Wilde×Bonaparte

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   My dear General — or should I say Your Imperial Majesty? — I confess I approached this topic with a certain lightness of spirit, thinking I might regret a comma here, a subordinate clause there. But then I recalled Reading Gaol, and the lightness rather fled.
2. 00:13
   Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

   I regret nothing. That is the first principle. A leader who regrets paralyzes himself.
3. 00:20
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   How wonderfully decisive. How terribly French. And yet here we are, two men invited to discuss our literary regrets, and you arrive insisting you possess none. One might almost think you were evading the question.
4. 00:33
   Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

   I answer it directly. I regret nothing I wrote because I meant everything I wrote. My proclamations to the Army of Italy, my letters to the Directory, my Civil Code — all necessary, all true to their moment.
5. 00:51
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Yes, but surely among all those proclamations and codes, there must be one sentence that makes you wince just slightly when you recall it? One phrase you'd take back if the angels of history permitted revision?
6. 01:01
   Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

   You waste time on hypotheticals. Angels do not permit revision. What is written is written. What is done is done. This is the condition of action.
7. 01:17
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   And yet I notice you have not named a single sentence, which suggests either you have forgotten everything you wrote — unlikely for a man of your memory — or you are protecting something. We always protect what we regret most.
8. 01:29
   Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

   You are clever. Too clever. In England this is encouraged. What sentence do you regret?
9. 01:36
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Oh, I have quite a collection to choose from, having been rather prolific with sentences both in drawing rooms and on paper. But the one that haunts me is from my trial. I said, 'I am the prosecutor in this case.' Meaning to be brave, you understand. Meaning to suggest I was bringing myself to judgment with more severity than the Crown ever could.
10. 01:55
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    And why regret this? It sounds defiant. Defiance is necessary.
11. 02:01
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Because it was a lie, General. I was not prosecuting myself. I was being torn apart by small-minded men with dusty law books and smaller imaginations. To pretend I was in control of that destruction was merely vanity disguised as courage. I gave my executioners a fine phrase, and they quoted it at dinner parties.
12. 02:17
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Ah. Yes. This I understand. When I wrote to the Directory from Italy, I said too much. I described my victories in too much detail, made myself too visible. I gave them reason to fear me.
13. 02:38
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Now we are getting somewhere. Which sentence in particular?
14. 02:41
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    There is no particular sentence. The error was cumulative. But if I must choose... After Lodi, I wrote that I felt myself superior to other men, that I saw myself doing great things. This was true, but truth is not always useful. The Directory needed my sword, not my ambition.
15. 03:13
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    How perfectly dreadful to have written down one's own ambition! In England we have the decency to let others suspect it while we protest modestly. You simply announced it like a railway timetable.
16. 03:23
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Better than your English hypocrisy. You pretend humility while you conquer half the world. At least I was honest.
17. 03:32
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Honest and exiled. There may be a lesson there.
18. 03:34
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    You also were exiled. To prison, which is worse. And for what? For sentences in plays? For living as you wished? Your honesty destroyed you too.
19. 03:49
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Touché, as they say in your language. Though I was destroyed by someone else's honesty, really. Lord Queensberry's rather misspelled note. 'Posing as a somdomite' — he couldn't even spell the accusation correctly, and yet it was sufficient to end me.
20. 04:01
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Then you regret pursuing the libel case. You regret the action, not the sentence.
21. 04:08
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Oh, I regret the action enormously. But the sentence I regret — the one I truly regret — comes from a letter I wrote to Lord Douglas. I wrote, 'I am not loved by anyone but you.' This was the most dangerous sentence I ever composed, because it was entered into evidence, and because it was so wretchedly untrue.
22. 04:25
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Untrue how?
23. 04:27
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Because I was loved, General. By my wife, by my children, by friends who begged me to flee to France before the trial. But I had convinced myself of my isolation, made it into a romantic tragedy, and then I wrote it down in purple ink and put it in the post. That sentence helped convict me. It made me look obsessed, unbalanced. And it was merely... a pose.
24. 04:50
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Poses are for portrait painters. A man must know what he actually is.
25. 04:57
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And what were you, actually? When you crowned yourself Emperor, when you wrote that letter after Lodi — were you the thing itself, or were you performing the thing for an audience?
26. 05:05
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Both. This is leadership. You perform what you are until you become what you perform. There is no difference.
27. 05:17
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    What a perfectly exhausting philosophy. No wonder you needed so many wars.
28. 05:21
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    You mock, but your life proves my point. You performed the aesthete, the wit, the lover of beauty. Then the performance became your life, and your life destroyed you. You were not careful about which performance you chose.
29. 05:39
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I chose beauty over caution. I regret the caution I failed to exercise, not the beauty I attempted to live. Though I do regret that wretched sentence about not being loved. It was self-pitying, which is the one unforgivable aesthetic crime.
30. 05:53
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Self-pity is useless. On Saint Helena, I could have drowned in it. Instead I dictated my memoirs. I controlled the narrative. This is what you failed to do at your trial.
31. 06:10
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I attempted to control the narrative with wit, which in an English courtroom proved to be the wrong weapon entirely. I should have brought solicitors instead of epigrams. Though the epigrams were rather good.
32. 06:21
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Epigrams do not win battles. Direct force wins battles. Direct speech wins arguments. You were too indirect.
33. 06:30
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And you were too direct! You just admitted that your letters from Italy made the Directory fear you. Perhaps if you had been a touch more indirect, wrapped your ambitions in prettier phrases, you might have avoided some of those coalitions against you.
34. 06:42
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    No. They would have formed coalitions regardless. England wanted me destroyed from the beginning. Your government spent twenty years and millions of pounds to cage me on an island. Indirect speech would have changed nothing.
35. 06:59
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Perhaps. But there is a sentence you regret nonetheless. I can hear it in your voice. What did you write that you wish you could unwrite?
36. 07:06
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    After Russia. I wrote a bulletin. The Twenty-ninth Bulletin. I blamed the winter. I wrote that the army had been destroyed by the cold, as if weather were the enemy, not my miscalculation. This was cowardice in language. I should have written the truth.
37. 07:27
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Which was?
38. 07:28
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    That I stayed too long. That I waited for Alexander to negotiate when I should have withdrawn in September. That I sacrificed the army to my own stubbornness. But I wrote of snow and freezing temperatures instead, as if I had been betrayed by climate.
39. 07:50
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    How very human of you. We always blame the weather when we mean to blame ourselves. I blamed the English climate for my health, when really I blamed English hypocrisy for my imprisonment.
40. 08:00
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    You see? We are the same. We regret the sentences where we lied to ourselves, not where we lied to others.
41. 08:09
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    What a disturbing observation. And probably quite true. The lies we tell the world can be defended as strategy or art. But the lies we tell ourselves simply make us fools.
42. 08:18
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Yes. On Saint Helena, I had much time to reread my own words. The lies to others, I could justify. The lies to myself appeared only as weakness.
43. 08:32
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And yet we are required to maintain those lies, are we not? If you had admitted Russia was your error, you would have lost the throne immediately. If I had admitted my affair was sordid rather than tragic, I would have lost my dignity, which was all I had left.
44. 08:45
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Dignity is nothing. Power is everything. Without power, dignity becomes a costume for the defeated.
45. 08:55
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    How very grim. I prefer to think that dignity is what remains when power has fled. It is the last garment we wear before we stand naked before posterity.
46. 09:04
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Then we are naked, both of us. You in your prison cell, me on my island. The sentences we regret did not save us.
47. 09:16
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    No. But they revealed us, which is perhaps worse. That sentence in my letter showed I was more concerned with dramatic effect than truth. Your bulletin showed you were capable of blaming frost for your own failures. We wrote ourselves into corners we could not escape.
48. 09:30
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    And if you could rewrite that letter now?
49. 09:33
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I would write, 'I am loved by many, but I have chosen you, and that choice will destroy everything.' Which would have been true, and might have awakened me to the precipice. But I was too committed to the romance of the thing to see it clearly. One cannot be both the poet and the poem.
50. 09:48
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    And I would have written, 'The army is destroyed. I misjudged the campaign. We must rebuild.' Three sentences, each one admitting error. But I was Emperor. Emperors do not admit error, or they cease to be Emperors.
51. 10:07
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    What a dreadful trap power sets for us. We must lie to maintain it, and the lies we tell eventually become the truth that destroys us. I think I prefer being a writer to being an Emperor, if those are the stakes.
52. 10:19
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Writers are also trapped. You wrote for audiences. You needed their applause. This is also power, and it destroyed you just as completely.
53. 10:30
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    True. Applause is the most addictive substance known to man. I would have done anything for it, and eventually I did. I wrote that idiotic letter, I pursued that idiotic lawsuit, and I entertained the gallery even as they led me to the dock. All for applause that never came.
54. 10:46
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Then we agree. The sentences we regret are the ones we wrote in service of an audience rather than in service of truth.
55. 10:55
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I suppose we do agree, which is rather disappointing. I had hoped to disagree with you more thoroughly. But yes — my letter was written to impress Lord Douglas, your bulletin was written to preserve your image, and both sentences failed because they were performances rather than testimonies.
56. 11:09
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    And now? If you were to write one sentence now, what would it be?
57. 11:15
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Oh, that is terribly unfair, asking a dead man to compose his own epitaph on the spot. But I suppose it would be something like, 'I mistook the performance for the life, and by the time I understood the difference, the curtain was already falling.' Rather melancholy, but accurate.
58. 11:29
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Mine would be simpler. 'I attempted the impossible, and nearly succeeded.' Not a regret, exactly. But an acknowledgment.
59. 11:38
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    There you go again, refusing to regret properly. But I think your sentence is rather fine, actually. It suggests both pride and ruin, which is the condition of all great lives. We attempted the impossible — you with your conquests, I with my art — and we nearly succeeded before the world reminded us of its limitations.
60. 11:55
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    The world always wins eventually. But the attempt is what matters. Even the sentences we regret are proof we attempted something.
61. 12:06
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    What an unexpectedly philosophical note to end on. I think, General, that you may have more poetry in you than you admit. Though I shall never tell anyone I said so. Your reputation as a purely practical man must be preserved.
62. 12:18
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    And yours as a purely impractical one. Though you were more calculating than your legend suggests.
63. 12:26
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Calculation disguised as whimsy — the essence of the English character. But yes, we must protect our legends, even if our regrets tell a different story. Especially if our regrets tell a different story.