Dead Man's Tale (eBook)

For twenty-five years, a man roamed Europe, and for twenty-five years campaign and travel was almost nothing more to him than the flight from one woman to another woman. He will probably exaggerate a little; but even after subtracting a modest percentage, there are still as many gallant adventures as can otherwise only be found in Casanova. And he now tells it with great joy and the pronounced pleasure of tasting it. He relives all the women he has won in quarters and in the drawing room, and in each one he fails to cite the proofs of his strength. However, with more profound He doesn't bother with psychology. Here, too, he is an unconditional supporter of the fact and knows nothing more amusing than to explain the way to it as precisely as possible. He knows a hundred ways of seduction, and the women he meets know, it must be admitted, a hundred and one ways of being seduced. From the princess to the maid, he knows the whole range of women in Europe at that time, and (he is also a great musician) his favorite opera, which at that time had hardly spread beyond Austria and Germany, is of course the immortal Don Juan. He knows how to grasp the beauty of Mozart's music. But his propaganda for the master is not completely unselfish, because he always achieves his greatest love triumphs through Don Juan's duet, which he goes through with skilful impromptus with the chosen one.

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But the dead man's adventures take place in the context of Napoleonic military campaigns! These are field post letters from a time when the theaters of war were as numerous as they are today. Admittedly, these struggles, alongside the iron, lacerating struggles of today, seem like skirmishes that seem to stem more from youthful thirst for action than from world-historical necessity. The colorful description of the small war at the end of the Italian boot reads strangely, opposite Sicily, where the English unscrupulously land Neapolitan bandits day and night and make life miserable for the French with their fleet. The friends of today already used means against each other back then, which they are now trying to put into action together against us, and they did not give in to each other's carelessness in the choice of methods of struggle; this is proven above all by the detailed description of the land and sea battle at Toulon. But much more interesting is the insight into the Napoleonic world structure, which we only get to know in the great history, so to speak, in the shell, while it is laid bare here, with the worm in the entablature and the rafters only briefly nailed on. What do we know of Napoleon's luck and end? But here, from the life of a dead man, we learn from a most involved eyewitness how things were with the world empire, even at the time of its greatest bloom. We experience how scarcely a square meter was quiet and safe, how indignation flared up and flared up even in the most subjugated cities and countries, and how constant, bloody tyranny was necessary in order to maintain the appearance of power to the outside world. In Naples, Rome, Venice, Vienna, Madrid, at all ends of Europe, the uncertainty of Napoleon's greatness was the same. Certainly, our informant is a very small lieutenant, but he gets everywhere, he is a member of the ruling caste, even if an insignificant one, he always finds his way in the vicinity of the Titan's footsteps, and lo and behold: this colossus too has feet of clay. Nowhere is his rule recognised, nowhere on the periphery are military things going so well, nowhere does food and pay come at the right time, for nothing does Napoleon have the time to take appropriate measures: he decrees and very often in such a way that his ardent supporters become his Opponents will have to because his orders are deadly for the area in question. The liquidation of this largest world empire seems tragic and ridiculous in its comedy. Our narrator sits punitively transferred to Corfu, closed off from the world by the English fleet.