downfall; consciously the divorce of Josephine signified to the supersti
tious Emperor the loss of his luck, and unconsciously triggered a need to
be punished. It is tempting to dismiss this as fanciful, but there is the
curious fact that, after a two-year absence, Napoleon suddenly visited
Josephine at Malmaison on 30 June 1812, just days before setting out on
campatgn. Certainly the thesis of keeping depression at bay can be
sustained circumstantially from the following remarks quoted by
Roederer:
I care nothing for St-Cloud or the Tuileries. It would matter little to
me if they were burned down. I count my houses as nothing, women as
nothing, my son as not very much. I leave one place, I go to another. I
leave St-Cloud and I go to Moscow, not out of inclination or to gratify
myself, but out of dry calculation.If the disastrous decision to go to war with Russia was in some sense a
symptom of Napoleon's declining psychological well-being, his physical
health was also declining. 'After all, forty is forty,' was one of the
Emperor's authentic remarks, perhaps indicating some alarm at his own
rapid and premature decline. Those who had close contact with him in
1812 reported that he was woefully unfit and had grown fat from daily
four-course meals. Meneval spoke of hypertrophy of the upper body,
with a great head on massive shoulders, but small arms, no neck, a
pronounced paunch and a lower body that seemed too slender to support
the torso. One of the hidden factors working against the success of the
1812 campaign was the Emperor's ill-health. Loath to leave his carriage,
he spent many hours on his couch undressed and came down just before
the decisive battle of the war with a bad cold and dysuria. Throughout
September he was like a skeleton on horseback, nursing a temperature, a
constant cough, breathing difficulties and an irregular pulse, and
suffering acute pain in emptying his bladder.
From early 1812 the drift to war was all but inevitable. Realizing that
this time his forces would not be able to live off the land, on 13 January
he ordered Lacue, his Director of War Administration, to supply enough
provisions for an army of 40o,ooo men for fifty da ys. The basic provision
was supposed to be twenty million rations of bread and the same of rice;
additionally, 6,ooo wagons, either horse or ox-drawn, were to carry
enough flour for 200,000 men for two months, and for the horses two
million bushels of oats, enough to feed fifty mounts for fifty days, were to
be supplied. Needless to say, the Emperor did not say how such a vast
commissariat was to be assembled in time for a spring campaign and