but they are not hidden away. The harbours of Antwerp and Flushing,
where there is room for the largest fleets in the world, harbours which
are open all through the winter; the waterworks at Dunkirk, Havre, and
Nice; the huge docks at Cherbourg; the port of Venice; the high roads
from Antwerp to Amsterdam, from Mainz to Metz, and from Bordeaux to
Bayonne; the passes over the Simplon, Mont Cenis, La Corniche, and Mont
Genèvre, which open up the Alps in four directions, and excel all the
constructions of the Romans. Then there are the roads from the Pyrenees
to the Alps, from Parma to Spezia, and from Savona into Piedmont; the
bridges across the Seine, and the bridges of Tours and of Lyons; ...
the Rhine-Rhone canal and the draining of the Pontine marshes; ...
the re-establishment of the Church destroyed by the revolution; the
setting up of new industries; the new Louvre; warehouses, streets, the
water supply of Paris, the quays along the Seine; ... the revival of
the weaving mills in Lyons; more than four hundred sugar factories;
the repair and embellishment of the royal palaces at a cost of frs.
50,000,000, and the refurnishing of them out of Napoleon’s private
fortune at a cost of frs. 60,000,000; the redemption of the only
remaining crown diamond, the Regent, which had been pawned to Jews in
Berlin for frs. 3,000,000; the Napoleon Museum, where all the works
of art had been obtained by purchase or by the peace treaties; many
millions for the support of agriculture and horse breeding.... These are
the treasures of Napoleon, which represent an expenditure of milliards,
and will outlast the centuries! These are the monuments which defy
calumny.... Moreover, history will record that they were all erected
while long wars were being waged, and without loans being raised to pay
for them!”
There he is in his little room, in the narrow house, on the rock in
the midst of the sea, defending his work, and, with a regal gesture,
shaking things together pell-mell—main roads, sugar factories, crown
diamonds, and the Catholic Church! Foreseeing the criticisms of history,
he is fully aware of the truth about himself; though a century will
elapse before posterity will begin to see in him something more than the
military commander whose fame (as he says) was dimmed by the failure at
Waterloo.
One evening, after dinner, the question assumes a personal aspect. An
inquisitive member of his circle has asked when he was happiest, and all
present give their ideas. Napoleon tells them that he was made content by
his marriage and when his son was born, “I cannot say happy, but content.”
“When you were First Consul?”
“I was not yet sure enough of myself.”
“At the coronation?”
“In Tilsit, I think. By that time I had learned the vicissitudes of
fortune; Preussisch-Eylau had been a warning to me, and nevertheless I
had won a victory there; I had dictated the terms of peace; the tsar
and the king of Prussia were paying court to me. But no, I am wrong,
that was not the best. The happiest days I ever knew were after my first
victories in Italy, when the masses surrounded me, shouting: ‘Evviva il
liberatore!’ I was only twenty-six, but I foresaw what I might become.
It was as if I were being lifted up into the air, and the world were
disappearing beneath my feet!”
With a sudden transition, he hums an Italian song, and then stands up,
saying: “Ten o’clock. Time for bed.”
How pale do these comparisons of happy moments seem in contrast with
the fiery rhapsody of his deeds! It was in the work he did that was
concentrated the life happiness of the man who enjoyed nothing but the
completed action. He surveys his past; doubts this suggestion and that,
saying that he was no more than “content,” and finally hears again the
first chorus of evvivas. In imagination he is again the youth soaring
upwards; and in the evening of his life, spent in this tropical exile,
the vision of fame floats once more before his eyes. That was what the
disciple of the classical heroes had set out to win—fame!
Fame, whose lure he had felt for the first time on the island of his
birth, still allures him on the island to which he had been banished.
Moreover, he knows that it is the glamour of warlike fame which has made
him most widely known among men. He asks whether there can be any one in
Paris who has never heard of Napoleon; he does not really mean Paris,
but the world. When Las Cases tells him how, in the remotest valleys of
Wales, shepherds had asked for news of the First Consul, or how yellow
men in China had spoken of him in the same breath with Tamerlane, then
the Emperor Napoleon forgets the shame and the weariness of his life on
the rock, and knows his happiest moments. If he is in such a mood, some
trifling item in the newspaper may arouse a flight of fancy:
“Yes, the reaction is doomed! Nothing can destroy great principles; they
will endure for ever in the light of the wonderful deeds we have done!
The first stains have been washed out in the waters of glory, and now
the principles are immortal.... Adorned with our laurels, acclaimed by
the peoples, sanctified by treaties with the powers, they are breathed
from all lips and hearkened to by all ears.... They will rule the world;
will become the faith and the morality of all the peoples; and, say what
you will, this new epoch is associated with my name. I lighted the torch;
friends and foes alike will acclaim me the leading champion, the greatest
representative of the new principles. After my death, for the nations I
shall still be the sun of their rights; my name will be the war cry of
their struggle, the slogan of their hopes!”
Still, these heroics about himself lack the right conclusion. Politically
he overestimates the value of his martyrdom; it has not been able to
save the dynasty: but he does not foresee the effect which this last act
of the drama will have upon the hearts of men. A soldier’s death looms
before his eyes; he had sought it under fire on the last battle-fields;
again and again he turns his own story over in his mind, in search of
the romantic moment which would have been the most appropriate close; he
often recurs to the subject in conversation. Like a playwright he looks
for the fitting climax: “I ought to have died in Moscow. Till then my
fame was undiminished.... If only heaven had sent me a bullet in the
Kremlin! My dynasty would have been established; history would have
compared me with Alexander and Cæsar. Whereas, as things have turned
out, I am practically nothing.” On another occasion he thinks that death
shortly before attaining the goal, would have had even more effect on
posterity: “Had I fallen at Borodino, my death would have been like
Alexander’s. A death at Waterloo would have been a good one. But perhaps
Dresden would have been better. No, no, at Waterloo would have been best.
The love of the people, their mourning!”
Once he summarises the whole as follows:
“Taking it all in all, what a ballad my life has been!”
XVII
Sunrise. A man stands at the door of a house where all the inmates are
still asleep. He wears a white coat, red slippers, a broad-brimmed straw
hat; he holds a spade in one hand, and rings a huge bell with the other,
rousing the sleepers to work. A wall is to be raised, a ditch lengthened;
land is to be reclaimed from the inroads of the sea; this is the scheme.
Doors open, tent-flaps are flung back, and from all directions men flock
to the master’s side. They are armed with shovels, rakes, axes; and are
eager to carry out the Emperor’s commands.
He resembles the centenarian Faust.
The last year of his life has opened. He has made up his mind, come what
may, to stay on this rock; and, since no one offers to make a verdant
bower for him, he has decided, after yearlong feuds and resistance to his
plans, to make a garden for himself. A half-circle of wall is to protect
the growths from too much sun, from the trade wind, and from the watchful
eye of the sentry. Cisterns are to store rain water; within the ramparts,
earth is distributed for the flowers and the bushes; four-and-twenty
large trees are planted; peaches, oranges, and, in front of his window,
an oak. The trees have been imported from the Cape, and are brought
to Longwood with the aid of the English artillery regiment—an old
acquaintance of the Peninsular War. Chinese gardeners, Indian coolies,
French servants, English stablemen, all help in the work; the doctor
must take a hand too, with Montholon and Bertrand; and when the English
officer on duty draws near, he sees the Emperor take a turf from his
grand marshal’s hands, fit it into its place on the bank, and pat it down
carefully. But since Napoleon knows that transplanted soldiers must be
especially well treated in foreign parts, he waters the square of grass
assiduously.
The work goes on for seven months; and, when it is finished, the garden,
so swiftly brought into being on the rock, is regarded as a wonder. The
governor’s daughter comes secretly to look at it. This is the last
miracle wrought by Napoleon.
It is because he has become aware of the decline in his energies, that he
has decided to beautify the place in which he is to pass the remainder
of his days. He is overheard murmuring to himself Voltaire’s line: “See
Paris once more? I cannot hope for that.” When his birthday comes round,
he says it will be the last, gives the children presents; “at dinner,
where we were all assembled, he beamed on us like a father in the family
circle.”
That autumn, he takes his last ride, a long one, going out of bounds for
the first time after four years.
He seldom dictates now, but has a fancy to do so sometimes at night
when sleep will not come; dictates comments on the battles of Turenne,
Frederick, and Cæsar; literary criticism upon Voltaire’s _Mahomet_ and
Virgil’s _Æneid_; remarks on suicide, which he had condemned long ago
when he had been a lieutenant. His best secretaries, Gourgaud and Las
Cases, have left the island long since. For a quarter of an hour at a
time, he will stand drumming with his fingers on the door of the veranda,
watching the gulls, or gazing at the clouds; he no longer scrutinises the
ships through the telescope; he is only waiting for death.
The news of a fresh conspiracy against the Bourbons, originating in the
army and widely supported by civilians, no longer excites him. During
the last six months of his life, he rejects two schemes of rescue. “It
is written in the stars that I am to die here. In America I should be
assassinated, or forgotten. Nothing but my martyrdom can save my dynasty.
That is why I prefer to stay in St. Helena.”
His mortal illness gains on him. The climate of the island is dangerous
to persons whose livers are healthy when they first come; Napoleon, at
thirty-five, had foretold that he would die of liver trouble like his
father, and his liver complaint is greatly aggravated. He says that his
stomach burns like fire; in some of the paroxysms, he rolls on the floor
in agony. He complains of a pain in the gastric region, “like the stab
of a penknife.” He shivers with cold, though he is burning within; when
hot compresses are applied, they can never be hot enough for him.
He watches his symptoms, and studies their meaning; will not take any
medicine until its action has been explained to him. He says ruefully:
“I have got so fond of my bed that I would not exchange it now for a
throne. What a pitiful creature I have become! I, who hardly ever needed
sleep, pass my days in lethargy. It seems a desperate resolve merely to
open my eyes. Often enough, I used to dictate on different topics to four
secretaries at once. In those days, I was Napoleon.” His mood vacillates
between heroic pathos and irony. When his valet reports that a comet is
visible, the Emperor rejoins: “That was the sign before the death of
Cæsar.” But when his doctor declares that there is no comet to be seen,
the sick man says: “Well, people die without comets!”
His medical attendant is a Corsican named Antommarchi. Owing to the
quarrel with the governor, the prisoner had no doctor for a year after
O’Meara’s departure. At length Madame Letizia, after much effort, was
able to arrange for the sending of this compatriot as his physician,
together with two priests, a body servant, and a cook. Thus it is that,
after years of silence, the Emperor hears trustworthy details about his
mother. Once, during these last days, he says in simple words what she
means to him: “All that I am and was, I owe to my mother; she taught me
her own principles, and encouraged in me the habit of work.”
Now there are five Corsicans round the lonely man. Only two of them are
any good: the body servant and the cook. Of the two priests, one is a
deaf old man, partially paralysed, and unable to articulate clearly; the
other, fresh from the seminary, is ignorant and uncouth. Antommarchi,
too, is a young man, inexperienced but pretentious. Still, the sight of
these islanders, men of his own race, revives memories of his Corsican
home. Hence, towards the close, feelings reawaken which in early life he
had stifled because of his determination to be a Frenchman. Napoleon dies
as he was born, an Italian.
He often talks Italian, now, or intersperses his French with strange
locutions literally translated from his mother tongue. When he reads
an attack made on him by a senator who declares that in the day of the
Empire France had chosen her master from among a people whom the Romans
did not consider good enough, to use as slaves, Napoleon’s comment is
that it is a great compliment to the Corsicans, “for the Romans knew that
this people could not be forced to serve.... Besides, Corsica, lying
between France and Italy, was an appropriate birthplace for a man who was
to rule both.”
Then, suddenly, it is again his fatherland. “Ah, Doctor, where are the
lovely skies of Corsica? If only I could have fled thither, the people
would have received me with open arms, and would have become my family.
Do you think that the allies could have mastered me in Corsica? You know
our mountaineers, their courage and their pride! I am familiar with every
ravine in the island, every stream!” He declares that he would fain have
made much of this island (about which he never troubled after leaving
it), would have signalised his love for it before all France. Only his
misfortunes had prevented his carrying out these plans. He speaks of the
spiritual greatness of the islanders, of their veneration for honour, of
the blood feuds they hand down from generation to generation; he speaks
of Paoli. “Everything is better there, the very smell of the ground. If
my eyes were shut, I should recognise it; I have never come across it
anywhere else.... No longer to own the house where one was born, to be
homeless—this is to be without a fatherland!” Thus late, thus painfully,
and thus indirectly, does this man without a fatherland make his great
discovery; or thus late does he acknowledge his true feelings.
The Corsican doctor has no great sympathy with the Emperor; he does
not credit Napoleon’s sufferings; he believes them to be simulated for
political ends, in the hope of a removal to Europe; and is absent during
the worst paroxysms. Thus the political use the Emperor has made of his
ailments works out its own revenge; for now, when he is really dying, his
own compatriot regards his sufferings as spurious. There is ample record
of these differences between doctor and patient. Napoleon wishes to get
rid of Antommarchi, and asks Lowe to have him sent back to Europe. This
is a new triumph for the governor, to whom the quarrel between the great
Corsican and the little is useful ammunition. Only four weeks before
the Emperor’s death, his gaoler once more tries to force a way into his
presence, and the consequent excitement is very bad for Napoleon.
The number of the faithful diminishes, as if to justify the misanthropist
at the close of his life. Now, in the very last weeks, four of the
servants and the old priest set sail for Europe; two others fall sick,
and the last remaining members of his suite are meditating flight:
Montholon is corresponding with the countess about the possibility of a
substitute; Bertrand is about to yield to the continued solicitations of
his family, and return to France. Montholon, to induce him to remain, has
to assure him that when the Emperor talks of being seriously ill, this is
not done merely to play upon Bertrand’s sympathies. When Bertrand finally
decides to remain, the invalid is greatly encouraged. The only one who
never thought of leaving, was Marchand, the valet. The Emperor says to
him: “If this goes on much longer, no one will be left here but you and
me. But you will look after me till the end, and will then close my eyes
for me.”
What really cuts him to the heart is that the man who has been his close
companion for so many years should now let long-hidden truths peep out.
He has had an argument with Bertrand, who says: “It would have been
the happiest day in my life if, after the deposition of the king, the
Convention had raised the duke of Orleans to the throne.” The Emperor
makes no immediate rejoinder, but afterwards says bitterly: “Bertrand,
who owes everything to me, whom I made one of the grand officers of my
empire!”
As his strength wanes, he looks round for something to lean on, and, for
the first time in his life, he appeals to his relatives for help. Pauline
is the dearest of them. Dictating a letter to her in the third person,
he gives a bulletin of his condition, and ends as follows: “The Emperor
earnestly hopes that Your Highness will acquaint influential Englishmen
with his situation. He is dying on this dreadful rock, forsaken by all.
His death struggle is terrible.”
In the middle of April, three weeks before the end, behind locked doors,
he dictates his will to Montholon. Then the amanuensis has to redictate
the document to the Emperor, for it must be in his own handwriting, that
it may be above suspicion. The Emperor sits writing for five hours, in
a cold sweat. The testament is characterised alike by statesmanlike
greatness and by human feelings; it represents, as it were, a survey of
his whole life.
XVIII
He begins his testament by declaring that he dies in the apostolical and
Roman religion, in the bosom of which he was born,—the faith which he
re-established in France, which he always protected, although, in his
innermost soul, he never accepted its teachings. Then his thoughts turn
to the glory of a hero’s grave, and, with a turn of phrase which shows
that he regards himself as a Frenchman by choice rather than by birth, he
writes: “It is my wish that my ashes shall be laid to rest on the bank of
the Seine, in the midst of the French people, which I have loved so well.”
Next come thoughts of his son, upon whom are lavished all the hopes a
man can entertain concerning what will happen after his own death, and
for whom he wishes to concentrate such rights as he may possess, such
treasures as he may own, and such teachings as he may utter. He tells
his “beloved wife” that he retains for her the most tender sentiments,
and beseeches her to watch over their son, since the lad is being brought
up as an Austrian prince. She is never to forget that the young Napoleon
was born a Frenchman. She must never allow the boy to become a tool in
the hands of the triumvirs who oppress the peoples of Europe—among whom
the greatest oppressor is the child’s own grandfather.
Then comes a last thrust at the enemy: “I am dying before my time,
murdered by the English oligarchy and its hired assassins.” But, in the
challenging tone of a tribune, he adds: “The English people will not
be slow to avenge me.” He closes this part of his will by declaring
that he had been defeated “through the treachery of Marmont, Augereau,
Talleyrand, and Lafayette.” Though he adds, “I forgive them,” behind this
mask of Christian charity the warrior’s steel glitters in the words: “May
the France that is yet unborn forgive them as I do.”
Now, quite in the patrician style, he thanks his beloved mother and his
brothers and sisters for the interest they have continued to feel in him.
“I pardon Louis for the libel he published in 1820: it is full of false
assertions and falsified documents.” Then come the actual bequests.
The main substance of what he has to leave consists of his savings out of
the civil list during fourteen years, together with all the furniture,
plate, etc., he had himself bought for his palaces; and also his Italian
property. He estimates it as amounting to more than frs. 200,000,000,
and points out that, as far as he is aware, no law has deprived him of
it. Half of it is bequeathed to the surviving officers and men who had
fought in the glorious campaigns from 1792 to 1815, in sums proportional
to their rates of pay on active service; the other half is to go to the
provincial towns and communes that had suffered in the two invasions. His
aim, in these provisions, is to put the Bourbon government in the wrong
for laying an embargo, at the time of his abdication, upon all his money
and securities. These clauses in his will are to promote a Napoleonic
sentiment among soldiers and civilians alike; his secret hope being that
his testament will exercise an influence in favour of his dynasty, like
Cæsar’s will when disclosed to the Roman populace by Mark Antony.
Now comes legacies to ninety-seven specified individuals. The list was
drawn up in the course of ten days. “His mind is continually at work
discovering new objects for his liberality; day after day he recalls the
names of additional old servants whom he wants to remember in his will.”
The bequests are to come from a special property of frs. 20,000,000, of
whose ownership he feels more secure than of the great imperial treasure.
Frs. 6,000,000 had been deposited in hard cash on leaving Paris in 1815.
Who are the legatees?
Montholon is to have frs. 2,000,000; Bertrand and the valet Marchand,
about half a million each. The valet is the only one whom Napoleon
honours with the name of friend, and he adds: “It is my wish that he
should marry the widow, sister, or daughter of an officer of my old
guard.” Marchand, Bertrand, and Montholon are to be the executors, and
all three of them have to affix their seals to each page of the will.
Thus the last document penned by Napoleon’s hand bears four seals: the
Emperor’s eagle volant, the arms of the two counts of the old noblesse,
and the plain monogram of the man of the people in whom the Emperor
showed supreme confidence by appointing him one of his executors. “The
services he has rendered me are those of a friend.”
Every one of the servants on St. Helena receives a competence; so do the
three surgeons Larrey, Percy, and Emmery. Of Larrey, Napoleon adds: “He
is the most virtuous man I have ever known.” Similar large sums, frs.
100,000 in most instances, are left to various generals who had been
closely associated with him, to his secretaries, to two authors, the Elba
guards, and the children of generals killed in battle. The stablemen,
the valets, the orderly officers, the huntsmen, a house-porter, a
librarian, the children or grandchildren of old family friends in
Corsica; the children or grandchildren of his nurse (if in need, despite
previous benefactions); the children or grandchildren of his sometime
tutor in Auxonne; those of the general in command at Toulon under whom
he had had his first experience of active service; those of the deputy
who had helped him to get his plans put in force against Toulon; those
of Muiron, “our aide-de-camp, killed at our side at Arcola, covering us
with his body”—all are remembered. The next item to the Muiron bequest
is a legacy “to the subaltern officer Cantillon,” who had been acquitted
of the charge of attempting to assassinate Wellington. “Cantillon had
as much right to assassinate that oligarch, as the latter had to send
me to perish upon the rock of St. Helena. Wellington, who proposed this
outrage, attempted to justify himself by pleading the interest of Great
Britain. Cantillon, if he had really assassinated that lord, would have
excused himself, and have been justified, by the same motives, the
interest of France.”