about them. But I wish for you to avoid being called “Tante Turlurette” by street urchins.
CAMBACÉRÈS
“Tante Turlurette!” Is that what you think?
BONAPARTE
Well, what do you expect? You run the risk. It’s all the more vexing because as regards the territories, the Concordat, the Code civil, and the Légion d’honneur, you have been extremely useful to me.
CAMBACÉRÈS
If I have served you well, I have fulfilled my destiny.
BONAPARTE
Almost nothing was left after twenty years of mediocrity and ten years of disorder. I want to create great things, things that will endure. I dreamed of a republican knighthood, to recognize exactly the kind of distinction treated disdainfully by the monarchy and dragged through the mud by the Jacobins. That is why I instituted the Légion d’honneur. I wanted a body of laws worthy of Moses, of Solomon, and of Justinian. That is why I imposed the Civil Code, drafted, thanks to you, in a style capable of making poets and novelists pale with envy.
CAMBACÉRÈS
How impatient you were during those interminable debates — on marriage, divorce, succession, natural children, capital punishment. You always wanted to move more quickly. I was always keen for your sake to find the simplest, most brief, and clearest formulation: “All those condemned to death will have their head removed. .”
BONAPARTE
Setting up the Concordat was your finest moment. The role of the Church is a matter of great national importance. You know well, Cambacérès, that for me the religion is not about the mystery of incarnation but a means to social order. No society can function without morality, and there is no morality without religion. Only religion can give the state strong and lasting support. A society without religion is like a ship without a compass. I was a Mohamedan in Egypt and I would be a Buddhist in India. I am a Catholic here because most here are Catholics. I place no faith in metaphysical nonsense, and thumb my nose at holy men, dervishes, and fakirs. Aside from Talleyrand, who is different and who keeps the future in mind, I have never used bishops in my governments. Priests are as chatty as women: no state secret is safe under their robes. Yet religion is still as necessary to the state as are police and the army. Bells and the cannons are the two great voices of men, competing with thunder, that great voice of nature. I made the cannons speak in Egypt, and in Italy I mourned the silence of the bells in our campaigns. Hence I signed the Concordat. I reopened the churches.
CAMBACÉRÈS
What caused me most concern was that great ceremonial cross which the pope’s nuncio, Cardinal Caprara, never parts with. A cardinal and his cross in the streets of Paris in Year IX of the Republic! We had to hide one from the other at the back of a coach.
BONAPARTE
My dear Cambacérès, I could say of you what Voltaire and Robespierre said of the Supreme Being: if you didn’t exist it would be necessary to invent you. The Te Deum at Notre Dame on Easter Sunday did not come out of nowhere. The Jacobins were furious. Even the Army balked.
CAMBACÉRÈS
Indeed they did. General Delmas told me, “This was a pretty procession of monks. All it lacked was the million men who killed each other to destroy what you are bringing back.”
BONAPARTE
Notre Dame had been closed for ten years. My republican colonels, my Jacobin captains, my twenty-year-old lieutenants. None of them had ever been to a mass before. Only Talleyrand, the Bishop of Autun returned by Pious VII to civil life, and Fouché, the former seminary student and regicide who joined the police, could recall what it was all about. You should have seen the two of them. They didn’t bat an eyelash. It is true that Talleyrand’s expression is so impassive that it is impossible to read. If you kicked him in the ass, his face would show nothing.
CAMBACÉRÈS
You have turned the Catholics of France into republicans.
BONAPARTE
I also defended the rights of Protestants and of Jews. Most of all I gave back to the French a Church designed to serve me. I appointed bishops who would obey me and feel honored to dine with the Prefect. Once priests were religious ministers. They became government ministers. The people followed: Sunday once a week is better than a day off every ten.
CAMBACÉRÈS
You were assisted in this by Chateaubriand and his Genius of Christianity, which arrived on the scene at just the right moment — on the eve of that Te Deum in Notre Dame.
BONAPARTE
I repaid Chateaubriand by sending him to Rome with my Uncle Fesch. According to Fontanes, his friend who sleeps with my sister Élisa while I sleep with France, they didn’t get along at all. Chateaubriand has talent but he is impossible.
CAMBACÉRÈS
He’s royalist who supports you. He dedicated Genius of Christianity to you.
BONAPARTE
Successful men of letters think themselves the center of the world. My difficulty with Monsieur de Chateaubriand is not whether to buy him but whether to pay him what he believes he’s worth. He’s offered himself to me twenty times, but always in such a way that would make me bend to his imagination, which leads to falseness, rather than the other way around. I have always ended up refusing his services, meaning to serve him. I’m sorry for this. With Talleyrand, Chateaubriand has the strongest head of our times. I’m sorry for his sake that he does not have a greater sense of his own interests.