'You are most kind. I might even stay here overnight if that would not be trespassing too greatly on your hospitality; for I should much like the opportunity of discussing various matters with you at some length.'
'About that there will be no difficulty. Indeed, I am honoured to have Monsieur le Ministre as my guest.'
Fouche bowed, 'I thank you; but there is one—er—small point upon which I must put you right. The First Consul has recently dispensed with my services. I am no longer Minister of Police.'
'You astound me,' Roger replied, raising his eyebrows. 'Have you then quarrelled with Bonaparte?'
'No, no; I would not say that,' Fouché replied, looking away and blowing his nose. 'It is only that he thinks that he can now do without me. He is, of course, mistaken—that is, if he wishes to retain both his life and his power; but let us talk of such matters later.'
Roger left the room to order a somewhat better dinner, and a bottle of wine to be brought to the library.
Over dinner they talked of many things, and there were few about which Fouche did not have inside information.
Roger had been absent from France for close on a year and a few weeks after he had left for England Hortense de Beauharnais had been married to Louis Bonaparte. She had been in love with the handsome Duroc, but he had not cared for her and had refused Bonaparte's offer of her hand. Josephine, meanwhile, perpetually harassed by the hatred of her Bonaparte relations, had been seeking some way to sow dissension among them. If she could marry off her daughter to Louis Bonaparte that should detach him from his family and make him her ally. With the arts she knew so well how „ to use she had persuaded her husband that it would be a most suitable match. Hortense had been very averse to it; but her mother had overruled her protests. Louis, too, had greatly disliked the idea, but he was a weakling and had tamely submitted to his brother's orders. So on January 7th these two young people, although hating one another, had been united in wedlock.
In January, too, the renewal of the Legislative Bodies had become due. No provision for this had been laid down in the hastily composed Constitution; so Bonaparte had decreed that the Senate should name the Tribunes and Legislators who were to go or remain. As might have been expected, no member was left in cither Assembly who had the courage to oppose him violently.
Another innovation the First Consul had introduced was the splitting of the principal Ministries, so that their functions were divided under two equally responsible Chiefs. By this means he had cunningly deprived any single Minister of the power to thwart him and could check the activities of one Minister by the reports of another employed on more or less the same type of work. Fouche had found himself the opposite number to Savary, formerly one of Dcsaix's A.D.C.s, whom Bonaparte had found to be a useful man and had now made Chief of the Security Police. All this Fouche declared, was a clear indication of Bonaparte's intention to make himself Dictator. On May 8th another step had been taken by his succeeding in getting passed a measure that extended his First Consulship for a further ten years. Two months later he had followed that up by having a referendum put to the people, and such was his immense popularity that the voting had been only eight thousand odd against the three million five hundred thousand in favour of his becoming First Consul for life. He had at once introduced a new Constitution, that he had ready in his pocket, which curtailed still further the liberties of the people who were so besotted about him, and from August 1st had decreed that henceforth he should be known as 'Napoleon'.
Meanwhile he had forced through reform after reform, all aimed at restoring France to a monarchy in all but name. In April he had ratified the Concordat with Rome and, to celebrate it, had a spectacular Te Deum sung in Notre Dame, which he had compelled all the notables to attend. Those old die-hard Revolutionary Generals Augereau and Lannes had had to be virtually arrested and conveyed to the Cathedral under escort in a carriage. Throughout the service they had talked without restraint, using their habitual oaths. Augereau had spat on the floor and Lannes declared loudly, 'Just to think that a million Frenchmen gave their lives to get rid of all this nonsense, and now we are forced to submit to it again.'
In an endeavour to win the allegiance of the Generals, Bonaparte had ignored the abolition during the Revolution of Orders of Chivalry and proposed to introduce a new one to be called the 'Legion of Honour'.
This was announced in May and was to have several grades so that persons of all classes should receive the distinction as a reward for their services to the State, and the highest rank of the Order was to be awarded both to the leading Generals and learned men of the Academy.
Against considerable opposition Bonaparte had forced his project through the Senate and a great outcry from the old sans-culottes had resulted. Many of the Generals, too, had declared it contrary to the principles of the Revolution.
Lafayette, whom Bonaparte had compelled the Austrians to give up after having been for many years a prisoner of war, flatly refused to accept the new honour. Moreau, revolting at this desecration of Revolutionary ideology, declared that he would hang the Cross of the Order he had been awarded to the collar of his dog.
Fouché went on to say that, having crushed the Jacobins; Bonaparte had found a new threat to his ambitions in many of the Generals and the rank and file of the Army, which was still strongly Republican. Augereau. Brune, St. Cyr, Jourdan, Lannes, Oudinot, Macdonald, Massena, Moreau and Bernadotte all intensely resented his assumption of virtually monarchical powers.
They had actually conspired against him and introduced a proposal to the Senate that his power should be curtailed by dividing France into a number of Military Governments. Bonaparte, of all people, had promptly assumed the role of the defender of the 'Liberties of the People' and, declaring Military Governments to be a most tyrannical form of rule, had the measure thrown out.
Bernadotte, who positively hated him, had then had his Chief of Staff, General Simon, despatch in secret thousands of pamphlets for distribution among the troops, that began,
'Soldiers! You no longer have a country; the Republic has ceased to exist. A tyrant has seized upon power; and that tyrant is Bonaparte'
Fouché had, of course, known all about this and had Simon and a number of officers arrested. Bonaparte had again shown extreme astuteness. Instead of ordering a purge that might have set half the army by the cars, he had had the arrested officers released without trial; one by one, quietly, got the recalcitrant Generals out of France to distant commands where they could do him no harm, and despatched all the most revolutionary-minded regiments on an expedition to San Domingo.
This, the largest island in the West Indies, had been a source of enormous wealth to France in the days of the Monarchy but, early in the Revolution, fiery agitators had been despatched there to preach the doctrine of equality, with the result that the slaves had risen and massacred thousands of the white population.
Out of this imbroglio a Negro General named Toussaint L’Ouverturc had arisen. He was a man of remarkable gifts and had succeeded in restoring a state approaching order in the island. In May 1801, following Bonaparte's example, he had given San Domingo a Constitution and appointed himself Governor for life. He had then written to the First Consul requesting that France should take the island under her protection and defend it from the English. As at that time Bonaparte was already putting out peace feelers towards Britain he acted with extreme duplicity. Replying to Toussaint in the most flattering terms, he said that he would send an army to protect San Domingo, while his real intention was to reconquer it.