Memoirs of General de Caulaincourt - The Russian Campaign

The Memoirs of General de

Caulaincourt, Duke of Vicenza

Volume I –  The Russian Campaign 1811-1812

Edited by Jean Hanoteau

Translated by Hamish Miles

 This edition is published by PICKLE PARTNERS PUBLISHING

Text originally published in 1935 under the same title.

© Pickle Partners Publishing 2011, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION 3

CHAPTER I 26

The St. Petersburg Embassy 26

CHAPTER II 65

Before the Russian Campaign 65

CHAPTER III 85

Towards Moscow 85

CHAPTER IV 141

Moscow 141

INTRODUCTION

THE manor of Caulaincourt is situated some eight miles to the west of St. Quentin, among the woods and water meadows of the valley of the Omignon. The old chateau was destroyed in the Great War but the terrace remains, in front of the new chateau built a few years ago, and from it one looks across to the wooded hill of Trefcon and the domain still held by the Caulaincourts after seven and more centuries.

The family of Caulaincourt was one of the ancient manorial houses that formerly abounded in Picardy. It went back in unbroken line of descent to Jean de Caulaincourt who in 1362 held the estate in fief, and though documentary proof no longer exists, there is little doubt that this Jean was the direct lineal descendant of Raoul de Caulaincourt, whose name occurs in the rolls of 1080. Thus from medieval times the Caulaincourts held a sure place in the Picard squirearchy and petty nobility; many of them were Knights of Malta, all were soldiers, serving in the innumerable wars that made and broke so many great families in France. Their Vermand blood gave them that shrewdness allied to courage so characteristic of that often harsh race that has been the sport of half the wars in Europe. War has always been an element in the life of Picardy. The chateau of Caulaincourt was pillaged, sacked and burned down by the Spaniards in 1557; the building that replaced it, with many enlargements and embellishments, was pillaged and blown up by the Germans in 1917. Thus family and château shared in the vicissitudes of France and were symbolical of her history.

The Caulaincourts had acquired no great wealth but they had already become one of the more important families of the neighbourhood of St. Quentin when Gabriel Louis, father of the subject of this memoir, was born. This Gabriel Louis was an interesting man, and he played an important part in the early career of his distinguished son. Like all well-born young men of those days he entered the army at a very early age and at eighteen was already aide-de-camp to Marshal Broglie. By the year 1788 he had been promoted brigadier-general. At the outbreak of the Revolution, Gabriel Louis de Caulaincourt embraced its principles with an enthusiasm hardly to be expected in one so bound by tradition to the feudal system. He offered his services to the Legislative Assembly and in 1792 was gazetted lieutenant-general in the Revolutionary Army. He was commanding at Arras when the Convention came into power, and it was there that he formally swore allegiance to the Constitution.

This was, however, the high tide of General de Caulaincourt's republican fervour, for his soldierly mind shuddered at the insubordination deliberately fostered, as it seemed to him, by the appointment of civil and political commissaries to supervise the army commands. A month or two after his promotion he obtained a short leave, to look after his affairs at Caulaincourt, and no sooner had he reached home than he sent in his papers on the score of ill health. He actually was suffering acutely from rheumatism, and the conditions in which the Revolutionary armies lived and fought were so crude and comfortless that his excuse was a perfectly valid one.

That the General was still in the good books of the Convention was proved by the fact that he went to live in Paris in that very ticklish year 1793, though during the actual months of the Terror during the following year he went into retirement in the village of Arcueil, a few miles out on the road to Sceaux. It was during those troublous times that General de Caulaincourt was able to give comfort, advice and help to the widow of one of his old companions in arms, Madame de Beauharnais. There was no lack of opportunity for exercising the duties of friendship where an adventuresome woman such as Josephine de Beauharnais was concerned, and the General was sometimes hard put to it to pilot her through difficult situations. Josephine never forgot her old friend, for when the tide turned and a twist of fate made her wife of the First Consul and then Empress of the French she saw to it that Gabriel Louis de Caulaincourt was nominated a Senator and, in 1808, was created a Count of the Empire. The old Picard noble had borne his new-fangled honours but a matter of six months, however, when he died. His body was interred in the Pantheon, his heart still rests in the parish church of his own Caulaincourt.

It was while still a young captain in the Body Guard that Gabriel Louis married Anne Josephine de Barandier, daughter of an old Picard family with Savoyard origins. It was a suitable match and the marriage contract was signed in the presence of the King, the Dauphin, the royal brothers of Provence and Artois, Madame and the Mesdames of France and a number of princes and princesses of the Blood. There were five children of this marriage; the eldest was he who was destined to become Duke of Vicenza. The second was Auguste Jean Gabriel, a promising general of division in the Grand Army when he was killed in the redoubt of Borodino. On the eve of going to Russia, Auguste de Caulaincourt was married to Blanche d'Aubusson, a convent-bred girl, who left the cloister on her marriage morning to go to the altar, and returned thither as soon as the nuptial blessing had been given, while her bridegroom set off that same afternoon to join his division. He never returned, and she never again left the convent; virgin and widow, she passed the remaining twenty-five years of her life shut away from that world she had seen in so fleeting a glimpse. The remaining children of Gabriel Louis were three daughters; one died in youth, the others married well.

Thus Armand de Caulaincourt, Duke of Vicenza and Master of the Horse to Napoleon, was of ancient stock with deep-rooted traditions and that sureness of self that comes after generations of ownership of an ancestral estate, after centuries of intermarriage and close association with similar families of a similar standing.

Caulaincourt, as it will henceforth be convenient to call the subject of this memoir, was born in the family chateau on December 9, 1773, and baptized in the parish church the following day. His early childhood was passed partly at Caulaincourt and partly at Versailles, where his mother had a house which she occupied during her terms of duty as lady-in-waiting to the Countess of Artois. His father he hardly ever saw, for there were many inconveniences in taking a child to the garrison towns where he was serving. Such education as young Caulaincourt received was inevitably with a view to his future profession of arms, and he had barely reached his fifteenth year when he was entered in the crack Royal Etranger Regiment, at that time stationed at Arras. In 1789 he was promoted lieutenant in the regiment which by this time, under Revolutionary influence, had become the 7th Cavalry Regiment. Caulaincourt proved a promising officer and when, a couple of years later, he was appointed aide-de-camp to his father the General, his commanding officer, Theodor de Lameth, certified that the young officer had proved most efficient in taking the troops on parade at mounted and foot drill, and, although only nineteen years of age, had completely won the confidence of his senior officers.

Unfortunately his father's relinquishment of command and retirement from active service involved young Caulaincourt in some disagreeable way. In the confusion of the times it is impossible now to tell exactly what happened. There are so many contradictory attestations and statements that the actual facts are lost beyond hope of being ever made clear. The only certainty that emerges is that on August 24, 1793, Citizen Armand Caulaincourt was registered in the rank of sergeant-major in the 17th battalion of the 6th company of National Guards, stationed at Cambrai. After three months of this he was seconded to another battalion, and on February 16, 1794, was transferred to the 16th Regiment of Light Horse, at Hesdin. Two squadrons were serving in Kléber’s army of the West in La Vendèe and to one of these Caulaincourt was posted. He had been obliged to take down his stripes when he transferred from the National Guard to the cavalry, but no sooner was he with the horse than he was made corporal and in less than three months had been promoted squadron sergeant-major.

It was while on the way to join his regiment that young Caulaincourt met with an adventure that furnished him with an anecdote he was very fond of relating in after years. He was passing through the main street of Angers when he was recognized by a red-hot Sansculotte who denounced him as a ci-devant, a suspect and a royalist, and had him cast into gaol. At the time feeling was running very high, the Girondins were about to fall and the Terror was brewing, so there is no knowing what his fate would have been had not the gaoler, whose wife had once been befriended by Caulaincourt's mother, smuggled the young man out in disguise and set him on the road to join his regiment. Some years later the Master of the Horse was accompanying his Emperor in a state progress through Holland when among those presented to Napoleon was the zealous Jacobin of Angers, now a very pious worshipper at the Imperial shrine. He started when he saw the man he had denounced, covered with decorations and occupying a position only second to that of the Emperor himself. But Caulaincourt merely smiled at him genially and observed, I think we have met before, Monsieur; in the Year Two, was it not?

Caulaincourt had not been long with his regiment when Kléber was succeeded in command by that valiant young warrior Hoche. Hoche saw that this squadron sergeant-major's abilities were being wasted in the hole-and-corner soldiering in La Vendée, and packed him off to the regimental depot at Soissons, with orders to take on the training of recruits and young officers. But Caulaincourt had only been at this work a month or two when he was appointed aide-de-camp by his father's old friend General Aubert-Dubayet, and to enable him to occupy this post he was gazetted by the Ministry of War as captain in the Cavalry. Nor did it end there. Aubert-Dubayet became Minister of War in 1795 and having taken a liking to his young aide-dc-camp took him to Paris and promoted him major. But Aubert-Dubayet's reign at the Ministry was of brief duration; he was a conceited, useless sort of man and Carnot got rid of him in three months. To save his face he was appointed ambassador to the Sublime Porte and Caulaincourt was detailed to accompany him thither.

Aubert-Dubayet was a man who enjoyed pomp and ceremony. The journey to Constantinople was something of a triumphal procession, with fetes and state entries at every city of importance they passed. But when they reached the walls of Stamboul they met with a check. The Porte was uncertain whether the French envoy was to be considered an Ambassador Extraordinary or just a plain ambassador, and until this fine point could be settled it was impossible to know exactly what degree of honour was to be paid to him. As it was a tricky question, and there seemed little hope of its being settled in less than a week, the General cut the matter short by entering the city after dark, without form or ceremony.

It was an odd experience in Caulaincourt's life' this embassy to Turkey, and one that he never looked back upon with anything but distaste. Scarcely had the party left Paris before dissension broke out among its members. Aubert-Dubayet was as vain and consequential as his aide-de-camp was reserved and self-sufficient. Thrust on one another's company as they necessarily were, they picked on each other's weak points with merciless fervour. The only thing they cordially agreed upon was that Caulaincourt should go back to France at the first opportunity. The chance came when the Turkish ambassador to France left Constantinople, and Caulaincourt was appointed his guide and master of ceremonies.

After a wearisome voyage that took seven weeks to accomplish—during which they were boarded by a Barbary pirate who went off with a flea in his ear when he found the Sultan's representative on board—they reached Marseilles. Here fresh troubles beset them, for the whole party was put into quarantine for thirty-six days, and the ambassador took this as personal affront to himself and an insult to his sovereign. Caulaincourt's task of amusing the irate pasha and soothing his wounded vanity was a trying one that was not rendered easier by the Turk's petulance and unvaried bad temper. To add to his difficulties, Caulaincourt's allowance for expenses incurred on the journey was meagre, for the Directory was far from wealthy, and the ambassador, accustomed to the lavish spending of money in the East, felt ever more and more slighted as he perceived the parsimony with which his guide was obliged to consider the slightest outlay. But he was somewhat mollified by the sensation his arrival caused in Paris. Crowds thronged the streets to witness his solemn entry, and the Directory had a special wooden stand, draped and beflagged, erected in the courtyard of the Luxembourg, from which a galaxy of beautiful high-waisted ladies could witness and applaud his formal reception by Barras and the other Directors.

Having delivered his ambassador, Caulaincourt was now unemployed. The pasha's request that his conductor should be given promotion was dismissed by the Directory and he was glad to accept the post of aide-dc-camp to his uncle, General d'Harville, at that time inspector of cavalry in the Army of Germany. This was a life thoroughly to his liking. So far as I am concerned, he wrote to his aunt, the discomforts of being always on the move, the incessant rain, the freezing cold, count as nothing compared with my love of a wandering life, the thrill of first setting eyes on a new place or a fresh bit of country. But even these pleasures he threw by the board directly it was rumoured that his old regiment, the 8th Cavalry, was detailed for the Army of the Invasion of England. This plan, so dear to Hoche and Carnot, never got so far advanced as Napoleon's plan of a few years later; before they had so much as caught a glimpse of the Channel, Caulaincourt and his men were turned about and marched down to the Rhine at Constance.

But his luck was on the turn, and in July, 1799, Caulaincourt was gazetted to the command of the 2nd Carabiniers. At last he was to see action! In that autumn and winter of 1799 there was stiff fighting along the Rhine, and the Carabiniers were in the thick of it. Encounters with the enemy were mostly skirmishes not worthy the name of engagements, but they were fought with a ferocity and eagerness often lacking in great set battles. It was in a hot action round a mill near Heilbronn that Caulaincourt got his first wound, a scratch that laid him up a couple of days at most. At Weinheim, a month later, he and his orderly were out one day reconnoitring when they were surprised by an enemy patrol. Fortunately a troop of Carabiniers came up in time, but not before Caulaincourt had been severely wounded. Operations began again early in the next spring, and once more the Colonel was hit. He went on with the campaign it was with considerably diminished zest, for he was beginning to grow out of touch with Republican methods and ideas. Indeed, there must have been a strong leaven of discontent in those Republican armies, especially in that Of the Rhine, where Moreau was in command.

On December 3, 1800, was fought the Battle of Hohenlinden. Caulaincourt was at the head of his Carabiniers and led one of the decisive charges of the day. As token of his appreciation Moreau declared his intention of making him brigadier-general on the field. But Caulaincourt refused this promotion as he had no wish to leave his regiment in the middle of a campaign. He was, too, attached to Moreau, and a rise in rank might well have meant recall or transfer to another army. It is a curious detail, due perhaps to this devotion to Moreau, that no letter of Caulaincourt's at this time so much as mentions the name of Napoleon Bonaparte. Yet he was soon to see the man who was to make his future.

Colonel de Caulaincourt was still at Lunéville, where the treaty that followed Hohenlinden was signed, when he received orders from the First Consul to proceed at once to Paris and report to the Minister of Foreign Affairs. He started for the Capital without delay, and on October 14, 1801, was admitted to an interview with Talleyrand. There he was told that Bonaparte had decided to send him at once to St. Petersburg as bearer of a personal letter to the Emperor of Russia.

The position between Russia and France had long been one of extreme delicacy. Since 1792 diplomatic relations had been completely severed, and since July, 1798, the two countries had actually been at war with one another. But when the Emperor Paul's friendship with Austria came to an end, Bonaparte perceived an opportunity for winning a Powerful ally. The Tsar was no less willing to clear up an  unsatisfactory situation, and sent a couple of trusted envoys to Paris to treat for peace. The assassination of Paul put an end for the time being to these pourparlers, but Bonaparte took the opportunity of Alexander's accession to the throne to send his aide-de-camp, Duroc, to St. Petersburg with his felicitations. Duroc did his work well, and on October so, 1801, a treaty and secret convention was signed in Paris, fixing the basis of common action between Russia and France for the general well-being of Europe. It was immediately after the signatures to this instrument had been exchanged that Caulaincourt was commissioned to take a letter to the Tsar. His instructions, dated October 14, were that, having delivered the letter to Alexander he was to express verbally the firm disposition of the French Government to cultivate with the utmost care the good understanding and friendly spirit that are being so happily established between the two States. He was told to announce the forthcoming appointment of a minister plenipotentiary, and was expressly forbidden to leave St. Petersburg before that minister should appear on the scene.

No doubt Caulaincourt had his father's old friend Josephine to thank for the appointment to this responsible mission, for the First Consul could have known little of him save that he was one of Moreau's confidential officers—no great recommendation, to say the least of it. Talleyrand may have remembered him in connexion with the Constantinople affair, but there must have been many with a greater claim on his favour.

Caulaincourt chose a brother officer, Captain Berckheim, to accompany him, and they left Paris on October 18. Winter had already set in and the roads were so heavy with mud and slush that it took them twelve days to get to Berlin and another three weeks to reach St. Petersburg. Two days later, on November 19, he was admitted to an audience with the Tsar and delivered his letter. He was graciously received and in the interview were laid the foundations of the friendship that ever remained between himself and Alexander. But his mission was by no means ended. For six months he was kept in St. Petersburg, visiting the various ministers, occasionally waiting on the Tsar, and all the while enjoying a succession of social fetes and frivolities that left him in amazement at the pleasure-loving nature of the Russians. At last, on May 23, 1802, he was granted his farewell audience of the Emperor. His successor had arrived and in his first letter back to France paid ample tribute to Caulaincourt's skill and tact in paving the way for him; I cannot speak too highly of Colonel Caulaincourt, he wrote. He has achieved so much and behaved so irreproachably.

Talleyrand had told him to choose his own route back to France. He hesitated between travelling by way of Stockholm or coming south through Warsaw and Vienna. On the one hand curious places to see, on the other, pretty women to meet, as he told his aunt. The pretty women won the day and he returned by Vienna. On the way back to Paris he met a courier at Wiesbaden bearing his appointment as aide-de-camp to the First Consul.

This was indeed a substantial reward. There were only eight aides-de-camp, and though the old intimacy no longer existed that had made General Bonaparte's staff one large family, the officers in attendance on the First Consul saw a personal side of him that few others knew anything about. Caulaincourt was soon an outstanding figure in this small circle, for he had a singular aptitude for organization and the First Consul greatly appreciated his skill in arranging State visits and inspections. He was promoted brigadier-general on August 29, 1803, and shortly afterwards was made Inspector-General of the Stables. The Consular Court was fast assuming a regal appearance; monarchy was in the air.

It was at this juncture that one of the major events of Caulaincourt's life took place. The outbreak of war between France and England, early in 1803, had drawn various Bourbon princes to London, where they offered-to raise and command a force to fight under the English flag. Among the men thus attracted were Georges Cadoudal, leader of the Breton royalists, and General Pichegru, who had escaped from Cayenne, whither he had been deported after an unsuccessful plot against the Directory. With characteristic cunning Fouché, Minister of Police, allowed Cadoudal and Pichegru to walk into the trap he had laid for them in Paris, and the revelations the former made under cross-examination presented the First Consul with justification for frightening the Royalists by a deed which would show his determination to put a stop once and for all to the incessant plots against his government.

During the afternoon of March 10, 1804, the First Consul summoned a council of war, and late that night dictated his orders. The Duke of Enghien, son of the Prince of Condé and nephew of Egalité Orleans, was living in retirement in the village of Ettenheim, just across the Baden frontier. He was a harmless soul, finding perfect contentment in hunting and shooting, but he was the only Bourbon to hand and it was decided that he should be made an example of.

The whole affair was worked out in the Tuileries in the fullest detail. General Ordener, commanding the Mounted Grenadiers oldie Consular Guard, was to proceed to Rheinau, take 300 men of the 22nd Dragoons, furnished with four days' rations, across the Rhine, march on Ettenheim, and capture the Duke of Enghien and any other people of note who might happen to be staying with him. (To give colour to the whole affair a rumour was circulated that Dumouriez was working up a conspiracy beneath the Duke's roof.) On the same day and at the same hour General de Caulaincourt was to take 200 men of the 20th Dragoons and 30 gendarmes, march to Offenburg, surround the town and arrest the Baroness de Reich, who was known to be a conspirator, and some other English agents. A third detachment, 300 cavalry and 4 guns, was detailed to watch the Rhine crossing and give help to the others if needed. Finally, when he had accomplished his task at Offenburg, Caulaincourt was to send out patrols to Ettenheim and assist Ordener if necessary. According to Méneval, the First Consul's secretary, Caulaincourt was present when these orders were written out, but he had not been let into the secret and only knew the very barest outline of what was afoot. He had no idea that the Duke of Enghien was to be brought back to France to meet his death.

Ordener reached Strasbourg during the night of March 12-13 and was joined by Caulaincourt the following evening. Ordener had made his arrangements, and at 5 a.m. on the 15th a party of troops surrounded the Duke's house, pushed their way in, forced their astonished prisoner into a coach, and bore him away to the citadel of Strasbourg where they arrived between four and five o'clock in the afternoon.

Caulaincourt, meanwhile, was out spy-hunting. He rounded up a number of suspected agents and émigrés at Offenburg; the Baroness de Reich had already been arrested by the Grand Duke of Baden, but her papers fell into the hands of the French. At the same time he carried out various commissions entrusted to him by Talleyrand, such as arranging for light boats to be built for the invasion of England, regulating the passage of the Rhine, and so forth. Having accomplished his work at Offenburg, he went back to Strasburg and entered the citadel during the evening of the 15th, a few hours after Ordener had arrived there with his prisoner.

While the two generals were discussing what was to be done next, far away in Paris the First Consul was dictating an order to Caulaincourt instructing him to send whoever had been arrested in Ettenheim under a strong guard to Paris. This order reached Strasburg at seven o'clock in the evening of the 17th, and Caulaincourt immediately sent Major Chariot of the 38th Squadron of Alsace Gendarmes instructions to detail an escort of an officer and two men to conduct Henri de Plessis to Paris. He was told to show the prisoner all the respect due to misfortune and pay him such attentions as were compatible with ensuring his safe-keeping. Thus it was that at half-past one in the morning of March 18, Henri de Plessis, Duke of Enghien, set out to meet his fate. After he had left, a red morocco pocket-book and a little red notebook that had belonged to him were handed to Caulaincourt, but this was his only actual connexion with the prisoner; during the time they were under the same roof in the citadel of Strasburg Caulaincourt never so much as set eyes on the unfortunate man.

The following day Caulaincourt himself started for Paris. He stopped a few hours at his old garrison town of Lunéville, to dine with the officers of the 2nd Carabiniers, and reached Malmaison on March 21, some time before dinner. The Duke of Enghien was already in his grave in the moat of Vincennes, having been shot at three o'clock that same morning.

Caulaincourt was flabbergasted when Josephine told him the news. Not only was he horrified at the actual deed, for he appreciated to the full what that high-handed piece of lawlessness involved, but he realized that all unwittingly he himself was deeply implicated in it. White and trembling he turned to Josephine in a sort of frenzy. Why, oh why, ' he cried; did I have to be mixed up in this fatal business! A moment later, turning to Madame de Rémusat with tears streaming down his checks, You will hate me now, he said; yet I am only unfortunate, not guilty—yet how unfortunate!"

Nor did he confine his bitter remarks to the women. Hortense relates that he spoke in similar terms to the First Consul and met Bonaparte's advances and attempts to mend matters with a stern aloofness that bid fair to end in an open rupture. Never in the Consular or Imperial Court did any man venture to show his feelings In the presence of the Master as Caulaincourt showed his stupefaction, rage, despair at finding himself involved in this shameful tragedy.

His forebodings were fulfilled. No sooner was the news of the Duke of Enghien's arrest and execution made public than blame and abuse were hurled at Caulaincourt. Few had ever heard of General Ordener, the man who actually went to Ettenheim, but Caulaincourt was a prominent member of the First Consul's suite and it was sufficient for him to have been even in the neighbourhood for the entire responsibility for carrying out the coup to be thrust on his shoulders. In his despatch announcing the murder, Cobenzl, the Austrian ambassador, said that Caulaincourt was in sole command of the troops who seized the Duke; Oubril, the Russian chargé d'affaires, wrote home to the same effect. The émigrés, who had long been incensed that one of their own rank, the head of an ancient feudal family, should be the trusted aide-de-camp of the Usurper, seized on this chance to throw mud and disseminate exaggerations and lies that were sometimes so gross that they deceived no one. Nor was it merely a passing cloud. For the rest of his life Caulaincourt's name lay under its shadow, he was dogged by the scandal to his dying day. The reproach of having been involved in this catastrophe, one of his friends said, brought untold bitterness into his life. Frequently he used to recount the disagreeable incidents that arose from the resentment of those who never troubled to discover the true facts. One night he was at a ball given by Madame Récamier and took the floor with Mademoiselle Chariot, the beauty of the season. Immediately a space was left around the couple, men and women pointedly shrinking back from them. Caulaincourt turned white with rage, and having handed back his partner, who pleaded faintness, to her chaperon he strode from the house. To make matters worse, he was unable to say anything to justify himself or explain the true facts, for the First Consul imposed a strict silence on the whole Ettenheim business, and Caulaincourt knew better than to disobey. His mouth closed officially he could only stare coldly when looked on askance, and hope that time would clear his name. On his deathbed the calumny embittered his last hours. Two days before he died he summoned the notary who was to draft his will, and three other persons—two of them old companions in arms. Lying on the little iron camp-bed that had been given him by the Emperor, he said: There is a preliminary statement I have to make. I die the victim of calumny. My enemies have tried to kill me with pinpricks, and they have succeeded. They have reproached me with the death of the Duke of Enghien. Pay careful heed to my words, Gentlemen; they are the words of a dying man, and one does not tell lies with death staring one in the face. I swear upon my honour that I had nothing whatever to do with the arrest or the death of the Duke of Enghien.

The full truth of the Enghien tragedy will never be known, for Napoleon kept the dossier of papers concerning it in his private study in the Tuileries, and when the Allies were marching on Paris in 1814 he had them burned. During the hurried days of the First Restoration, Talleyrand went through the archives in the office of the Secretary of State and burned two hundred portfolios of secret documents concerning events during the Empire that might have compromised himself or his friends. But ample proof remains to confirm Caulaincourt's dying repudiation of any responsibility for the murder.

Two months after the death of the Duke of Enghien Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul, became Napoleon Emperor of the French. The organization of the Imperial Court was one of the first things to be undertaken, for Napoleon intended that it should be numerous and brilliant, worthy of France and her first Emperor. His uncle Fesch was appointed Grand Almoner; Talleyrand, Grand Chamberlain; Duroc, Grand Marshal of the Palace; Berthier, Grand Master of the Hunt; Ségur, Master of Ceremonies. To these august ranks was added, by a decree of July 10, 1804, General de Caulaincourt, who became Master of the Horse.

The Master of the Horse held no merely ornamental sinecure in the Imperial Court. He was directly responsible for the good condition and satisfactory working of all the Emperor's stables. He had charge of the pages about the Court and was particularly charged with their proper training and discipline. All the couriers and despatch riders were under his orders, and to organize these was, in itself, an onerous and difficult task during the Emperor's continual campaigns and State progresses, when he rarely spent more than a night in any one place yet required the papers and despatches from Paris to be on his table at the appointed hour every day. The Master of the Horse was responsible for the Emperor's personal equipment and harness, arms, etc.; he had entire control and management of the Imperial stud at Saint Cloud. Every detail of the various journeys had to be arranged by him; it was his duty to accompany His Majesty and, in the constable's absence, carry the Imperial sword. After a time he was given the supervision of the orderly officers about the Emperor's person.

The Master of the Horse's duties were laid down with the utmost clarity and precision. If the Emperor's charger were killed in action, it was the duty of the Master to dismount and give him his own. When on campaign, his quarters had to be as near the Emperor's as possible so that he could take his orders the last thing at night and first thing in the morning. When the Emperor was in the saddle the Master's place was at the horse's crupper, on the near side, while the colonel-general in waiting was on the off-side, On the road the Master's carriage immediately preceded that of the Emperor. In French territory, during times of peace, he had the right of entry to the Imperial presence. It was his duty to push forward His Majesty's chair when he sat down to table and withdraw it when he rose. He was at the Emperor's right hand when he mounted on horseback or entered his carriage, tendering him his whip, the reins, and the near stirrup.

At the time these honours were thrust upon him Caulaincourt held no higher military rank than that of brigadier-general, but on February 1, 1805, he was promoted general of division. It was murmured spitefully in certain quarters that this was his reward for what he had done at Ettenheim, but there is no reason to suppose that such was the case. He was, it is true, only thirty-one years of age, but he had seen seventeen years' active service, had fought in thirteen campaigns and been wounded twice. Apart from this, the two and a half years he had passed in close attendance on Napoleon and the confidence he had inspired were ample justification for such rapid promotion. Moreover, the exalted position he held in the Imperial Court demanded that he should be of suitable rank. It was on that account that he was passed rapidly through the various grades of the Legion of Honour, being given the Grand Cordon on its creation, February 1, 1805.

Amid the new and sometimes garish splendour of the Court Caulaincourt cut a fine and dignified figure. Generations of ancestors accustomed to the etiquette and formality of Versailles had bequeathed to him a sureness of comportment and ease of behaviour that many a new Duke or Marshal envied. In person he was tall and slender; Méneval describes him as habitually calm and serious in demeanour; the Duchess of Abrantès says he was, as good company as any man in France. Mademoiselle Avrillon calls him gallant, and attractive in his person, uniting the formality of the old Court to the more genuine values of the Emperor's military Court.

Behind his courtesy and refinement, however, was an invincible determination and self-confidence. Napoleon said he was like an iron bar that could only be bent in the furnace. Yet an acute observer considered that his determination was largely the obstinacy of a naturally timid man, doing his utmost to hide his fears and shyness. This would explain the extreme susceptibility of his nature, that was hurt more by the pin-pricks of gossip than by the harsher blows of fate.

With all his