enough that the man was unreliable: he was a former Robespierre acolyte
who had trimmed successfully to emerge from Thermidor as a Barras
protege. But it was intolerable that he might infect Pauline with
venereal disease, and that she could end up married to the most
promiscuous man in Paris. Just at the moment Napoleon lacked the
power to cross Barras over Freron, so he advised Letizia to stall and await
further instructions.
On 24 March he was at Toulon, where he met and greatly impressed
Denis Decres, later to be his Minister of Marine. Next day he was at
Antibes, where he conferred with Louis Berthier, his forty-three-year-old
chief of staf f. Berthier, a veteran of the American War of Independence
and the Vendee, was a man of great energy and lucid mind; he was a
brilliant organizer and a master of the terse dispatch. Napoleon sensed his
quality straight away. Never one to judge men, at least, by external
appearances, he ignored Berthier's physical ugliness, his gaucherie, his
stammering and his compulsive nail biting, and concentrated on his great
administrative talents -enhanced, in Napoleon's eyes, by Berthier's lack
of ambition for a field command.
Yet the supreme test of Napoleon's ability to overawe rivals and bend
them to his will came in Nice on 27 March, when he met his three
principal generals: Serurier, Augereau and Massena. Serurier was a tall
man with a scar on his lip, a fifty-three-year-old martinet who had fought
in the Seven Years War and in Corsica in I 770. Although he was the son
of a molecatcher at the royal stud at Laon, he had the demeanour of an
aristocrat and it was said that, after the Revolution he went in danger of
his life every time he entered a new army camp, such was his foppish,
oligarchic air. He had less energy than Berthier or Augereau, but was a
man of greater integrity.
The thirty-eight-year-old Augereau, who had begun life in the Parisian
gutters, was the son of a stonemason and had had a chequered career. A
devotee of the first real communist, Gracchus Babeuf, who was in this
very year executed by the Directory, Augereau was a genuine man of
mystery. He had deserted from the French Army at seventeen, and then
led an intinerant life as an adventurer. According to his own (either
unreliable or unverifiable) account he had at various times sold watches in
Constantinople, given dancing lessons, served in the Russian army and
eloped with a Greek girl to Lisbon. The French Revolution was the
making of him. He commanded the 'German Legion' in the Vendee and
then won a spectacular victory against the Spanish with the Army of the
Pyrenees in 1795. A man of little education and indifferent intellect,
Augereau was a great fighting general, with a tendency to melancholia,
marcin
(Marcin)
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