From the Pen of "N"

NAPOLEON'S LETTERS (312 pp.)--Translated and Edited by J. M. Thompson--Everyman's Library ($1.65).

Habitually at around 2 a.m., Dictator Napoleon Bonaparte strode into his writing room and assaulted his correspondence. He answered immediately a few important letters, laid others aside for further consideration, hurled the remainder on the floor. At 4 a.m. he summoned his secretary, who found the great man impatiently striding the floor in a white dressing gown, a handkerchief bound round his head.

"Write!" snapped the Emperor, and instantly a flood of words poured from the imperial mouth--natural, conversational words spoken with such intimate intensity as to give the illusion that the recipients of the letters were entering the room one by one, hearing the Emperor's orders with their own ears, and then passing from the scene like ghosts. The toiling secretary, scribbling like mad in a desperate shorthand, never dared to interrupt the one-man show, which ended only when the Emperor abruptly shot from the room, took an hour's nap. and ultimately returned with "an overfilled goose-quill" to inscribe a blotty "N" at the base of each transcribed letter.

Napoleon wrote between 50,000 and 70,000 letters in this way during the 15 years of his dictatorship. Thirty-nine years after Waterloo, Napoleon III (youngest son of the first Emperor's brother, Louis Bonaparte) ordered "official" (i.e., edited and censored) publication of the correspondence--and landed his chosen editors with a nagging headache. Far from illustrating "the grand personality" of "our august predecessor," the letters displayed Napoleon's true personality with embarrassing frankness. Whole sections of them had to be omitted as "illegible," so that the imperial legend should not be tarnished by evidence of ruthless dishonesty.

Man of All Trades. The 300 unedited letters in the Everyman collection, the first new edition in two decades, are the latest attempt to distill "a potent bottle" out of the "great lake of correspondence." They show a mind that always went straight to the point without swerving a hair's breadth and never doubted that it was wise enough to teach law to lawyers, science to scientists, and religion to Popes. Most of the letters have a single idea at the back of them--to impress on the recipients the notion that they are living in an age dominated by a "new spirit"--Napoleon himself. Anything, no matter how trifling, that weakens this impression is automatically condemned; anything that strengthens it, no matter how falsely, is automatically encouraged.

"Your love affair [with Mme. de Visconti] has lasted too long," runs a directive to Marshal Berthier. "I have a right to expect that a man . . . whom posterity will always picture at my side, shall no longer abandon himself . . . I want you to get married . . . If you don't, I will never see you again." (Berthier did take a wife, but not Mme. de Visconti.)

Year by year the great man's relatives and marshals were appointed to kingdoms and principalities* all over the Continent--but always as mouthpieces of the supreme "N." "Your letters," Napoleon tells his brother Louis, King of Holland, "are always talking of obedience and of respect; but [these] consist in not going so fast in such important matters without my advice." Marshal Soult, Duke of Dalmatia, is asked: "How could a man of your ability have supposed that I should ever allow you to exercise any authority not derived from me? Your action shows . . . a failure to realize my character."

Son of All Faiths. For those not in his power whom he hoped to win as allies, Napoleon had more honeyed words. He was an atheist who hoped, he wrote, to "suppress all monks indiscriminately" and use religion chiefly as a means of teaching docility to growing girls ("There is nothing I dislike so much as a meddlesome woman"). But he readily became "Your Holiness' devoted son" when he needed papal aid--and an ardent Moslem when he invaded Egypt ("There is no other god but God, and Mahomet is his prophet!"). French Jews, he ordered, must be convinced that with his help they would find the "New Jerusalem" in France--despite his convictions, expressed in another letter, that they were "the most despicable race in the world." The same "practical" approach appeared in his fondness for fabricated "accidents," e.g., the destruction of an enemy strongpoint during a ceasefire period. "You can say if you like," he told the marshal who was to do the dirty work, "that a magazine blew up, or that the explosion was due to powder stored in the cellars."

But in matters that required an imperious technique, Napoleon dropped duplicity overboard and went straight to the point. At a ball in Warsaw he saw his future mistress, Marie Walewska, for the first time, and brusquely gave her the imperial works: "I saw no one but you, I admired no one but you, I want no one but you. Answer me at once, and assuage the impatient passion of 'N.' " Only with his wife Josephine, whom he wooed and married before his own greatness was assured, did he show any trace of human frailty. "Had I a heart so base as to love without return, I would tear it to pieces with my teeth. Josephine! Josephine! . . . My heart, utterly engrossed with you, has fears that make me miserable . . ."

Monarch of All Moods. Napoleon took proud delight in acts of clemency. When a German traitor's wife burst into tears on being shown an incriminating letter written by her husband, Napoleon smugly informed Josephine that he had said to the weeping woman: "Madam, you can throw that letter into the fire: I shall never be strong enough to punish your husband." But clemency never interfered with policy. "You must make the skipper speak," he orders, of a sea captain suspected of spying for the English. "You can . . . squeeze his thumbs under the hammer of a musket."

Napoleon's Letters succeed in their aim of revealing the many sides of Napoleon's character, but they show in particular the man whose vanity was so prodigious that when exiled to the island of Elba, he referred to his 18 marines as "My Guard" and to his small boats as "the Navy." And anyone who wants to get on in the world at any cost will find in the Letters many a useful price tag, e.g.:

P: "So long as a prince holds his tongue, his power is incalculable; he should never talk unless he knows he is the ablest man in the room."

P: "When a king is said to be a good fellow, his reign is a failure."

P: "To pack in small parcels has always been the hallmark of a fool."

P: "Men put up with injury if it is not accompanied by insult."

* The only surviving ruling house: Sweden's Bernadottes.

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