made Chateaubriand call him 'a poet in action' - is not so far in
sensibility from his account of his own relationship to Fate: 'I had risen
fr om the masses so suddenly. I fe lt my isolation. So I kept throwing
anchors for my salvation into the depths of the sea.' Then there is of
course the famous utterance from the St Helena period: 'What a novel,
anyhow, my life has been!'
Napoleon was always conscious of his place in history even as he made
it, and it is this, as much as his many theatrical and histrionic touches,
that have led people to speak of him as 'nothing but' an actor. The
remark he made when he and Josephine first occupied the Tuileries is
typical: 'Come along, my little Creole, go and lie down in the bed of your
masters.' But a truer assessment would be to say that Napoleon's reason
was always the servant of his imagination. His great memory for facts was
transmuted by the imagination just as a great orchestral conductor
'magics' a dry score. He spoke of the 'after-midnight presence of mind' to
denote the same kind of unconscious process an artist like R. L.
Stevenson referred to as his 'Brownies'; Napoleon would often wake up
in the middle of the night with an intuition comparable to that of a
Coleridge or an Einstein.
Because Napoleon was an artist manque and saw his life as a novel,
nothing in it surprised him. People have often wondered how it was that
an obscure Corsican could ascend an imperial throne like a duck taking to
water. But wearing the purple to such a man would simply be another
chapter in the book of his life. This is surely the hidden subtext to his
own apology: 'It is said that I am ambitious, but this is an error; or at least
my ambition is so intimately allied to my whole being that it cannot be
separated from it.' Some have even speculated that Napoleon was a 'dual
man' in a unique sense, that he was a man who lived in space and time
and who observed the 'other self doing so many remarkable things, that,
to put it another way, he lived on an equal footing with his own destiny.
This is why some writers, on the analogy of the historical Jesus and the
numinous Christ, have elected to separate the historical Bonaparte from
the legendary Napoleon and to consider them as things apart. Grapholo
gists' study of Napoleon's penmanship, revealing hyperimpatience,
identity problems and a discord between brain and hand, also demon
strate that the handwritings of the young General Bonaparte and the
middle-aged Emperor Napoleon, are virtually those of two different
people.
The penchant for making policy on the wing meant that politically, as
well as militarily, Napoleon was a pragmatist who reacted to events: he
had no blueprint, no overarching aim and therefore claimed that he was
marcin
(Marcin)
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