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"Le nom de Miranda," wrote Brissot to Dumouriez, "lui vaudra une armee; et ses talens, son courage, son genie, tout nous repond du succes." Monge, Gensonne, Claviere, Petion, were pleased with the plan, but Miranda started difficulties.
Its builders erected it to the memory of la Grande Armee and that Grand Army was the people in arms who spread revolution throughout Europe. The artists, great inventors, foresaw the true significance of this work.
I likewise, on the Tuesday evening, paid a farewell visit to my friend Azveto, as it was my intention to leave Evora on the Thursday following and return to Lisbon; in which view I had engaged a calash of a man who informed me that he had served as a soldier in the grande armee of Napoleon, and been present in the Russian campaign. He looked the very image of a drunkard.
All these were lost to him, and yet as he sat in the darkness, because he could not tell an N from an M, he laughed, and laughed happily. From where did he draw his strength and courage? Was it the instinct for life that makes a drowning man fight against an ocean? Was it his training as an officer of the Grande Armée?
The peasants shut him up for the night in an empty cloth factory, and the next morning brought him to an ice-hole near the dyke, and began to beg the drummer 'de la Grrrrande Armee' to oblige them; in other words, to swim under the ice.
In the same year the Duke of Brunswick-Oels and Colonel Dornberg, notwithstanding the smallness of the force under them, by their action positively induced Napoleon, only a few weeks before Wagram, to detach the whole corps of Kellerman, 30,000 strong, which otherwise would have been called up to the support of the Grande Armée, to the region in which these enterprising raiders were operating.
Orders were sent to the corps d' armee which occupied Media to evacuate its conquests and to retire forthwith upon the Euphrates. These orders were executed, but with difficulty.
The losses suffered by the Grande Armée were enormous, but they have been exaggerated. I have already said that I have seen a situation report, covered with notes in Napoleon's hand, which gives the figure of those who crossed the Nieman as 325,000, of whom 155,000 were French.
This was his last rally: on the morrow, while a storm was sweeping over the island, and tearing up large trees, his senses began to fail: Montholon thought he heard the words France, armée, tête d'armée, Joséphine: he lingered on insensible for some hours: the storm died down: the sun bathed the island in a flood of glory, and, as it dipped into the ocean, the great man passed away.
It is no dead sure thing that if the people of other countries boycotted France, that they would not ruin more Jews than Frenchmen, as the Jews are in business that the Exposition will make or break, while the French just sit around and drink absinthe and shout 'viva la armee! Don't you see you may ruin the very people you want to help? Then, stop and think of another thing.
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