litter of eight bastards; I find her more despicable than ever. She was a
nice enough trollop; she has become a horrible, infamous woman.' It is
impossible here not to detect some displaced envy for Tallien's fecundity,
with its obvious contrast to Josephine's barrenness.
The Emperor's correspondence from Finkenstein shows him indis
posed to suffer gladly those he took to be fools. After some nagging from
Fouche about the necessity of peace, he hit back irritably: 'Talking
incessantly about peace is not a good means of getting it.' When Hortense
sent him grief-stricken letters about the death from croup of her son
Charles-Napoleon-Louis, he reproached her sharply for her 'excessive'
lamentations: this was tantamount to letting death win, he chided, but as
a soldier he knew very well that death was not that terrible an adversary.
When Hortense unsurprisingly did not reply to this cold, unsympathetic
'condolence', Napoleon wrote in the tones of a stern but benevolent
paterfamilias: 'My daughter ... You have not written a word; you've
forgotten everything. I'm told you love no one any more and are
indifferent to everything; I can see this from your silence. This is not well
done, Hortense ... If I had been at Malmaison, I would have shared your
pain.'
By early June r8o7 Napoleon was ready to begin operations against the
Russians. Herculean efforts saw the total strength of the Grande Armee -
including units in Naples and Dalmatia and those guarding the coasts of
France and Holland - raised to 6oo,ooo by May. Six fresh divisions had
been raised, two each from Italy, Germany and Poland. A particular
feature of early r8o7 was the appearance of an Army of Germany,
roo,ooo strong, recruited particularly from Saxony and Baden. Designed
to make sure that Germany did not rise in his rear or Austria suddenly
enter the war, the Army of Germany straddled Prussia, with Jerome in
command of the right wing in Silesia, Brune in the centre and Mortier
commanding the left in Pomerania. To make sure that there was a firm
hand on Warsaw, the Emperor summoned Massena (to his disgust) from
Italy.
By June Napoleon had 22o,ooo men in Poland and outnumbered the
Russians two to one. The two heroes of Eylau, Davout and Murat, were
with him, and Lefebvre, helped by Lannes and Oudinot, had just
successfully completed a second siege of Danzig. The brimming
magazines of Danzig eased the French supply problem, which had been
acute in the winter of r8o6--o7, and encouraged Napoleon to cast envious
eyes on the next such military cornucopia, at Konigsberg. The only cloud
over the Grand Army was the dissolution of Augereau's VII Corps, no
longer viable after Eylau; the survivors were redistributed among the
marcin
(Marcin)
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