11th.—After our breakfast in the tent and a few turns in the garden, the
Emperor read, for the last time, the chapter of Arcole.
During our ride in the calash, somebody observed that it was Sunday. “We
should have mass,” said the Emperor, “if we were in a Christian country,
if we had a priest; and that would have been a pastime for us during the
day. I have been always fond of the sound of the bells in the country.
We should,” he added in a gay tone, “resolve upon choosing a priest
among us;—the curate of St. Helena.”—But how ordain him, it was said,
without a bishop?—“And am I not one,” replied the Emperor, “have I not
been anointed with the same oil, consecrated in the same manner? Were
not Clovis and his successors anointed, at the time, with the formula of
_Rex Christique sacerdos_? Were they not, in fact, real bishops? Was not
the subsequent suppression of that formula caused by the jealousy and
policy of the bishops and popes?”
I did not eat at dinner, the Emperor wished to know the cause. I had a
violent pain in my stomach, a complaint to which I said I was very
subject. “I am more fortunate than you,” he observed. “In all my life, I
never had either the head-ache or a pain in my stomach” The Emperor
often repeated what he had said, and he has pronounced these same words
perhaps ten, twenty, or thirty times, in the midst of us at different
moments.[8]