Napoleon's Wars_ An International History, 1803-1815 - Charles Esdaile [83]
Nor is Chaptal much more flattering. In his eyes Napoleon ‘had the manners of a second lieutenant of no family’, while he was horrified by the lack of courtesy and respect which he habitually accorded his ministers, generals, servants and guests at court: the First Consul frequently flew into violent rages at the slightest misdeed, failed to appear at his own levees, and wrecked formal banquets by bolting a few mouthfuls of food and then getting up before his fellow diners had so much as embarked on the soup. This last tendency was perhaps the fruit of a personal dynamism and energy that few could equal - Chaptal reports that Napoleon could travel back to Paris day and night from the depths of Poland and plunge straight from his carriage into a meeting of the council of state without displaying the slightest fatigue - but even in his eating habits there was something of the camp: as is notorious, his favourite dishes - mushrooms, fried onions, fried potatoes - were the stuff of any soldier’s skillet. To return to Napoleon’s manner, there is mention of traits that would today be put down to hyperactivity, some of them deeply unpleasant:
Napoleon was by nature habitually destructive. In the council chamber the midst of a discussion would find him, knife in hand, cutting at the arms of his chair and scoring deep grooves in its wood . . . For a bit of variety in this respect, he would seize hold of a pen and cover the papers in front of him with lines of ink, crumpling up each sheet into a ball after he had finished with it and throwing it on the floor. As for pieces of porcelain, they could hardly be put in his hand without getting smashed. I remember that one day he was presented with an equestrian statue of himself that had been executed with true perfection by the china factory at Sèvres. Placing it on a table, he first broke its stirrups and then a leg, and, when I remarked that the artist would die of hurt were he to see his work being thus mutilated, he coldly replied, ‘All that can be fixed with a bit of paste.’ Caressing a child, he would pinch it so hard that it cried. At Malmaison he had a fowling piece in his office and he was constantly firing this through the window at the rare birds that Josephine used to keep on the lakes in the grounds. This malign impulse to destroy was so great that he could not enter the hothouse at Malmaison without cutting down or pulling up one of the rare plants that were buried there.23
Coupled with this suppressed violence was an egotism that is even now quite chilling. His favourite topic of conversation was himself; he despised women and treated them with contempt and, it seems, considerable sexual brutality; and he regarded other men with the utmost cynicism:
While some of his intellectual qualities were remarkable . . . his soul was lacking. There was no generosity, no real greatness. I never knew him admire, I never knew him understand, an act of decency. He always denied the existence of sentiment; he put no store in sincerity; and he openly admitted that he judged a man’s ability in accordance with the extent to which he could engage in deceit - on such occasions, indeed, he would take much pleasure in recalling that in his infancy one of his uncles had predicted that he would govern the world on account of the fact that he was always lying . . . Every means of governing men that might debase them was made use of by Napoleon. He shunned the bonds of affection, he took pains to divide his followers from one