They also toured long stretches of the Scheldt, Somme and Seine, for in every town and village along their banks—and those of the rivers Elbe and Weser as well—shipwrights brought from all parts of France were labouring night and day building the vast fleet of invasion barges that was to carry the 'Army of the Coast of the Ocean' across the Channel.
On their return to Paris there were other matters to be gone into that had already been put in train earlier that autumn. An American inventor named Fulton, a man of undoubted genius but uncertain sympathies—at one time he claimed that he would 'Deliver France and the world from British oppression' and a little later that Napoleon was 'A wild beast who ought to be hunted down'—had been busying himself on two projects. One was an adaptation of the steam vessel with which Henry Bell had filled all beholders with wonder and terror on the Clyde in 1800. The other was a forerunner of the modern submarine.
Fulton's first paddle steamer had been so ill constructed that during a gale it rid itself of the weight of its engine by breaking in half, but he had since made another that astonished the scientists of the Institute by chugging very slowly down the Seine. The submarine, or 'plunging boat' as it was termed, suffered the disability that, being a sailing vessel, as soon as it disappeared under water it lost all power to move forward. Admittedly it succeeded in discharging a form of torpedo into another small vessel and sinking it, but it certainly would have been blown to pieces before it could have done so had its victim been armed with a cannon.
Napoleon, like most wise military commanders, was extremely chary of changing any main type of armament while his country was at war because, although the new type might be an improvement on the old, the change-over involved great organisational difficulties and the troops had to be trained in handling it before it could be used effectively. So he could not be brought even to consider building a fleet of Fulton's steamboats for the invasion.
By that time his building programme of flat-bottomed barges was well advanced, and during the autumn Roger saw a letter of his to Admiral Gantheaume in which he said that he would soon have one thousand three hundred barges on the northern coast capable of carrying over one hundred thousand men, and another flotilla based on the Dutch ports that would transport a follow-up of a further sixty thousand.
The menace of an invading army of such a size would have made Roger tremble for the safety of his country had he believed that any great part of it would succeed in getting ashore. But Napoleon and his generals knew nothing of the tides, cross-currents and uncertainties of the English Channel, whereas Roger had spent countless days of his boyhood sailing from Lymington on yachts large and small up and down the coast; so he knew a great deal. It was, therefore, his firm opinion that even a moderate choppiness of the sea would make most of the troops in the cumbersome barges terribly seasick, that many of the barges would sink and all be extremely vulnerable to both the guns of the Royal Navy and those of the shore batteries.
During the autumn, whenever Roger was not on duty with his master, or being despatched on brief missions by him, he continued his delightful liaison with the unfailingly amorous Pauline, to the great pleasure and satisfaction of them both.
On several occasions he encountered her husband, Camillo Borghese, when attending receptions at the Tuilerics, the Hotel de Charost and other private mansions, and soon knew all about the Prince. He was twenty-eight and an attractive man with large dark eyes. His estates in Italy were vast, but his education left much to be desired. He spoke French with a heavy accent and was incapable of writing even his own language correctly. Five years earlier, with the enthusiasm of youth for new ideas, he had espoused the Republican cause in Rome. Accepting the doctrine of 'Liberty, Equality and Fraternity' without reserve he had, with other like-minded young nobles, thrown his coat of arms into a public bonfire, wherein Cardinals' hats were already blazing, and danced round it.
These antics had since been discreetly overlooked, and older members of his family had seen to it that he retained his vast possessions. His courtship of Pauline had been warmly approved by her mother, whose natural language and sympathies were Italian; and it was Madame Letizia who had pushed Napoleon into agreeing that Pauline should be allowed to marry Borghese before her twelve months of mourning had expired.
When in society Roger tactfully refrained from paying more attention to Pauline than to the other Bonaparte ladies and, secure in her passionate attachment to him, he could afford to make himself pleasant to the Prince. Meanwhile a furious strife was raging among the members of the Bonaparte family.
The idea had long been canvassed that to protect himself from assassination Napoleon should become an hereditary monarch and thus, having appointed a successor, ensure that his death would not lead to rival factions plunging France into civil war. As Napoleon had no son, all the Bonapartes were already at loggerheads over their claims to become his heir. Joseph, as the eldest, naturally asserted it to be his right. Lucicn, the ex-Robespicrreist, was now more eager to become an heir apparent than any of them and argued that, had it not been for the part he had played during the coup-d'etat of Brumaire, Napoleon would never have become consul at all. The two younger brothers, Louis and Jerome, both put in bids. Then there were the children. Eliza had only a daughter, but both the ambitious Caroline and Pauline had sons. Louis, too, had a boy and Josephine did her utmost to persuade Napoleon to adopt him, because he was her grandson by Hortcnse. Last but not least there was her own son, Eugene dc Beauharnais, who could not altogether be ignored owing to his having become a good soldier and because Napoleon was fonder of him than he was of any of his own brothers.
During the autumn, however, two of the claimants ruled themselves out. Jerome, now aged nineteen, had been put into the Navy and sailed to the West Indies. France, since the Louisiana settlement, having most friendly relations with the United States, young Jerome had had himself landed there and, as the First Consul's brother, been most handsomely received. In Baltimore he had met and married a Miss Elizabeth Patterson.
When Napoleon had learned of this he had become berserk with rage. Pauline having married a Prince had impressed upon him the heights to which he could raise his family now that, in all but title, he was a monarch; so he had intended that Jerome's wife should be nothing less than a Princess, and the wretched boy had spoilt this gratifying prospect by getting himself tied up to the daughter of an American merchant.
The case of Lucien, by far the cleverest but also the most pig-headed and troublesome of Napoleon's brothers, was even more deplorable. An habitual lecher, while Ambassador in Madrid, he had tried but failed to seduce a Spanish Infanta, and had then acquired the beautiful Marquesa de Santa Cruz as his mistress. On his return from Spain, to the fury of his sister Eliza who, after the death of his first wife, had enormously enjoyed acting as hostess for him, he had brought the Marquesa back with him and installed her as chatelaine in a chateau that he had taken just outside Paris.
Napoleon, regarding this as a temporary affaire, made no objection to it and, ever forgiving of the ungrateful way in which his family abused his generosity, endeavoured to make friends again with Lucien, then evolved a fine plan to further his fortunes. The young and incredibly stupid King of the newly created Kingdom of Etruria had died the previous May; why should not Lucien marry the widowed Queen and so become the son-in-law of the King of Spain, which would bind Spain still more firmly to the interests of France?