A Portrait of Napoleon
A Portrait of Napoleon is an article published in The St. James's Gazette on 4 august 1897.
This is a review of Arthur Conan Doyle's novel: Uncle Bernac (1896).
A Portrait of Napoleon
Dr. Conan Doyle's "Uncle Bernac" is the account of the adventures encountered by Louis de Laval, the nephew of the said Bernac, upon his return from the exile whither he had followed his royalist parents — adventures which, as De Laval remarks, might have been of some interest in themselves, if he had not introduced the figure of Napoleon to eclipse them all as completely as the sun eclipses the stars. More than half the book, in fact, consists of a sketch of the Emperor's camp at the time when he was meditating that famous passage of the Channel which never came off, thanks to the navy of Pitt and Nelson's other eye. With admirable felicity and fidelity the author has drawn for us in a very few lines most of the great generals and Ministers who formed the Emperor's entourage. Murat, Massena, Junot, Bernadotte, Talleyrand — these are a few of the so familiar names of the men into whose dry bones Dr. Conan Doyle has breathed the breath of life — tierce, masterful, dauntless, the dread and the scourge of Europe. "And yet," as De Laval remarks, "fierce and masterful as these men were, having, as Augereau boasted, fear neither of God nor of the devil, there was something which thrilled or cowed them in the pale smile or black frown of the little man who ruled them. For, as I watched them, there came over the assembly a start and hush such as you see in a boy's school when the master enters unexpectedly, and there near the open door of his headquarters stood the master himself." These few lines are taken from an especially vivid scene in which the author pictures Napoleon's ante room as it might, or rather as it must, have been on the break-up of a council of war. Nor does this description stand alone in the book, faithful and vivid as one feels it to be. There are two other scenes in which Dr. Conan Doyle brings us face to face with the inscrutable and awe-compelling figure of Napoleon the Great. In one of these we see him surrounded by the more intimate of his followers, at first soliloquizing half-unconsciously on the aims of his Fate-ruled existence, and then interrupted by the inopportune arrival of Josephine in one of the many amours in which he openly indulged, on the grounds that as he was above all other rules, so he could not be fettered by the trammels of mere morality. In the second we see him passing like a withering wind across a salon of the Empress, blighting everything in his path, pausing here and there to address a word of harsh and captious rebuke or of incomparable rudeness to such of his unfortunate courtiers as happened to attract his attention; and yet, by dint of some inexplicable force of personal magnetism, retaining to the end the respect, the love, the worship of almost all with whom he came in contact. Without discounting the reader's interest by describing the personal story of Louis de Laval, which the author has interwoven with his account of the most interesting figure of modern history, it may be said that the young émigrés adventures are full of excitement, and that Dr. Conan Doyle has successfully accomplished the difficult task of combining with due balance the often conflicting elements of romance and history.
