BOOK VI

Bonaparte at the Malmaison--General abandonment--Departure from the

Malmaison--Rambouillet--Rochefort--Bonaparte takes refuge on the

English fleet--He writes to the Prince Regent--Bonaparte on the

_Bellerophon_--Torbay--Act confining Bonaparte in St Helena--He

passes over to the Northumberland and sets sail--Judgment on

Bonaparte--Character of Bonaparte--Has Bonaparte left us in

renown what he has lost us in strength?--Futility of the truths

set forth above--The Island of St. Helena--Bonaparte crosses the

Atlantic--Napoleon lands at St. Helena--His establishment at

Longwood--Precautions--Life at Longwood--Visits--Manzoni--Illness of

Bonaparte--Ossian--Reveries of Napoleon in sight of the sea--Projects

of evasion--Last occupation of Bonaparte--He lies down to rise no

more--He dictates his will--Napoleon's religious sentiments--The

chaplain Vignale--Napoleon's speech to Antomarchi, his doctor--He

receives the last sacraments--He expires--His funeral--Destruction of

the Napoleonic world--My last relations with Bonaparte--St. Helena

after the death of Napoleon--Exhumation of Bonaparte--My visit to

Cannes.

If a man were unexpectedly transported from life's most clamorous

scenes to the silent shores of the Arctic Ocean, he would feel what

I feel beside the tomb of Napoleon, for we find ourselves suddenly

standing by the edge of that tomb.

Leaving Paris on the 25th of June, Napoleon awaited at the Malmaison

the moment of his departure from France. I return to him: coming back

to past days, anticipating future times, I shall not leave him again

until after his death.

The Malmaison, where the Emperor rested, was empty. Joséphine was

dead[356]; Bonaparte found himself alone in that retreat. There he had

commenced his fortune; there he had been happy; there he had become

intoxicated with the incense of the world; there, from the heart of

his tomb, issued orders that shook the world. In those gardens where

formerly the feet of the crowd raked up the sanded walks, the grass

and brambles grew green; I had ascertained this when walking there.

Already, for want of tending, the exotic trees were pining away; on the

canals the black Australian swans no longer floated; the cage no longer

held the tropical birds prisoners: they had flown away to await their

host in their own country.

Bonaparte might, however, have found a subject of consolation by

turning his eyes upon his early days: fallen kings are afflicted above

all because, looking upwards from their fall, they see only a splendid

inheritance and the pomps of their cradle: but what did Napoleon

discern prior to his prosperity? The manger of his birth in a Corsican

village. Higher-minded, when flinging off the purple mantle, he would

have proudly resumed the goat-herd's sayon; but men do not place

themselves back at their origin when it was humble; it seems that an

unjust Heaven deprives them of their patrimony when, in fate's lottery,

they do naught but lose what they have won; and nevertheless Napoleon's

greatness arises from the fact that he had started from himself: none

of his blood had gone before him and prepared his power.

At the sight of those abandoned gardens, of those untenanted

apartments, of those galleries faded by the routs, of those rooms

in which song and music had ceased, Napoleon was able to go over

his career: he was able to ask himself whether, with a little more

moderation, he might not have preserved his delights. Foreigners,

enemies, were not banishing him now; he was not departing as a _quasi_

victor, leaving the nations in admiration of his passage, after the

prodigious campaign of 1814: he was retiring beaten. Frenchmen,

friends, were demanding his immediate abdication, urging his departure,

refusing even to have him as a general, sending him messenger after

messenger, to oblige him to quit the soil over which he had shed as

much glory as scourges.

Added to this harsh lesson, came other warnings: the Prussians were

prowling around the neighbourhood of the Malmaison; Blücher, full of

wine, staggering, ordered them to seize, to "hang" the conqueror who

had "put his foot on the neck of Kings." The rapidity of the fortunes,

the vulgarity of the manners, the promptness of the elevation and

degradation of the personages of to-day will, I fear, take away a part

of the nobility of history: Rome and Greece did not speak of "hanging"

Alexander and Cæsar.

The scenes which had taken place in 1814 were renewed in 1815, but

with something more offensive, because the ingrates were stimulated

by fear; it was necessary to get rid of Napoleon quickly: the Allies

were arriving; Alexander was not there, at first, to temper the triumph

and curb the insolence of fortune; Paris was no more adorned with its

lustral inviolability; a first invasion had profaned the sanctuary; it

was no longer God's anger that fell upon us, it was the contempt of

Heaven: the human thunder-bolt was spent.

All the cowardly characters had acquired a new degree of malignity

through the Hundred Days; affecting to raise themselves, through love

of the country, above personal attachments, they exclaimed that it was

really too criminal of Bonaparte to have violated the treaties of 1814.

But were not the true culprits those who had countenanced his designs?

Suppose that, in 1815, instead of getting new armies for him, after

forsaking him once only to forsake him again, they had said to him,

when he came to sleep at the Tuileries:

"You have been deceived by your genius, opinion is no longer with you;

take pity on France. Retire after this last visit to the country; go

and live in the land of Washington. Who knows that the Bourbons will

not make mistakes? Who knows that, one day, France will not turn her

eyes towards you, when, in the school of liberty, you shall have learnt

to respect the laws? You will then return, not as a ravisher swooping

on his prey, but as a great citizen, the pacificator of his country!"

They did not hold that language to them: they humoured the passions of

their returned leader; they contributed to blinding him, sure as they

were of benefiting by either his victory or his defeat. The soldier

alone died for Napoleon, with admirable sincerity; the rest was but a

grazing herd, growing fat to right and left. If, at least, the viziers

of the despoiled caliph had been satisfied to turn their backs on him!

But no: they reaped profit from his last moments; they overwhelmed him

with their sordid demands; all wanted to make money out of his poverty.

[Sidenote: Abandonment of Napoleon.]

Never was a more complete abandonment; Bonaparte had given cause for

it: he was insensible to the troubles of others; the world paid him

with indifference for indifference. Like most despots, he was on good

terms with his domestics; at bottom he cared for nobody: a solitary

man, he sufficed unto himself; misfortune did nothing except to restore

him to the desert which was his life.

When I gather up my memories, when I recollect having seen Washington

in his little house at Philadelphia and Bonaparte in his palaces, it

seems to me that Washington, retiring to his field in Virginia, cannot

have experienced the searchings of conscience of Bonaparte awaiting

exile in his gardens at the Malmaison. Nothing was altered in the life

of the first; he relapsed into his modest habits; he had not raised

himself above the happiness of the husbandman whom he had freed: all

was subverted in the life of the second.

*

Napoleon left the Malmaison[357] accompanied by Generals Bertrand,

Rovigo and Beker[358], the latter in the quality of inspector

or commissary. On the way, he was seized with a wish to stop at

Rambouillet. He left it to take ship at Rochefort, as did Charles X.

to take ship at Cherbourg; Rambouillet, the inglorious retreat where

all that was greatest in men or dynasties was eclipsed: the fatal spot

where Francis I. died; where Henry III., escaping from the barricades,

slept booted and spurred in passing; where Louis XVI. left his

shadow[359]! How happy would Louis, Napoleon and Charles have been, had

they been only the humble keepers of the herds of Rambouillet!

On arriving at Rochefort[360], Napoleon hesitated: the Executive

Commission were sending imperative orders:

"The garrisons of Rochefort and the Rochelle," said the dispatches,

"must use main force to make Napoleon take ship.... Employ force...

make him go... his services cannot be accepted."

Napoleon's services could not be accepted! And had you not accepted his

bounties and his chains? Napoleon did not go away; he was driven out:

and by whom?

Bonaparte had believed only in fortune; he banned misfortune _ab

igne et aquâ_; he had acquitted the ungrateful in advance: a just

retaliation made him appear before his own system. When success,

ceasing to animate his person, became incarnate in another individual,

the disciples abandoned the master for the school. I, who believe in

the legitimacy of benefits and the sovereignty of misfortune, had

I served Bonaparte, I would not have left him; I would have proved

to him, by my fidelity, the falseness of his political principles;

sharing his disgrace, I would have remained by his side as a living

contradiction of his barren doctrines and of the worthlessness of the

right of prosperity.

Frigates had been waiting for him in the Rochefort road-stead stead

since the first of July: hopes which never die, memories inseparable

from a last farewell kept him back. How he must have regretted the

days of his childhood, when his clear eyes had not yet known the first

rain-drops! He left time for the English fleet to approach. He was

still able to embark on two luggers which were to join a Danish ship at

sea (this was the course which his brother Joseph took); but decision

failed him when he looked at the coast of France. He felt an aversion

for a republic; the liberty and equality of the United States were

repugnant to him. He inclined towards asking shelter of the English:

"What disadvantage do you see in that course?" he asked of those whom

he consulted.

"The disadvantage of dishonouring yourself," answered a naval officer;

"you must not fall, even dead, into the hands of the English. They will

have you stuffed and show you at a shilling a head."

*

[Sidenote: The letter to the Regent.]

Notwithstanding these observations, the Emperor resolved to give

himself up to his conquerors. On the 13th of July, when Louis XVIII.

had already been five days in Paris, Napoleon sent the captain[361]

of the English ship _Bellerophon_ the following letter for the Prince

Regent:

"ROYAL HIGHNESS,

"A victim to the factions which distract my country

and to the enmity of the greatest powers in Europe, I

have terminated my political career, and I come, like

Themistocles[362], to throw myself upon the hospitality of

the British people. I put myself under the protection of

their laws; which I claim from Your Royal Highness as the

most powerful, the most constant and the most generous of my

enemies.

"ROCHEFORT, 13 _July_ 1815."

If Bonaparte had not, during twenty years, overwhelmed with outrages

the British people, its government, its King, and the heir of that

King, one might find a certain propriety of tone in this letter; but

how had this "Royal Highness," so long despised, so long insulted by

Napoleon, suddenly become "the most powerful, the most constant and the

most generous" of enemies by the mere fact that he was victorious?

Napoleon could not be persuaded of what he was saying; and that which

is not true is not eloquent. The phrase setting forth the fact of a

fallen greatness addressing itself to an enemy is fine; the well-worn

instance of Themistocles is superfluous.

The step taken by Napoleon shows something worse than a lack of

sincerity; it shows neglect of France: the Emperor busied himself only

with his individual catastrophe; when the fall came, we no longer

counted for anything in his eyes. Without reflecting that, by giving

the preference to England over America, his choice became an outrage

to the mourning of the country, he begged a shelter of the government

which, for twenty years, had kept Europe in its pay against ourselves,

of the government whose commissary with the Russian Army, General

Wilson[363], urged Kutuzoff[364], in the retreat from Moscow, to

exterminate us completely: the English, successful in the final battle,

were encamped in the Bois de Boulogne. Go then, O Themistocles, to

seat yourself quietly by the British hearth, while the soil has not

yet finished drinking in the French blood shed for you at Waterloo!

What part would the fugitive, feasted may-be, have played on the banks

of the Thames, in the face of France invaded, of Wellington become

dictator at the Louvre? Napoleon's high fortunes served him better:

the English, allowing themselves to be carried towards a narrow and

spiteful policy, missed their final triumph; instead of undoing their

supplicant by admitting him to their fortresses or their banquets, they

rendered more brilliant for posterity the crown which they believed

they had snatched from him. He grew greater in his captivity through

the enormous affright of the Powers; the Ocean enchained him in vain:

Europe in arms camped on the shore, her eyes fixed upon the sea.

*

On the 15th of July, the _Épervier_ conveyed Bonaparte to the

_Bellerophon._ The French craft was so small that, from the deck of the

English ship, they did not see the giant on the waves. The Emperor,

accosting Captain Maitland, said to him:

"I come to place myself under the protection of the laws of England"

Once at least the contemner of the laws confessed their authority.

The fleet set sail for Torbay: a multitude of shipping cruised around

the _Bellerophon_; the same eagerness was shown at Plymouth. On the

30th of July, Lord Keith[365] handed the applicant the Act confining

him at St. Helena.

"It is worse than Tamerlane's[366] cage," said Napoleon.

[Sidenote: Ordered to St. Helena.]

This violation of the Law of Nations and of the respect due to

hospitality was revolting. If you see the light on board of any ship,

provided it be _under sail_, you are _English born_; by virtue of the

old London customs, the _waves_ are considered _soil of Albion._ And an

English ship was not an inviolable altar for a supplicant, it did not

place the great man who embraced the poop of the _Bellerophon_ under

the protection of the British trident! Bonaparte protested; he argued

about laws, talked of treachery and perfidy, appealed to the future:

did that become him? Had he not laughed at justice? Had he not, in his

might, trampled under foot the sacred things whose guarantee he now

invoked? Had he not carried off Toussaint-Louverture[367] and the King

of Spain[368]? Had he not had English travellers arrested who happened

to be in France at the time of the rupture of the Peace of Amiens,

and kept them prisoners for years? Allowable therefore to mercantile

England to imitate what he had done himself, and to use ignoble

reprisals; but they might have acted differently.

With Napoleon, the size of the heart did not correspond with the width

of the head: his quarrels with the English are deplorable; they revolt

Lord Byron. How could he condescend to honour his gaolers with a word?

One suffers at seeing him stoop to wordy conflicts with Lord Keith at

Torbay, with Sir Hudson Lowe[369] at St. Helena, publish statements

because they break faith with him, cavil about a title, about a little

more, or a little less, gold or honours. Bonaparte, reduced to himself,

was reduced to his glory, and that ought to suffice him: he had nothing

to ask of men; he did not treat adversity despotically enough; one

would have pardoned him for making of misfortune his last slave. I find

nothing remarkable in his protest against the violation of hospitality,

save the date and signature of that protest:

"On board the _Bellerophon_, at sea.

"NAPOLEON."

There are harmonies of immensity.

From the _Bellerophon_ Bonaparte crossed on to the Northumberland. Two

frigates laden with the future garrison of St. Helena escorted him.

Some of the officers of that garrison had fought at Waterloo. They

permitted that explorer of the globe to keep with him M. and Madame

Bertrand, Messieurs de Montholon[370], Gourgaud and de Las Cases[371],

voluntary and generous passengers on the submerged plank. By one

clause in the captain's instructions, "Bonaparte must be disarmed:"

Napoleon alone, a prisoner on board ship, in the midst of the Ocean,

"disarmed[372]!" What a magnificent terror of his power! But what a

lesson from Heaven to men who abuse the sword! The stupid Admiralty

treated the great convict of the human race as a Botany-Bay felon: did

the Black Prince "disarm" King John?

The squadron weighed anchor. Since the bark which carried Cæsar, no

ship had been laden with so great a destiny. Bonaparte was approaching

that sea of miracles upon which the Arab of Mount Sinai had seen

him pass. The last French land that Napoleon discerned was Cape la

Hogue[373]: another trophy of the English.

The Emperor had been mistaken in the interest of his memory, when he

wished to remain in Europe; he would soon have been only a vulgar or

faded prisoner: his old rôle was ended. But, beyond that rôle, a new

position revivified him with a new renown. No man of universal fame has

had an end similar to Napoleon's. He was not, as after his first fall,

proclaimed autocrat of a few quarries of iron and marble, the first to

furnish him with a sword, the second with a statue; an eagle, he was

given a rock on the point of which he remained in the sun-light till

his death, in full view of the whole world.

*

At the moment when Bonaparte is quitting Europe, in which he is giving

up his life to go in search of the destinies of his death, it is well

to examine this man of two existences, to depict the false and the true

Napoleon: they blend and form a whole from the mixture of their reality

and their falsehood.

[Sidenote: Napoleon as statesman.]

From the conjunction of these remarks it results that Bonaparte was

a poet in action, an immense genius in war, an indefatigable, able

and intelligent spirit in administration, a laborious and rational

legislator. That is why he has so great a hold on the imagination of

peoples and so much authority over the judgment of practical men.

But, as a politician, he will always appear deficient in the eyes of

statesmen. This observation, which has escaped the majority of his

panegyrists, will, I am convinced, become the definite opinion that

will survive concerning him; it will explain the contrast between his

prodigious actions and their pitiful results. At St. Helena, he himself

severely condemned his political conduct on two points: the Spanish War

and the Russian War; he might have extended his confession to other

delinquencies. His enthusiasts will perhaps not maintain that, when

blaming himself, he was mistaken in himself.

Let us recapitulate:

Bonaparte acted contrary to all prudence, not to speak again of the

hatefulness of the action, in killing the Duc d'Enghien: he attached

a weight to his life. Notwithstanding the puerile apologists, this

death, as we have seen, was the secret leaven of the discords that

subsequently burst out between Alexander and Napoleon, as also between

Prussia and France.

The attempt upon Spain was completely improper: the Peninsula was the

Emperor's; he could turn it to the most advantageous account: instead

of that, he turned it into a school for the English soldiers and into

the cause of his own destruction through the rising of a people.

The detention of the Pope and the annexation of the States of the

Church to France were but the caprice of tyranny through which he lost

the advantage of passing for the restorer of religion.

Bonaparte did not stop, as he should have done, when he had married the

daughter of the Cæsars: Russia and England were crying mercy to him.

He did not revive Poland, when the safety of Europe depended on the

restoration of that kingdom.

Madness having once set in, he went on from Smolensk[374]; everything

told him that he must not go further at his first step, that his first

Northern Campaign was finished, and that the second, as he himself

felt, would make him master of the Empire of the Tsars.

[Illustration: Pope Pius VII.]

He was able neither to compute the days nor to foresee the effect

of the climatic changes, which every one at Moscow computed and

foresaw. See above what I have said of the Continental Blockade and

the Confederation of the Rhine[375]: the first, a gigantic conception,

but a questionable act; the second, an important work, but spoilt in

the execution by the camp instinct and the fiscal spirit Napoleon

inherited the old French monarchy as the centuries and an uninterrupted

succession of great men had made it, as the majesty of Louis XIV. and

the alliances of Louis XV. had left it, as the Republic had enlarged

it. He seated himself on that magnificent pedestal, stretched out

his arms, laid hold of the peoples, and gathered them around him;

but he lost Europe with as much suddenness as he had taken it; he

twice brought the Allies to Paris, notwithstanding the marvels of his

military intelligence. He had the world under his feet, and all he got

from it was a prison for himself, exile for his family, the loss of all

his conquests and of a portion of the old French soil.

[Sidenote: Where Napoleon failed.]

Here is history proved by facts and deniable by none. Whence arose

the faults which I have just pointed out, followed by so quick and so

fatal a catastrophe? They arose from Bonaparte's imperfectness as a

politician.

In his alliances, he enchained the governments only with concessions

of territory, of which he soon altered the boundaries, constantly

displaying the reservation to take back what he had given, ever making

the oppressor felt; in his invasions, he reorganized nothing, Italy

excepted. Instead of stopping at every step to raise up again, under

another shape, what he had overthrown, he did not discontinue his

movement of progression among ruins: he went so fast that he scarce had

the time to breathe where he passed through. If, by a sort of Treaty

of Westphalia, he had settled and assured the existence of the States

in Germany, in Prussia, in Poland, at his first retrograde march he

would have leant his back against contented populations and have found

shelters. But his poetic edifice of victories, lacking a base and

suspended in mid-air only by his genius, fell when his genius came to

retire. The Macedonian founded empires in his course: Bonaparte, in his

course, knew only how to destroy them; his sole aim was to be, in his

own person, the master of the globe, without troubling his head about

the means of preserving it.

Men have tried to make of Bonaparte a perfect being, a type of

sentiment, of delicacy, of morality and of justice, a writer like

Cæsar and Thucydides, an orator and an historian like Demosthenes

and Tacitus. Napoleon's public speeches, his phrases in the tent or

the council-chamber are so much the less inspired with the breath of

prophecy in that what they foretell by way of catastrophes has not been

accomplished, while the Isaias of the sword has himself disappeared:

writings on the wall which pursue States, without catching and

destroying them, remain puerile, instead of being sublime. Bonaparte

was truly Destiny during sixteen years: Destiny is mute, and Bonaparte

ought to have been so. Bonaparte was not Cæsar; his education was

neither learned nor select; half a foreigner, he was ignorant of the

first words of our language: what mattered, after all, that his speech

was faulty? He gave the pass-word to the universe. His bulletins have

the eloquence of victory. Sometimes, in the intoxication of success,

they made a show of drafting them on a drum-head; from amid the most

mournful accents arose fatal bursts of laughter. I have read with

attention all that Bonaparte has written: the early manuscripts of his

childhood, his novels; next, his letters to Buttafuoco, the _Souper

de Beaucaire_, his private letters to Joséphine; the five volumes

of his speeches, his orders and his bulletins, his dispatches left

unpublished and spoilt by the editing in M. de Talleyrand's offices.

I know something of these matters; I have found scarcely any thoughts

resembling the great islander's nature, except in a scrap of autograph

left behind at Elba:

"My heart denies itself to common joys as to ordinary pain."

"Not having given myself life, I shall not rob myself of it,

so long as it will have me."

"My evil genius appeared to me and foretold my end, which I

found at Leipzig."

"I have laid the terrible spirit of innovation which was

overrunning the world."

That most certainly is genuine Bonaparte.

If the bulletins, the dispatches, the allocutions, the proclamations

of Bonaparte are distinguished for energy, this energy did not

belong to him in his own right: it was of his time, it came from the

revolutionary inspiration which grew weaker in Bonaparte, because he

marched counter to that inspiration. Danton said:

"The metal is boiling over; if you do not watch the furnace, you will

all be scalded."

Saint-Just said:

"Dare!"

That word contains the whole policy of our Revolution; they who make

revolutions by halves only dig a grave.

Do Bonaparte's bulletins rise above that pride of speech?

[Sidenote: Napoleon as writer.]

As for the numerous volumes published under the title of _Mémoires de

Sainte-Hélène, Napoléon dans l'exil._, etc., those documents, gathered

from Bonaparte's mouth or dictated by him to different persons, contain

a few fine passages on actions of war, a few remarkable appreciations

of certain men; but, in the upshot, Napoleon is occupied only in making

his apology, in justifying his past, in basing on commonplace ideas

accomplished events and things of which he had never dreamt during

the course of those events. In this compilation, in which _pros_ and

_cons_ succeed one another, in which every opinion finds a favourable

authority and a peremptory refutation, it is difficult to separate that

which belongs to Napoleon from that which belongs to his secretaries.

It is probable that he had a different version for each of them, in

order that readers might choose according to their taste and, in the

future, create for themselves Napoleons to their liking. He dictated

his history as he wished to leave it; he was an author writing articles

on his own work. Nothing therefore could be more absurd than to go

into ecstasies over chronicles by different hands which are not, like

Cæsar's _Commentaries_, a short work, springing from a great head,

written by a superior writer; and yet those brief commentaries, Asinius

Pollio[376] thought, were neither faithful nor exact. The _Mémorial

de Sainte-Hélène_ is good, allowing liberally for the candour and

simplicity of the admiration.

One of the things that contributed most to render Napoleon hateful

during his life was his inclination for debasing everything: in a fired

city, he would couple decrees on the re-establishing of a few comedians

with fiats which suppressed monarchs; a parody of the omnipotence of

God, who rules the lot of the world and of an ant. With the fall of

empires he mingled insults to women; he delighted in the humiliation

of what he had overthrown; he calumniated and wounded particularly all

that had dared to resist him. His arrogance was equal to his luck;

the more he lowered others the greater he believed himself to appear.

Jealous of his generals, he accused them of his own mistakes, for, as

for himself, he was infallible. Despising all merits, he reproached

them harshly with their errors. He would never have said, after the

disaster of Ramillies, as Louis XIV.[377] said to the Maréchal de

Villeroi[378]:

"Monsieur le maréchal, at our age one is not lucky."

A touching magnanimity of which Napoleon knew nothing. The century of

Louis XIV. was made by Louis the Great: Bonaparte made his century.

The history of the Empire, changed by false traditions, will be yet

further falsified by the state of society during the imperial Epoch.

Any revolution written in the presence of the liberty of the press

can allow the eye to probe to the bottom of facts, because each one

reports them as he has seen them: the reign of Cromwell is known,

because it was customary to say to the Protector what one thought of

his acts and his person. In France, even under the Revolution, despite

the inexorable censorship of the executioner, the truth came out; the

triumphing faction was not always the same; it soon succumbed, and the

faction which succeeded it taught you what its predecessor had hidden

from you: there was liberty from one scaffold to the other, between the

cutting off of two heads. But when Bonaparte seized upon the power,

when thought was gagged, when one heard nothing but the voice of a

despotism which spoke only to praise itself and allowed only itself to

be spoken of, truth disappeared.

The would-be authentic documents of that time are tainted; nothing

was published, books or newspapers, save by the master's order:

Bonaparte saw to the articles in the _Moniteur_; his prefects sent back

from the various departments the recitals, the congratulations, the

felicitations, in the form in which the Paris authorities had dictated

and forwarded them, in which form they expressed a conventional public

opinion, quite different from the real opinion. Write history from

such documents as those! In proof of your impartial studies, quote the

authentic sources to which you have gone: you will only be quoting a

lie in support of a lie.

If it were possible to call this universal imposture into question,

if men who have not seen the days of the Empire were to insist upon

regarding as sincere all that they come upon in printed documents, or

even all that they might dig up in certain boxes at the public offices,

it would be enough to appeal to an unexceptionable witness, to the

"Conservative" Senate; there, in the decree which I have quoted above,

you have seen its own words:

*

"Taking into consideration that the liberty of the press has been

constantly submitted to the arbitrary censorship of his police, and

that, at the same time, he has always made use of the press to fill

France and Europe with fabricated facts and false maxims; that acts and

reports, passed by the Senate, have undergone alterations when made

public, etc."

Is there any reply possible to this declaration?

The life of Bonaparte was an incontestable truth, which imposture had

taken upon itself to write.

*

[Sidenote: Pride and affectation.]

A monstrous pride and an incessant affectation spoil Napoleon's

character. At the time of his dominion, what need had he to exaggerate

his stature, when the God of Armies had furnished him with the war

chariot "whose wheels are living"?

He took after the Italian blood; his nature was complex: great men,

a very small family upon earth, unhappily find only themselves to

imitate them. At once a model and a copy, a real personage and an

actor representing that personage, Napoleon was his own mime; he would

not have believed himself a hero, if he had not dressed himself up

in a hero's costume. This curious weakness gives something false and

equivocal to his astonishing realities: one is afraid of taking the

king of kings for Roscius, or Roscius for the king of kings.

Napoleon's qualities are so much adulterated in the gazettes, the

pamphlets, the poems and even in the songs overrun with imperialism,

that those qualities are completely unrecognisable. All the touching

things ascribed to Bonaparte in the _ana_ about the "prisoners," the

"dead," the "soldiers," are idle trash to which the actions of his life

give the lie.

The _Grand-mère_ of my illustrious friend Béranger is only an admirable

ballad: Bonaparte had nothing of the good fellow about him. Dominion

personified, he was hard; that coldness formed the antidote to his

fiery imagination; he found in himself no word, he found only a deed,

and a deed ready to chafe at the smallest independence: a gnat that

flew without his orders was a rebellious insect in his eyes.

It was not enough to lie to the ears, it was necessary to lie to the

eyes: here, in an engraving, we see Bonaparte taking off his hat to

the Austrian wounded; there, we have a little _tourlourou_[379] who

prevents the Emperor from passing; further on, Napoleon touches the

plague-stricken of Jaffa, and he never touched them; he crosses Mount

St. Bernard on a spirited horse amid a whirl of snow-flakes, and it

was the finest weather in the world.

Are they not now trying to transform the Emperor into a Roman of

the early days of the Aventine, into a missionary of liberty, into

a citizen who instituted slavery only for love of the opposite

virtue? Draw your conclusions from two features of the great founder

of equality: he ordered his brother Jerome's marriage with Miss

Patterson[380] to be annulled, because the brother of Napoleon could

ally himself only with the blood of Princes; later, after returning

from the isle of Elba, he invested the new "democratic" constitution

with a peerage and crowned it with the "Additional Act."

That Bonaparte, following up the successes of the Revolution,

everywhere disseminated principles of independence; that his victories

helped to relax the bonds between the peoples and the kings, and

snatched those peoples from the power of the old customs and the

ancient ideas; that, in this sense, he contributed to the social

enfranchisement: these are facts which I do not pretend to contest; but

that, of his own will, he laboured scientifically for the political and

civil deliverance of the nations; that he established the narrowest

despotism with the idea of giving to Europe and to France in particular

the widest Constitution; that he was only a tribune disguised as a

tyrant: all this is a supposition which I cannot possibly adopt.

Bonaparte, like the race of princes, desired nothing and sought nothing

save power, attaining it, however, through liberty, because he made

his first appearance on the world's stage in 1793. The Revolution,

which was Napoleon's wet-nurse, did not long delay in appearing to

him as an enemy; he never ceased beating her. The Emperor, for the

rest, knew evil very well, when the evil did not come directly from

the Emperor; for he was not destitute of moral sense. The sophism

put forward concerning Bonaparte's love for liberty proves only one

thing, the abuse which can be made of reason; nowadays it lends

itself to everything. Is it not established that the Terror was a

time of humanity? In fact, were they not demanding the abolition of

the death-penalty while they were killing everybody? Have not great

civilizers, as they are "called," always immolated men, and is it

not therefore, as far as has been "proved," that Robespierre was the

continuer of Jesus Christ?

[Sidenote: Napoleon's popularity.]

The Emperor meddled with everything; his intelligence never rested; he

had a sort of perpetual agitation of ideas. In the impetuousness of his

nature, instead of a free and continuous train, he advanced by leaps

and bounds, he flung himself upon the universe and shook it; he would

have none of it, of that universe, if he was obliged to wait for it:

an incomprehensible being, who found the secret of debasing his most

towering actions by despising them, and who raised his least elevated

actions to his own level. Impatient of will, patient of character,

incomplete and as though unfinished, Napoleon had gaps in his genius:

his understanding resembled the sky of that other hemisphere under

which he was to go to die, the sky whose stars are separated by empty

spaces.

One asks one's self by what spell Bonaparte, so aristocratic, so

hostile to the people, came to achieve the popularity which he enjoyed:

for that forger of yokes has most certainly remained popular with

a nation whose pretension was to raise altars to independence and

equality; here is the solution of the enigma:

Daily experience makes us recognise that the French are instinctively

drawn towards power; they do not love liberty; equality alone is their

idol. Now equality and despotism have secret connections. In those

two respects, Napoleon had his fount in the hearts of the French,

militarily inclined towards dominion, democratically enamoured of

the level. Once on the throne, he made the people sit down beside

him: a proletarian king, he humbled the kings and nobles in his

ante-chambers; he levelled the ranks, not by lowering but by raising

them: the descending level would have charmed the plebeian envy more,

the ascending level was more flattering to its pride. French vanity

was puffed up also by the superiority which Bonaparte gave us over the

rest of Europe; another cause of Napoleon's popularity has to do with

the affliction of his last days. After his death, as men became better

acquainted with what he had suffered at St. Helena, they began to be

moved; they forgot his tyranny to remember that, after conquering our

enemies, after subsequently drawing them into France, he had defended

us against them; we imagine that he might save us to-day from the

disgrace into which we have sunk: his fame was recalled to us by his

misfortune; his glory profited by his adversity.

Lastly, the marvels of his arms have bewitched the young, while

teaching us to worship brute force. His unexampled fortune has left to

the overweening conceit of every ambition the hope of arriving at the

point which he attained.

And yet this man, so popular through the roller which he had passed

over France, was the mortal enemy of equality and the greatest

organizer of aristocracy within democracy.

I cannot acquiesce in the false praises with which men have insulted

Bonaparte, while trying to justify everything in his conduct; I cannot

surrender my reason nor go into ecstasies before that which arouses my

horror or my pity.

If I have succeeded in conveying what I have felt, there will remain

of my portrait one of the leading figures in history; but I have

adopted no part of the fantastic creature composed of lies: lies which

I saw born, lies which, taken at first for what they were, passed in

time to the state of truth through the infatuation and the imbecile

credulity of mankind. I refuse to be a gull and to fall into a fit with

admiration. I strive to paint persons conscientiously, without taking

from them what they have, without giving them what they have not. If

success were esteemed as innocence; if, debauching even posterity, it

loaded it with its chains; if, a future slave, begotten by a slavish

past, that suborned posterity became the accomplice of whosoever should

have triumphed: where would be the right, where would be the reward

of sacrifices? Good and evil becoming only relative qualities, all

morality would be blotted out from human actions.

That is the difficulty which is caused to the impartial writer by a

brilliant renown; he keeps it on one side as much as he can, in order

to lay bare the truth; but the glory returns like a golden haze and

instantly covers the picture.

*

In order not to admit the diminution of territory and power which we

owe to Bonaparte, the present generation consoles itself by imagining

that he has given back to us in illustriousness what he has taken from

us in strength:

"Are we not from this time forward," it asks, "famed in the four

quarters of the earth? Is not a Frenchman feared, remarked, sought out,

known on every shore?"

But were we placed between those two conditions: either immortality

without power, or power without immortality? Alexander made the Greek

name known to the universe; none the less he left them four empires

in Asia; the language and civilization of the Hellenes extended from

the Nile to Babylon and from Babylon to the Indus. At his death,

his ancestral Kingdom of Macedon, far from being diminished, had

increased a hundred-fold in force. Bonaparte made us known on every

shore; commanded by him, the French threw Europe so low at their

feet that France still prevails by her name, and that the Arc de

l'Étoile can rise up without appearing a puerile trophy; but, before

our reverses, that monument would have stood as a witness, instead of

being only a record. And yet, had not Dumouriez, with raw recruits,

given the foreigner his first lessons[381], Jourdan won the Battle

of Fleurus[382], Pichegru conquered Belgium and Holland[383], Hoche

crossed the Rhine[384], Masséna triumphed at Zurich[385], Moreau at

Hohenlinden[386]: all exploits most difficult to obtain and preliminary

to others? Bonaparte made a corporate whole of these scattered

successes; he continued them, he caused those victories to shine forth:

but without those first wonders, would he have obtained the last? He

was raised above all things only when reason with him was executing the

inspirations of the poet.

[Sidenote A true appreciation.]

Our sovereign's illustriousness cost us merely two or three hundred

thousand men a year; we paid for it with merely three millions of our

soldiers; our fellow-citizens bought it merely at the cost of their

sufferings and their liberties during fifteen years: can such trifles

count? Are the generations that have come after us not resplendent? So

much the worse for those who have disappeared! The calamities under the

Republic served for the safety of all; our misfortunes under the Empire

did much more: they deified Bonaparte! That is enough for us.

That is not enough for me: I will not stoop so low as to hide my nation

behind Bonaparte; he did not make France: France made him. No talent,

no superiority will ever bring me to consent to the power which can,

with one word, deprive me of my independence, my home, my friends: if

I do not say of my fortune and my honour, it is because one's fortune

does not appear to me to be worth the trouble of defending it; as

for honour, it escapes tyranny: it is the soul of the martyrs; bonds

encompass and do not enchain it; it pierces the vault of prisons and

carries the whole man away with it.

The wrong which true philosophy will never forgive Bonaparte is that

he accustomed society to passive obedience, thrust back humanity

towards the times of moral degradation, and perhaps corrupted

characters in such a way that it would be impossible to say when men's

hearts will begin to throb with generous sentiments. The weakness in

which we are plunged as regards Europe, our actual abasement are the

result of the Napoleonic slavery: all that remains to us is the faculty

to bear the yoke. Bonaparte unsettled even the future: 'twould not

surprise me if, in the discomfort of our impotence, we were seen to

grow smaller, to barricade ourselves against Europe instead of going to

seek it out, to give up our freedom within to deliver ourselves from an

illusory terror without, to lose ourselves in ignoble provident cares,

contrary to our genius and to the fourteen centuries which compose our

national manners. The despotism which Bonaparte left in the air will

descend upon us in the shape of fortresses.

The fashion nowadays is to greet liberty with a sardonic smile, to look

upon it as a piece of old lumber, fallen into disuse with honour. I am

not in the fashion: I think that there is nothing in the world without

liberty; it gives a price to life; were I to remain the last to defend

it, I would never cease to proclaim its rights. To attack Napoleon in

the name of things that are past, to assail him with ideas that are

dead is to prepare fresh triumphs for him. He is to be fought only with

something greater than himself, liberty: he was guilty towards it and

consequently towards the human race.

*

Vain words! Better than any do I feel their uselessness. Henceforth any

observation, however moderate it may be, is reputed profane: it needs

courage to dare brave the cries of the vulgar, not to be afraid of

being treated as a narrow intelligence, incapable of understanding and

feeling the genius of Napoleon, for the sole reason that, in the midst

of the lively and real admiration which one professes for him, one

is nevertheless not able to worship all his imperfections. The world

belongs to Bonaparte: that of which the ravisher was unable to complete

the conquest, his fame usurps; living he missed the world, dead he

possesses it. It is vain for you to protest: the generations pass by

without listening to you. Antiquity makes the son of Priam say to the

shade:

"Judge not Hector from his little tomb; the _Iliad_, Homer, the Greeks

in flight, see there my sepulchre: I am buried under all those great

deeds."

[Sidenote: The Napoleonic legend.]

Bonaparte is no longer the real Bonaparte, but a legendary figure put

together from the vagaries of the poet, the talk of the soldier and the

tales of the people; it is the Charlemagne and the Alexander of the

idylls of the middle ages that we behold to-day. That fantastic hero

will remain the real personage; the other portraits will disappear.

Bonaparte is so strongly connected with absolute dominion that,

after undergoing the despotism of his person, we have to undergo the

despotism of his memory. This latter despotism is more overbearing than

the former; for, though men fought against Napoleon when he was on the

throne, there is an universal agreement to accept the irons which he

flings to us now that he is dead. He is an obstacle to future events:

how could a power issuing from the camps establish itself after him?

Has he not killed all military glory by surpassing it? How could a free

government come into being, when he has corrupted the principles of all

liberty in men's hearts? No legitimate power is now able to drive the

usurping spectre from the mind of man: the soldier and the citizen,

the Republican and the Monarchist, the rich and the poor alike place

busts and portraits of Napoleon in their homes, in their palaces or in

their cottages; the former conquered are in agreement with the former

conquerors; one cannot take a step in Italy without coming across him;

one cannot enter Germany without meeting him, for in that country the

young generation which rejected him is past. Generally, the centuries

sit down before the portrait of a great man, they finish it by means of

a long and successive work. This time, the human race has declined to

wait: perhaps it was in too great a hurry to stump a crayon drawing. It

is time to place the completed side of the idol in juxtaposition with

the defective side.

Bonaparte is not great through his words, his speeches, his writings,

through the love of liberty which he never possessed and which he never

pretended to establish; he is great in that he created a regular and

powerful government, a code of laws adopted in different countries,

courts of law, schools, a strong, active, intelligent administration,

which still lasts us; he is great in that he revived, enlightened and

governed Italy superlatively well; he is great in that, in France,

he restored order from the midst of chaos, in that he built up the

altars, in that he reduced furious demagogues, vainglorious scholars,

anarchical men of letters, Voltairean atheists, open-air orators,

cut-throats of the prisons and streets, starvelings of the tribune,

the clubs and the scaffolds, in that he reduced them to serve under

him; he is great in that he curbed an anarchical mob; he is great in

that he put an end to the familiarities of a common fortune, in that he

forced soldiers, his equals, and captains, his chiefs or his rivals,

to bend before his will; he is great above all in that he was born of

himself alone, in that he was able, with no other authority than that

of his genius, able, he, to make himself obeyed by thirty-six million

subjects, at a time when no illusion surrounds the thrones; he is great

in that he overthrew all the kings his opponents, in that he defeated

all the armies, whatever the difference in their discipline and valour,

in that he taught his name to savage as well as to civilized peoples,

in that he surpassed all the conquerors who preceded him, in that he

filled ten years with prodigies so great that we have difficulty to-day

in understanding them.

The famous offender in triumphal matter is no more; the few men who

still understand noble sentiments can do justice to glory without

fearing it, but without repenting of having proclaimed what that

glory had that was baleful, without recognising the destroyer of

independences as the father of emancipations: Napoleon does not need

that one should ascribe merits to him; he was richly enough endowed at

his birth.

Now, therefore, that, severed from his time, his history is ended and

his idyll commencing, let us go to see him die: let us leave Europe;

let us follow him beneath the sky of his apotheosis! The hissing of the

seas where his ships have struck sail will point out to us the spot of

his disappearance:

"At the extremity of our hemisphere," says Tacitus, "is heard the sound

made by the dipping sun: _sonum insuper immergentis audiri._"

*

João de Nova[387], a Portuguese navigator, had lost his bearings in

the waters separating Africa and America. In 1502, on the 18th of

August, the feast of St. Helen[388], mother of the first Christian

Emperor[389], he came upon an island at the 16th degree of latitude

and 11th of longitude; he landed and gave it the name of the day upon

which it was discovered.

After frequenting the island for some years, the Portuguese

relinquished it; the Dutch established themselves there, and

subsequently abandoned it for the Cape of Good Hope; the British East

Indian Company seized it; the Dutch retook it in 1672; the British

occupied it anew and settled there.

[Sidenote: St. Helena.]

When João de Nova landed at St. Helena, the interior of the uninhabited

country was mere forest land. Fernando Lopez, a Portuguese renegado,

transported to that oasis, stocked it with cows, goats, hens,

guinea-fowls and birds from the four corners of the earth. On to the

island were taken successively, as on to the deck of the Ark, animals

of the whole creation.

Five hundred whites, fifteen hundred negroes, mingled with mulattoes,

Javanese and Chinese, compose the population of the island. Jamestown

is its town and its harbour. Before the English were masters of the

Cape of Good Hope, the Company's fleets, returning from India, put in

at Jamestown. The sailors spread their slop-goods at the foot of the

cabbage-trees: the mute and solitary forest changed once a year into a

noisy and populous market.

The climate of the island is healthy but rainy: that dungeon of

Neptune, which is only seven or eight leagues in circumference,

attracts the ocean vapours. The equatorial sun drives away every

breathing thing at noon-day, forces the very gnats into silence and

rest, obliges men and beasts to hide themselves. The billows are

illumined at night by what is called "the phosphorescent light," a

light produced by myriads of insects whose loves, electrified by the

storms, kindle upon the surface of the deep the illuminations of an

universal wedding. The shadow of the island, dark and motionless,

reposes amid a moving plain of diamonds. The spectacle of the heavens

is similarly magnificent, according to my learned and famous friend, M.

de Humboldt[390]:

"We feel," he says, "an indescribable sensation when, on approaching

the Equator, and particularly when passing from one hemisphere to

the other, we see these stars, which we have contemplated from our

infancy, progressively sink and finally disappear.... One feels that he

is not in Europe, when he sees the immense constellation of the Ship or

the phosphorescent Clouds of Magellan arise on the horizon....

"We saw distinctly," he continues, "for the first time the Southern

Cross only on the night of the 4th of July, in the sixteenth degree of

latitude....

"I recalled the sublime passage of Dante, which the most celebrated

commentators have applied to that constellation:

"Io mi volsi a man destra, etc.[391]"

"Among the Portuguese and Spaniards, a religious feeling attaches them

to a constellation whose form reminds them of that sign of the faith

planted by their ancestors in the deserts of the New World."

*

The poets of France and of Lusitania have placed elegiac scenes on the

shores of Melinda and the neighbouring isles. It is a far cry from

those fictitious sorrows to the real torments of Napoleon under the

stars foretold by the singer of Beatrice and in those seas of Eleonora

and Virginia. Did the great men of Rome, banished to the isles of

Greece, concern themselves with the charms of those shores and the

divinities of Crete and Naxos? That which enraptured Vasco de Gama and

Camoëns could not move Bonaparte: prone on the poop of the vessel, he

did not perceive that above his head glittered unknown constellations

whose rays met his eyes for the first time. What cared he for those

stars which he had never seen from his bivouacs, which had not shone

upon his empire? And yet no star was wanting to his destiny: one half

of the firmament lighted up his cradle; the other was reserved for the

pomp of his tomb.

The sea which Napoleon was crossing was not the friendly sea which

carried him from the harbours of Corsica, from the sands of Abukir,

from the rocks of Elba, to the shores of Provence; it was that hostile

ocean which, after enclosing him in Germany, France, Portugal and

Spain, opened out before his course only to close up again behind him.

Probably, when he saw the waves urge on his ship, the trade-winds drive

it ever further with a constant blast, he did not make the reflections

upon his catastrophe with which it inspires me: each man feels his

life in his own manner; he who affords a great spectacle to the world

is less touched and less instructed than the spectator. Occupied with

the past as though it could be reborn, hoping still in his memories,

Bonaparte scarce perceived that he was crossing the line, nor asked

what hand traced the circles in which the globes are compelled to

imprison their eternal progress.

On the 15th of August, the wandering colony kept St. Napoleon's

Day[392] on board the vessel which was taking Napoleon to his last

halting-place. On the 15th of October, the _Northumberland_ was abreast

of St. Helena. The passenger mounted on deck: he had a difficulty in

discovering an imperceptible black speck in the bluish immensity;

he took a spy-glass: he surveyed that particle of earth as he might

formerly have surveyed a fortress in the middle of a lake. He saw the

market-town of St. James enchased in scarped rocks; not a wrinkle in

that barren face but a gun hung from it: they seemed to wish to receive

the captive according to his genius.

[Sidenote: Arrival at St. Helena.]

On the 16th of October 1815, Bonaparte touched the rock, his mausoleum,

even as, on the 12th of October 1492, Christopher Columbus touched the

New World, his monument:

"There," says Walter Scott, "at the entrance to the Indian Ocean,

Bonaparte was deprived of the means of making a second _avatar_ or

incarnation on earth."

Before being moved to the residence of Longwood, Bonaparte occupied

a hut at Briars, near Balcomb's Cottage. On the 9th of December,

Longwood, hurriedly enlarged by the carpenters of the English fleet,

received its guest. The house, situated on a mountain upland, consisted

of a drawing-room, a dining-room, a library, a study and a bed-room.

It was not much: those who inhabited the tower of the Temple and the

donjon of Vincennes were still worse lodged; true, one paid them the

attention of shortening their stay. General Gourgaud, M. and Madame de

Montholon with their children, M. de Las Cases and his son camped out

provisionally in tents; M. and Madame Bertrand installed themselves at

Hut's Gate, a cottage placed on the boundary of the grounds of Longwood.

Bonaparte had a stretch of sand, twelve miles long, as his

exercise-ground; sentries surrounded that space and look-out men were

posted on the highest peaks. The lion could extend his walks further,

but in that case he had to consent to allow himself to be watched by an

English _bestiarius._ Two camps defended the excommunicated enclosure:

at night, the circle of the sentries was drawn in round Longwood. At

nine o'clock, Napoleon, confined, could no longer go out; the patrols

went the round; horsemen on vedette, foot-soldiers placed here and

there kept watch in the creeks and in the ravines which ran down to the

sea. Two armed brigs cruised, one to leeward, the other to wind-ward

of the island. What precautions to guard one man in the midst of

the seas! After sunset, no boat could put to sea; the fishing-boats

were numbered, and at night they remained in harbour under the

responsibility of a lieutenant in the Navy. The Sovereign Generalissimo

who had summoned the world to his stirrup was called upon to appear

twice a day before a military collar. Bonaparte did not submit to that

call; when, by good luck, he was able to avoid the sight of the officer

on duty, that officer would not have dared to say where and how he had

seen him of whom it was more difficult to establish the absence than to

prove the presence to the universe.

Sir George Cockburn[393], the author of those severe regulations, was

replaced by Sir Hudson Lowe. Then began the bickerings about which all

the Memoirs have told us. If one were to believe those Memoirs, the

new Governor must have been of the family of the enormous spiders of

St. Helena and the reptile of those woods in which snakes are unknown.

England was lacking in elevation, Napoleon in dignity. To put an end to

his requirements of etiquette, Bonaparte sometimes seemed determined

to conceal himself behind an assumed name, like a monarch travelling

in a foreign country; he had the touching idea of taking the name

of one of his aides-de-camp, killed at the Battle of Areola[394].

France, Austria, Russia appointed commissaries to the residence of St.

Helena[395]: the captive was accustomed to receive the ambassadors

of the two latter Powers; the Legitimacy, which had not recognised

Napoleon as Emperor, would have acted more nobly by not recognising

Napoleon as a prisoner.

[Sidenote: Life at Longwood.]

A large wooden house, constructed in London, was sent to St Helena; but

Napoleon did not feel well enough to inhabit it. His life at Longwood

was regulated in this way: he rose at uncertain hours; M. Marchand, his

valet, read to him when he was in bed; after rising, in the morning,

he dictated to Generals Montholon and Gourgaud and to the son of M. de

Las Cases. He breakfasted at ten o'clock, rode on horseback or drove

until about three, returned indoors at six and went to bed at eleven.

He affected to dress as he is painted in his portrait by Isabey[396]:

in the morning, he wrapped himself in a caftan and wound a Madras

handkerchief round his head.

St. Helena lies between the two Poles. The navigators who pass from one

spot to the other salute this first station where the land refreshes

eyes wearied with the spectacle of the Ocean and offers fruits and the

coolness of sweet water to mouths chafed with salt. The presence of

Bonaparte changed this isle of promise into a plague-stricken rock:

foreign ships no longer touched there; so soon as they were signalled

at twenty leagues' distance, a cruiser went to challenge them and

charged them to keep off: none were allowed into port, except in case

of stormy weather, but the ships of the British Navy alone.

Some of the English travellers who had lately admired or who were on

their way to see the marvels of the Ganges visited another marvel on

their road: India, accustomed to conquerors, had one chained at her

gates.

Napoleon allowed these visits with reluctance. He consented to receive

Lord Amherst[397] on the latter's return from his Chinese embassy.

Admiral Sir Pulteney Malcolm[398] he liked:

"Does your Government mean," he asked him one day, "to detain me upon

this rock until my death's day?"

The admiral replied that he feared so.

"Then the term of my life will soon arrive."

"I hope not, _monsieur_; I hope that you will survive to record your

great actions; they are so numerous that the task will ensure you a

term of long life."

Napoleon did not take offense at this simple appellation of _monsieur_;

he revealed himself at that moment through his real greatness.

Fortunately for himself, he never wrote his life; he would have

lessened it: men of that nature must leave their Memoirs to be told by

the unknown voice which belongs to nobody and which issues from the

nations and the centuries. To us every-day people alone is it permitted

to talk of ourselves, because nobody would talk of us.

Captain Basil Hall[399] called at Longwood; Bonaparte remembered having

seen the captain's father at Brienne:

"Your father," he said, "was the first Englishman that I ever saw; and

I have recollected him all my life on that account."

He talked with the captain about the recent discovery of the island of

Loo-Choo:

"The inhabitants have no arms," said the captain.

"No arms!" exclaimed Bonaparte. "That is to say no guns: they have

muskets?"

"Not even muskets."

"Well, then, spears, or at least, bows and arrows?"

"Neither one nor other."

"Nor daggers?"

"No, none."

"But, without arms, how can one fight?"

Captain Hall illustrated their ignorance with respect to all the world,

by saying they knew nothing of France and England, and never had even

heard of His Majesty.

Bonaparte smiled in a way which struck the captain: the more serious

the countenance, the more beautiful the smile. Those different

travellers remarked that not the least trace of colour appeared in

Bonaparte's cheeks: his head resembled a marble bust whose whiteness

had been slightly yellowed by time. Not the smallest trace of a wrinkle

was discernible on his brow, nor an approach to a furrow on any part of

his countenance; his mind seemed at ease. This apparent calm gave rise

to the belief that the flame of his genius had taken flight. His manner

of speaking was slow; his expression was benignant and almost kindly;

sometimes he would dart forth dazzling glances, but that state soon

passed: his eyes became veiled and sad.

[Sidenote: Napoleon at St. Helena.]

Ah, other travellers known to Napoleon had, in former days, appeared

upon those shores!

After the explosion of the infernal machine[400], a senatus-consultus

of the 4th of January 1801 decreed, without trial, by a simple

police-order, the exile beyond-seas of one hundred and thirty

Republicans: put on board the frigate _Chiffonne_ and the corvette

_Flèche_, they were taken to the Seychelle Islands and dispersed

shortly afterwards in the archipelago of the Comores, between Africa

and Madagascar: they nearly all died there. Two of the men transported,

Lefranc and Saunois, having succeeded in escaping on board an American

ship, touched at St. Helena in 1803: there, twelve years later,

Providence was to imprison their great oppressor.

The too-famous General Rossignol[401], their companion in misfortune, a

quarter of an hour before uttering his last breath, exclaimed:

"I die harassed by the most horrible pains; but I should die content

if I could hear that the tyrant of my country was enduring the same

sufferings[402]!"

Thus did freedom's imprecations await him who betrayed her, even in the

other hemisphere.

Italy, roused from her long sleep by Napoleon, turned her eyes towards

the illustrious offspring who wished to restore her to her glory, and

with whom she had re-fallen beneath the yoke. The sons of the Muses,

the noblest and most grateful of men, when they are not the vilest and

most unthankful, looked on St. Helena. The last poet of the land of

Virgil sang the last warrior of the land of Cæsar:

Tutto ei provò, la gloria

Maggior dopo il periglio,

La fuga e la vittoria,

La reggia e il triste esiglio:

Due volte nella polvere,

Due volte sull'altar.

Ei si nomo: due secoli,

L'un contro l'altro armato,

Sommessi a lui si volsero,

Come aspettando il fato;

Ei fè silenzio, ed arbitro

S'assise in mezzo a lor.

"He felt all," says Manzoni[403], "the greatest glory after peril,

flight and victory, royalty and sad banishment: twice in the dust,

twice on the altar.

"He stated his name: two centuries, one against the other armed, turned

towards him, as though awaiting their fate; he was silent and seated

himself as arbiter between them."

*

Bonaparte was approaching his end; devoured by an internal wound

envenomed by sorrow, he had borne that wound in the thick of

prosperity: it was the only legacy which he had received from his

father; the rest came to him from God's munificence.

Already he reckoned six years of exile; he had needed less time to

conquer Europe. He remained almost always indoors, and read Ossian in

Cesarotti's[404] Italian translation. Everything saddened him under a

sky beneath which life seemed shorter, the sun remaining three days

less in that hemisphere than in ours. When Bonaparte went out, he

passed along rugged paths lined with aloes and sweet-scented broom.

He walked among gum-trees with sparse flowers, which the generous

winds made lean to the same side, or hid himself in the thick mists

which rolled low. He was seen seated at the feet of Diana's Peak,

Flag Staff, or Leader Hill, gazing on the sea through the gaps in the

mountains. Before him, the Ocean unfolded itself, which on the one side

bathes the coasts of Africa, on the other the American shores, and

which goes, like a marginless stream, to lose itself in the southern

seas. No civilized land nearer than the Cape of Storms. Who shall tell

the thoughts of that Prometheus torn alive by death, when, his hand

pressed to his smarting breast, he turned his gaze over the billows!

Christ was led into a high mountain whence he saw the kingdoms of the

world; but for Christ it was written to the tempter of mankind:

"Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God[405]."

[Sidenote: Napoleon's sufferings.]

Bonaparte, forgetting a thought of his which I have quoted ("not

having given myself life, I shall not rob myself of it"), spoke of

killing himself; he also did not remember his "order of the day" with

regard to the suicide of one of his soldiers. He believed sufficiently

in the attachment of his companions in captivity to hope that they

would consent to suffocate themselves with him in the smoke from a

brazier: the illusion was great. Such are the intoxications of a

long domination; but, in the case of Napoleon's impatiences, we must

consider only the degree of suffering to which he had attained. M.

de Las Cases, having written to Lucien on a piece of white silk, in

contravention of the regulations, received the order to leave St.

Helena[406]: his absence increased the void around the exile.

On the 18th of March 1817, Lord Holland[407], in the House of Lords,

made a motion on the subject of the complaints forwarded to England by

General Montholon:

"It will not be considered by posterity," he said, "whether Bonaparte

has been justly punished for his crimes, but whether Great Britain has

acted in that generous manner which becomes a great country."

Lord Bathurst[408] opposed the motion.

Cardinal Fesch sent two priests[409] from Italy to his nephew. The

Princess Borghese begged the favour of being allowed to join her

brother:

"No," said Napoleon, "I would not have her witness the degrading state

to which I am reduced and the insults to which I am subjected."

That beloved sister, _germana Jovis_, did not cross the seas: she died

in the regions where Napoleon had left his reputation.

Schemes of abduction were formed: a Colonel Latapie, at the head of

a band of American adventurers, designed a descent on St. Helena.

Johnson[410], a resolute smuggler, meditated an attempt to carry off

Bonaparte by means of a submarine vessel. Young lords entered into

these plans; people plotted to break the chains of the oppressor:

they would have left the liberator of the human race to die in irons

without a thought Bonaparte hoped for his delivery from the political

movements of Europe. If he had lived till 1830, perhaps he would have

returned to us; but what would he have done among us? He would have

seemed infirm and out of date in the midst of the new ideas. Formerly

his tyranny appeared liberty to our slavery; now his greatness would

appear despotism to our littleness. At the present period, everything

is decrepit in a day; who lives too long dies alive. As we advance in

life, we leave three or four images of ourselves, different one from

the other: we see them next in the haze of the past, like portraits of

our different ages.

Bonaparte, in his feebleness, no longer occupied himself except like a

child: he amused himself by digging a little basin in his garden; he

put a few fish into it: the mastick employed in cementing the basin

contained copperas, and the fish died. Bonaparte said:

"Everything I love, everything that belongs to me is immediately

smitten."

About the end of February 1821, Napoleon was obliged to take to his bed

and did not rise again.

"How low am I fallen!" he murmured. "I stirred the world, and I cannot

raise my eyelid."

He did not believe in medicine and objected to a consultation of

Antomarchi[411] with the Jamestown doctors. Nevertheless, he admitted

Dr. Arnott beside his death-bed. He dictated his will from the 13th

to the 27th of April; on the 28th, he ordered his heart to be sent to

Marie-Louise; he forbade any English surgeon to lay a hand upon him

after his decease. Persuaded that he was succumbing to the malady by

which his father had been attacked, he requested that the report of the

autopsy should be transmitted to the Duc de Reichstadt: the paternal

direction has become useless; Napoleon II. has joined Napoleon I.

[Sidenote: Napoleon's death-bed.]

At this last hour, the religious sentiment with which Bonaparte was

always imbued awoke. Thibaudeau, in his _Mémoires sur le Consulat_,

tells us, with reference to the restoration of public worship, that the

First Consul said to him:

"'On Sunday last, in the midst of the silence of nature, I

was walking in these gardens[412]; the sound of the bell of

Ruel suddenly came and struck my ear and renewed all the

impressions of my youth; I was moved, so powerful is the

force of early habit, and said to myself:

"'If it is thus for me, what effect must similar memories not

produce on simple and credulous men? Let your philosophers

reply to that!'"...

"And, raising his hands to the sky:

"'Who is He that made all that?'"

In 1797, by his Proclamation of Macerata, Bonaparte authorized the

residence of the French refugee priests in the Papal States, forbade

them to be molested, ordered the convents to support them, and allotted

them a salary in money.

His variations in Egypt, his rages against the Church, of which he was

the restorer, show that an instinct of spirituality predominated in the

very midst of his errors; for his lapses and his irritations are not of

a philosophical nature and bear the impress of the religious character.

Bonaparte, when giving Vignale the details of the funeral lights by

which he wished his remains to be surrounded, thought he saw signs that

his instructions were displeasing to Antomarchi; he entered into an

explanation with the doctor and said to him:

"You are above those weaknesses: but how can it be helped? I am neither

a philosopher nor a doctor; I believe in God; I am of my father's

religion. We cannot all be atheists.... Are you able not to believe

in God? For, after all, everything proclaims His existence, and the

greatest geniuses have believed it.... You are a doctor.... Those

people only tackle matter: they never believe anything."

You strong minds of the day, give up your admiration for Napoleon; you

have nothing to do with that poor man: did he not imagine that a comet

had come to fetch him, as it had carried off Cæsar of old? Moreover,

he "believed in God;" he "was of his father's religion;" he was not a

"philosopher;" he was not an "atheist;" he had not, like you, given

battle to the Almighty, although he had defeated a good many kings;

he found that "everything proclaimed the existence" of the Supreme

Being; he declared that "the greatest geniuses had believed in that

existence," and he wished to believe as his fathers did. Lastly, O

monstrous thing, this foremost man of modern times, this man of all the

centuries, was a Christian in the nineteenth century! His will begins

with this clause:

"I DIE IN THE APOSTOLIC AND ROMAN RELIGION, IN THE BOSOM OF

WHICH I WAS BORN MORE THAN FIFTY YEARS AGO."

In the third paragraph of the will of Louis XVI., we read:

"I DIE IN THE UNION OF OUR HOLY MOTHER THE CATHOLIC,

APOSTOLIC AND ROMAN CHURCH."

The Revolution has given us many a lesson; but is there any one of

them to be compared with this? Napoleon and Louis XVI. making the

same profession of faith! Would you know the value of the Cross? Seek

through the whole world for what best suits virtue in misfortune or the

man of genius dying.

[Sidenote: Death of Napoleon.]

On the 3rd of May, Napoleon was administered the sacrament of Extreme

Unction and received the Blessed Viaticum. The silence of the

bed-chamber was interrupted only by the death-sob, mingled with the

regular sound of the pendulum of a clock: the shadow, before stopping

on the dial, did a few more rounds; the luminary that outlined it

had a difficulty in dying out. On the 4th, the tempest of Cromwell's

death-pangs arose: almost all the trees at Longwood were uprooted. At

last, on the 5th, at eleven minutes to six in the evening, amid the

wind, the rain and the crash of the waves, Bonaparte gave up to God

the mightiest breath of life that ever quickened human clay. The last

words caught upon the conqueror's lips were, "_Tête... armée_," or

"_Tête d'armée._" His thoughts were still wandering in the midst of

combats. When he closed his eyes for ever, his sword, dead with him,

was laid by his side, a crucifix rested on his breast: the symbol of

peace, applied to the heart of Napoleon, calmed the throbbing of that

heart even as a ray from Heaven makes the wave to fall.

*

Bonaparte first desired to be interred in the Cathedral of Ajaccio;

then, by a codicil dated 16 April 1821, he bequeathed his bones

to France: Heaven had served him better; his real mausoleum is

the rock on which he expired: turn back to my story of the death

of the Duc d'Enghien. Napoleon, foreseeing the opposition of the

British Government to his last wishes, eventually made choice of a

burying-place in St. Helena.

In a narrow valley known as Slane's or Geranium Valley, now Tomb

Valley, rises a fountain; Napoleon's Chinese servants, faithful as

Camoëns' Javanese, used to fill their pitchers there: weeping willows

overhang the spring; green grass, studded with tchampas, grows all

around:

"The tchampas, despite its brilliancy and its perfume, is not a flower

that one seeks after, because it flourishes on the tombs," say the

Sanskrit poems.

In the declivities of the bare rocks, bitter lemon-trees thrive ill,

with cocoanut-trees, larches and cone-trees of which men collect the

gum which sticks to the beards of the goats.

Napoleon, booted, spurred, dressed in the uniform of a colonel of the

Guard, decorated with the Legion of Honour, was laid in state on his

little iron bedstead; upon that visage which was never astonished the

soul, as it fled, had left a sublime stupor. The planishers and joiners

soldered and nailed Bonaparte into a four-fold coffin of mahogany, of

lead, of mahogany again, and of tin: they seemed to fear that he would

never be imprisoned enough. The cloak which the erstwhile victor had

worn at the vast funeral of Marengo served as a pall to the coffin.

Napoleon delighted in the willows of the spring; he asked for peace of

the Slane Valley even as banished Dante asked for peace of the Convent

of Corvo. In gratitude for the transient repose which he tasted there

during the last days of his life, he appointed that valley as the

shelter of his eternal rest. Speaking of the source, he said:

"If God were willing that I should recover, I would raise a monument in

the spot where it springs."

That monument was his tomb. In Plutarch's time, in a place consecrated

to the nymphs on the banks of the Strymon, one still saw a stone bench

on which Alexander had sat

The obsequies were held on the 28th of May. The weather was fine: four

horses, led by grooms on foot, drew the hearse; four-and-twenty English

grenadiers, carrying no arms, surrounded it; Napoleon's horse followed.

The garrison of the island lined the precipices of the road. Three

squadrons of dragoons went before the procession; the 20th Regiment of

Infantry, the marines, the St. Helena Volunteers, the Royal Artillery,

with fifteen pieces of cannon, brought up the rear. Bands of musicians,

stationed at distances on the rocks, exchanged mournful tunes. On

reaching a pass, the hearse stopped; the twenty-four unarmed grenadiers

lifted up the corpse and had the honour of carrying it on their

shoulders to the burying-place. Three volleys of artillery saluted the

remains of Napoleon at the moment when he sank into the earth: all

the noise which he had made on that earth did not penetrate six feet

beneath it.

A stone which was to have been employed in the building of a new house

for the exile was lowered upon his coffin, as it were the trap-door of

his last cell.

They recited the verses from Psalm 87:

"I am poor, and in labours from my youth: and being exalted

have been humbled and troubled.

"Thy wrath hath come upon me.... [413]"

The flag-ship fired minute-guns. This warlike harmony, lost in the

immensity of the Ocean, made response to the _Requiescat in pace._

The Emperor, buried by his victors of Waterloo, had heard the last

cannon-shot of that battle; he did not hear the last detonation

with which England disturbed and honoured his sleep at St. Helena.

All withdrew, holding in their hands a branch of willow, as though

returning from the Feast of Palms.

Lord Byron thought that the dictator of kings had abdicated his renown

with his blade, that he was going to die forgotten. The poet ought to

have known that Napoleon's destiny was a muse, like all high destinies.

That muse was able to change an abortive issue into a catastrophe

which revived its hero. The solitude of Napoleon's exile and tomb has

spread over a brilliant memory a spell of a different kind. Alexander

did not die under the eyes of Greece; he disappeared in the proud

perspectives of Babylon. Bonaparte has not died under the eyes of

France; he has vanished in the gorgeous horizons of the torrid zone.

He sleeps like a hermit or like a pariah in a valley, at the end of a

deserted pathway. The magnitude of the silence which presses upon him

equals the vastness of the noise that once surrounded him. The nations

are absent, their crowd has withdrawn; the tropic bird "harnessed,"

says Buffon, "to the chariot of the sun," precipitates itself from the

orb of light; where does it rest to-day? It rests upon ashes whose

weight tilted the globe.

"They all put crowns upon themselves after his death ... and

evils were multiplied in the earth[414]."

[Sidenote: Influence of Napoleon.]

This summing up of the Machabees on Alexander seems made for Napoleon:

"They have put crowns _upon themselves_, and evils have been multiplied

in the earth." Scarce twenty years have passed since Bonaparte's death,

and already the French Monarchy and the Spanish Monarchy[415] are no

more. The map of the world has changed; we have had to learn a new

geography: parted from their lawful sovereigns, nations have been flung

to sovereigns taken at haphazard; famous actors have stepped down from

the stage to which nameless actors have climbed; the eagles have taken

flight from the crest of the tall pine, fallen into the sea, while

frail shell-fish have fastened on to the sides of the still protecting

trunk.

As, in the final result, all runs to its end, "the terrible spirit of

novelty which was passing over the world," as the Emperor said, to

which he had opposed the cross-bar of his genius, resumes its course;

the conqueror's institutions decay; he will be the last of the great

individual existences; nothing henceforth will predominate in low and

levelled societies; the shade of Napoleon will tower alone at the

extremity of the destroyed old world, like the phantom of the deluge

at the edge of its abyss: a distant posterity will discern that shade

across the gulf into which unknown centuries will fall, until the

appointed day of the social re-birth.

*

Since it is my own life which I am writing while busying myself with

others, great and small, I am obliged to mix this life with men and

things, when it happens to be recalled. Did I, in one flight, without

ever stopping, pass through the memory of the transported one who, in

his ocean prison, awaited the execution of God's decree? No.

The peace which Napoleon had not concluded with the kings his gaolers

he had made with me: I was a son of the sea like himself; my nativity

was one of the rock like his. I flatter myself to have known Napoleon

better than they who saw him oftener and approached him more closely.

Napoleon at St. Helena, ceasing to have occasion to maintain his anger

with me, had abandoned his hostility; I, becoming more just in my turn,

wrote the following article in the _Conservateur_:

"The nations have called Bonaparte a scourge; but the

scourges of God retain something of the eternity and grandeur

of the divine wrath whence they emanate: 'Ye dry bones ...

I will send spirit into you, and you shall live[416].' Born

in an island to go and die in an island, on the boundaries

of three continents; cast in the midst of the seas in which

Camoëns seemed to foretell him by placing there the genius of

the tempests, Bonaparte cannot stir on his rock but we are

apprized of it by a concussion; a step of the new Adamastor

at the other Pole makes itself felt at this. If Napoleon,

escaping from the hands of his gaolers, were to retire to the

United States, his looks fixed upon the Ocean would be enough

to disturb the nations of the Old World; his mere presence

on the American shore of the Atlantic would oblige Europe to

camp on the opposite shore[417]."

This article reached Bonaparte at St. Helena; a hand which he thought

hostile poured the last balsam on his wounds; he said to M. de

Montholon:

"If, in 1814 and 1815, the royal confidence had not been placed in

men whose souls were enervated by circumstances too strong for them,

or who, renegades to their country, saw safety and glory for their

master's throne only in the yoke of the Holy Alliance; if the Duc

de Richelieu, whose ambition it was to deliver his country from the

presence of the foreign bayonets, if Chateaubriand, who had just

rendered such eminent services at Ghent, had had the direction of

affairs, France would have issued powerful and dreaded from those two

great national crises. Chateaubriand has been gifted by nature with

the Promethean fire: his works witness it. His style is not that of

Racine, it is that of the prophet. If ever he arrives at the helm

of State, it is possible that Chateaubriand may go astray: so many

others have found their ruin there! But what is certain is that all

that is great and national must be fitting to his genius, and that

he would have indignantly rejected the ignominious acts of the then

administration[418]."

[Sidenote: Napoleon's verdict on myself.]

Such were my last relations with Bonaparte. Why should I not admit that

that opinion "tickles my heart's proud weakness"? Many little men to

whom I have rendered great services have not judged me so favourably as

the giant whose might I had dared to attack.

*

While the Napoleonic world was becoming obliterated, I inquired into

the places where Napoleon himself had passed from view. The tomb at

St. Helena has already worn out one of the willows his contemporaries:

the decrepit and fallen tree is daily mutilated by the pilgrims. The

sepulchre is surrounded by a cast-iron grating; three flag-stones are

laid cross-wise over the grave; a few irises grow at the head and feet;

the spring of the valley still flows in the spot where prodigious days

dried up. Travellers brought by the tempest think it the proper thing

to chronicle their obscurity on the brilliant sepulchre. An old woman

has established herself close by, and lives on the shadow of a memory;

a pensioner stands sentry in a sentry-box.

The old Longwood, at two hundred steps from the new, is abandoned.

Across an enclosure filled with dung, one arrives at a stable; it used

to serve Bonaparte as a bed-room. A negro shows you a sort of passage

occupied by a hand-mill and says:

"Here he died."

The room in which Napoleon first saw the light was probably neither

larger nor more luxurious.

At the new Longwood, Plantation House, inhabited by the Governor, one

sees the Duke of Wellington in portraiture and the pictures of his

battles. A glass-doored cupboard contains a piece of the tree near

which the English general stood at Waterloo; this relic is placed

between an olive-branch gathered in the Garden of Olives and some

ornaments worn by South-Sea savages: a curious association on the part

of the abusers of the waves. It is useless for the victor here to try

to substitute himself for the vanquished, under the protection of a

branch from the Holy Land and the memory of Cook; it is enough that, at

St. Helena, one finds solitude, the Ocean and Napoleon.

If one were to search into the history of the transformation of the

shores made illustrious by tombs, cradles, palaces, what variety

of things and destinies would one not see, since such strange

metamorphoses are worked even in the obscure dwellings to which our

puny lives are attached! In what hut was Clovis born? In what chariot

did Attila see the light? What torrent covers Alaric's burying-place?

What jackal stands where stood Alexander's coffin of gold or crystal?

How many times have those ashes changed their place? And all those

mausoleums in Egypt and India: to whom do they belong? God alone knows

the cause of those changes linked with the mystery of the future:

for men there are truths hidden in the depths of time; they manifest

themselves only with the help of the ages, even as there are stars so

far removed from the earth that their light has not yet reached us.

*

But while I was writing this, time has progressed: it has produced an

event which would partake of greatness, if events did not nowadays

tumble into the mud. We have asked in London to have Bonaparte's

remains restored; the request has been entertained: what does England

care for old bones? She will make us as many presents of that sort as

we like. Napoleon's remains have come back to us at the moment of our

humiliation; they might have undergone the right of search; but the

foreigner showed himself compliant: he gave a pass to the ashes.

The translation of Napoleon's relics is an offense against fame. No

burial in Paris will ever be as good as Slane Valley: who would wish

to see Pompey elsewhere than in the furrow of sand thrown up by a poor

freedman, assisted by an old legionary? What shall we do with those

magnificent relics in the midst of our miseries? Will the hardest

granite represent the perpetuity of Bonaparte's works? If even we

possessed a Michael Angelo to carve the funeral statue?--How would one

fashion the monument? To little men mausoleums, to great men a stone

and a name. If, at least, they had suspended the coffin on the coping

of the Arc de Triomphe, if the nations had seen their master from afar

borne on the shoulders of his victories? Was not Trajan's urn in Rome

set at the top of his column? Napoleon, among us, will be lost in the

mob of those tatterdemalions of dead who steal away in silence. God

grant that he may not be exposed to the vicissitudes of our political

changes, protected though he may be by Louis XIV., Vauban and Turenne!

Beware of those violations of tombs so common in our country! Let a

certain side of the Revolution triumph, and the conqueror's dust may go

to join the dusts which our passions have scattered: men will forget

the vanquisher of the nations to remember only the oppressor of their

liberties. The bones of Napoleon will not reproduce his genius: they

will teach his despotism to second-rate soldiers.

[Sidenote: Napoleon's home-coming.]

Be this as it may, a frigate was supplied to a son[419] of

Louis-Philippe: a name dear to our ancient naval victories protected

it on the waves. Sailing from Toulon, where Bonaparte had embarked in

his might for the conquest of Egypt, the new Argo came to St. Helena

to claim what no longer existed. The sepulchre, with its silence,

continued to rise motionless in Slane or Geranium Valley. Of the two

weeping willows, one had fallen; Lady Dallas, the wife of a governor

of the island, had planted, to replace the decayed tree, eighteen

young willows and four-and-thirty cypresses; the spring, still there,

flowed as when Napoleon drank its water. During a whole night, under

the direction of an English captain named Alexander, the men worked at

opening the monument. The four coffins fitted one within the other, the

mahogany coffin, the lead coffin, the second mahogany or West-Indian

wood coffin, and the tin coffin, were discovered intact. They proceeded

to the inspection of those mummified moulds in a tent, in the centre of

a circle of officers, some of whom had known Bonaparte.

"When the last coffin was opened," says the Abbé Coquereau[420],

"our looks plunged in. They met a whitish mass which covered the

whole length of the body. Dr. Gaillard, touching it, distinguished a

white satin cushion which lined the inside of the upper plank of the

coffin: it had become unfastened and lay about the remains like a

winding-sheet....

"The whole body seemed as though covered with a light foam; one would

have said that we were looking at it through a transparent cloud. It

was certainly his head: a pillow raised it slightly; his wide forehead,

his eyes, the sockets of which were outlined beneath the eye-lids,

still fringed with a few lashes; his cheeks were swollen, his nose

alone had suffered, his mouth, half-open, displayed three teeth of

great whiteness; on his chin the mark of the beard was perfectly

clear; his two hands especially seemed to belong to some one who still

breathed, so quick were they in tone and colouring; one of them, the

left hand, was raised a little higher than the right; his nails had

grown after death: they were long and white; one of his boots had come

unsewn and let through four of his toes of a dull white."

*

What was it that struck the disinterrers? The inanity of earthly

things? Man's vanity? No, the beauty of the dead man; his nails only

had lengthened, to tear, I presume, what remained of liberty in the

world. His feet, restored to humility, no longer rested on crown

cushions; they lay bare in their dust. The son of Condé also was

dressed in the moat at Vincennes; yet Napoleon, so well preserved, had

been reduced to exactly those "three teeth" which the bullets had left

in the jaw of the Duc d'Enghien.

The eclipsed star of St. Helena has reappeared to the great joy of

the peoples: the world has seen Napoleon again; Napoleon has not seen

the world again. The conqueror's vagrant ashes have been looked down

upon by the same stars that guided him to his exile: Bonaparte passed

through the tomb, as he passed through everything, without stopping.

Landed at the Havre, the corpse arrived at the Arc de Triomphe, a

canopy beneath which the sun shows its face on certain days of the

year. From that arch to the Invalides, one saw nothing but wooden

columns, plaster busts, a statue of the Great Condé (a hideous pulp

which ran), deal obelisks commemorative of the victor's indestructible

life. A sharp cold made the generals drop around the funeral car, as

in the retreat from Moscow. Nothing was beautiful, except the mourning

barge which had carried Napoleon in silence on the Seine, and a

crucifix.

Robbed of his catafalque of rocks, Napoleon has come to be buried

in the dirt of Paris. Instead of ships which used to salute the new

Hercules, consumed upon Mount Œta, the washerwomen of Vaugirard will

roam around him with pensioners unknown to the Grande Armée. By way of

prelude to this feebleness, little men were able to imagine nothing

better than an open-air wax-work show. After a few days' rain, nothing

remained of these decorations but squalid odds and ends. Whatever we

may do, the real sepulchre of the triumpher will always be seen in the

midst of the seas: the body is with us, the life immortal at St. Helena.

Napoleon has closed the era of the past: he made war too great for it

to return in a manner to interest mankind. He slammed the doors of the

Temple of Janus violently after him; and behind those doors he heaped

up piles of dead bodies, to prevent them from ever opening again.

*

[Sidenote: A visit to the Golfe Juan.]

In Europe I have been to visit the parts where Bonaparte landed after

breaking his ban at Elba. I alighted at the inn at Cannes[421] at the

very moment when the guns were firing in commemoration of the 29th of

July[422]: one of the results of the Emperor's incursion, doubtless

unforeseen by him. Night had fallen when I arrived at the Golfe Juan; I

got down at a lonely house alongside the high-road. Jacquemin, potter

and inn-keeper, the owner of the house, led me to the sea. We went by

sunk roads between olive-trees under which Bonaparte had bivouacked:

Jacquemin himself had received him and guided me. To the left of the

cross-path stood a sort of covered shed: Napoleon, invading France

alone, had deposited the luggage with which he had landed in that shed.

On reaching the beach, I saw a calm sea wrinkled by not the slightest

breath; the surge, thin as gauze, unrolled itself over the sand

noiselessly and foamlessly. An astonishing sky, all resplendent with

constellations, crowned my head. The crescent of the moon soon sank and

hid itself behind a mountain. In the gulf lay only one bark at anchor,

and two boats: to the left appeared the Antibes light-house, to the

right the Lérins Isles; before me, the main sea opened out to the South

in the direction of Rome, to which Bonaparte had first sent me.

The Lérins Isles, now called the Sainte-Marguerite Isles, of old

received a few Christians fleeing before the Barbarians. St.

Honoratus[423], coming from Hungary, landed on one of those rocks: he

climbed a palm-tree, made the sign of the Cross, and all the serpents

died, that is to say, paganism disappeared and the new civilization was

born in the West.

Fourteen hundred years later, Bonaparte came to end that civilization

in the parts in which the saint had commenced it. The last solitary

of those hermitages was the Man in the Iron Mask, if the Iron Mask is

a reality. From the silence of the Golfe Juan, from the peace of the

islands of the anchorites of old, issued the noise of Waterloo, which

crossed the Atlantic to die out at St Helena.

[Sidenote: In praise of indifference.]

One can imagine what I felt, between the memories of two societies,

between a world extinct and a world ready to become extinct, at night,

on that deserted sea-board. I left the beach in a sort of religious

consternation, leaving the billows to pass and pass again, without

obliterating them, over the traces of Napoleon's last step but one.

At the end of each great epoch of time, one hears some voice, doleful

with regrets of the past, sound the curfew: thus moaned they who saw

vanish Charlemagne, St. Louis, Francis I., Henry IV. and Louis XIV.

What could I not say, in my turn, eye-witness that I am of two or three

lapsed worlds? When one has met, as I have, Washington and Bonaparte,

what remains there to look at behind the plough of the American

Cincinnatus and the tomb at St Helena? Why have I survived the age

and the men to whom I belonged by the date of my birth? Why did I not

fall with my contemporaries, the last of an exhausted race? Why have I

remained alone to seek their bones in the dust and darkness of a full

catacomb? I am disheartened at lasting. Ah, if only I possessed the

indifference of one of those old long-shore Arabs whom I met in Africa!

Seated cross-legged on a little rope mat, their head wrapped in their

burnoose, they while away their last hours in following with their

eyes, in the azure of the sky, the beautiful flamingo flying along the

ruins of Carthage; lulled by the murmuring of the waves, they half

forget their existence and, in a low voice, sing a song of the sea:

they are going to die.

[356] The Empress Joséphine died at the Malmaison on the 29th of May

1814.--B.

[357] 29 June 1815.--B.

[358] Nicolas Léonard Comte Beker (1770-1840), a general of division,

count of the Empire, and grand officer of the Legion of Honour.

He fell out of favour with Napoleon, and was sent in disgrace to

Belle-Isle-en-Mer, where he remained in command till 1814. He was a

member of the Chamber of Representatives during the Hundred Days. Louis

XVIII. raised him to the peerage in 1819.--B.

[359] Louis XVI. purchased Rambouillet from the Penthièvre Family in

1778.--T.

[360] 3 July 1815.--B.

[361] Captain, later Admiral Sir Frederick Lewis Maitland

(1779-1839).--T.

[362] Themistocles (_circa_ 535 B.C.--470 B.C.) took refuge, when

exiled from Athens, first with Admetes King of the Molossians,

and secondly with Artaxerxes I. King of Persia, who showed him a

magnificent hospitality, but wished to make him bear arms against

Greece. Themistocles took poison to avoid being forced to obey.--T.

[363] General Sir Robert Thomas Wilson (1777-1849) accompanied the

Russian army in the campaign of 1812 and took a prominent part in the

fighting. He was appointed Governor of Gibraltar in 1842. Wilson was

one of the three Englishmen instrumental in the escape of the Comte de

Lavallette from Paris in 1816.--T.

[364] Mikhail Kutuzoff, Field-marshal Prince of Smolensk (1745-1813),

commanded the Russian forces at Borodino and Smolensk in 1812.--T.

[365] Admiral George Keith Elphinstone, Viscount Keith (1746-1823),

Commander-in-Chief of the Channel Fleet, was at Plymouth when the

news reached him of Bonaparte's surrender, and was, throughout, the

intermediary between the Government and Napoleon relative to his being

sent to St. Helena.--T.

[366] Tamerlane Khan of Tartary (1336-1405), the famous Oriental

warrior.--T.

[367] Dominique Francois Toussaint-Louverture (1743-1803), a coloured

native of San Domingo, assisted the French to drive out the Spaniards

and English and to repress a rising of mulattoes, and was successively

appointed general of brigade, general of division, and finally

Commander-in-Chief of the armies of San Domingo. But, in 1800, he

proclaimed himself President for life. He refused to recognise General

Leclerc, sent out to restore French authority (1802), but found himself

obliged to capitulate, and was arrested as a conspirator, transported

to France, and imprisoned in the fort of Joux, where he died.--T.

[368] Charles IV. King of Spain (1748-1819) was sent as a prisoner, by

Napoleon, to Compiègne and to Marseilles.--T.

[369] Colonel Sir Hudson Lowe (1770-1844), Napoleon's keeper at St.

Helena. He was promoted on his return, in 1823, and richly rewarded

for his services, but lost the greater portion of his fortune in

speculation.--T.

[370] Charles Tristan Comte de Montholon (1782-1853) remained with

Bonaparte until his death. He published his _Mémoires pour servir_

in collaboration with General Gourgaud, and, in 1840, took part in

Louis-Napoleon's expedition to Boulogne, subsequently sharing his

imprisonment at Ham.--T.

[371] Marie Joseph Emmanuel Auguste Dieudonné Comte de Las Cases

(1766-1842) was expelled by Lowe from St. Helena in 1816 and sent to

the Cape of Good Hope; later he was sent to Europe and detained as

a prisoner. He was permitted to return to France after the death of

Napoleon, and published his famous _Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène_ in

1822-23.--T.

[372] Napoleon was not disarmed. According to M. Thiers, "as he was

crossing from the _Bellerophon_ to the _Northumberland_, Admiral Keith,

with visible pain and in the most respectful tone, addressed these

words to the Emperor:

"'General, England commands me to ask for your sword.'

"To these words Napoleon replied with a look which showed to what

extremities it would be necessary to stoop to disarm him. Lord Keith

did not insist, and Napoleon kept his glorious sword."

This scene is pure fiction; it is even contradicted by the Comte de Las

Cases in his _Mémorial_, where he says:

"I asked if it would be really possible that they should go so far as

to take the Emperor's sword from him. The admiral replied that they

would respect it, but that Napoleon would be the only one, and that all

the rest would be disarmed."

Napoleon therefore kept his sword, and his companions recovered theirs

on their arrival at St. Helena.--B.

[373] The combined Dutch and English fleets defeated the French fleet

off Cape la Hogue on the 29th of May 1692.--T.

[374] The French gained a bloody victory over the Russians at Smolensk

in 1812.--T.

[375] These references, occurring in Books II. and III., form part of

the portion excised from the Memoirs for separate publication.--T.

[376] Caius Asinius Pollio (B.C. 77--A.D. 3): _cf._ the Letters to

Cicero.--T.

[377] Louis XIV. King of France (1638-1715) was 68 years of age at the

date of the Battle of Ramillies.--T.

[378] François de Neufville, Maréchal Duc de Villeroi (1643-1730), was

defeated at Ramillies by the Duke of Marlborough in 1706.--T.

[379] As who, in these days, should say "Tommy."--T.

[380] Elizabeth Patterson (1785-1879) married Jerome Bonaparte, at

Philadelphia, in 1803. He divorced her, in 1807, at Napoleon's bidding,

in order to marry the Princess Catherine of Wurtemberg.--T.

[381] Dumouriez defeated the Austrians at Jemappes on the 6th of

October 1792.--T.

[382] 27 Tune 1794.--T.

[383] April to November 1794.--T.

[384] February 1797.--T.

[385] 25 and 26 September 1799.--T.

[386] 3 December 1800.--T.

[387] João de Nova (_fl._ 1500) was a Spanish navigator in Portuguese

service. He had discovered the island of Concepcion in the previous

year.--T.

[388] St. Helen (_d._ 328), first wife of Constantius I. Chlorus and

mother of Constantine. Her husband repudiated her when he was created

Emperor, to marry the daughter of Maximian. When Constantine became

Emperor, he gave his mother the title of Empress, and she embraced

Christianity with her son. St. Helen visited Jerusalem in 325, built a

church on Mount Calvary, and discovered the remains of the True Cross

in 326.--T.

[389] Constantine I. the Great (274-337) became Emperor in 306 and

embraced Christianity in 312.--T.

[390] Baron Friedrich Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), the

Prussian explorer, author of several geographical works including the

_Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du nouveau continent_ (Paris, 1799 _et

seq._), from which the above extract is taken.--T.

[391]

Io mi volsi a man destra, e posi mente

All'astro polo, e vidi quattro stelle

Non viste mai fuor ch'alla prima gente.

(_Il Purgatorio_, I. 22-24).--B.

[392] St Napoleon (_fl._ 13th century), of Rome, canonized by Pope

Pius VII. to be honoured on the 15th of August, the date of Napoleon

Bonaparte's birthday in 1769.--T.

[393] Admiral Sir George Cockburn (1772-1853) conveyed Bonaparte to

St. Helena on board the _Northumberland_ and remained at St. Helena as

Governor from October 1815 to the summer of 1816.--T.

[394] M. Muiron (_d._ 1796).--B.

[395] The French commissary was the Marquis de Montchenu; the Austrian,

Baron von Stürmer; the Russian, the Comte de Balmaine.--B.

[396] Jean Baptiste Isabey (1764-1855), a pupil of David, and a famous

miniature painter. He was successively appointed first painter to the

Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory, Court Painter to the Emperor and, later,

to King Louis XVIII., Organizer of Court Festivities, and Assistant

Keeper of the Royal Museums (1827). Isabey painted the portraits in

miniature of all the principal persons in Europe, from Napoleon to

Alexander.--T.

[397] William Pitt second Lord, later first Earl Amherst (1773-1857)

was sent, in 1816, as Ambassador to China, where he met with but small

success. Lord Amherst was appointed Governor-General of India in

1823.--T.

[398] Admiral Sir Pulteney Malcolm (1768-1838), Commander-in-Chief of

the St. Helena Station in 1816 and 1817.--T.

[399] Captain Basil Hall (1788-1844), author of a number of volumes

of Voyages, the best-known of which was published in 1815, after his

return from St. Helena, entitled, _An Account of a Voyage of Discovery

to the West Coast of Corea and the great Loo-Choo Islands._--B.

[400] The explosion, directed against Bonaparte while First Consul,

took place on the 24th of December 1800, in the Rue Saint-Nicaise in

Paris, a few moments after the Consul had passed by. Eight persons were

killed and twenty-eight grievously wounded.--T.

[401] Jean Antoine Rossignol (1759-1802), a famous and shifty

demagogue, had been General Commanding-in-Chief in the Vendée of the

army known as that of the Côtes de La Rochelle. He displayed the

grossest incapacity and was guilty of the greatest atrocities. He had

been constantly imprisoned by various governments or parties, and,

after the explosion of the infernal machine, was transported to the

Island of Anjuan or Johanna, in the Comores, where he died on the 28th

of April 1802.--T.

[402] _Cf._ VICTOR BARRUCAND, _La Vie véritable de Jean Rossignol_

(Paris, 1896).--B.

[403] Alessandro Conte Manzoni (1784-1873), the Italian poet, from

whose ode, _Il Cinque Maggio_, the above lines are taken.--T.

[404] Melchiore Cesarotti (1730-1808), professor of Greek and Hebrew

at the University of Padua, had received many kindnesses at Napoleon's

hands. He published valuable translations in Italian of Ossian,

Demosthenes and Homer, in addition to several original works on

literature and philosophy.--T.

[405] LU. IV, 5-12.--T.

[406] 27 November 1816.--B.

[407] Henry Richard Vassall Fox, third Lord Holland (1773-1840), nephew

and follower of Charles James Fox, and noted for his generous conduct

towards France.--T.

[408] Henry third Earl Bathurst (1762-1834), Secretary for War and the

Colonies in Lord Liverpool's Ministry.--T.

[409] The Abbé Buonavita and the Abbé Vignale. They arrived at St.

Helena on the 20th of September 1819.--B.

[410] Thomas Johnson (1772-1839), alternately a smuggler and a pilot

to the Royal Navy, twice broke jail and ended as the recipient of a

pension of £100 a year.--T.

[411] Francesco Antomarchi (1780-1830), a native of Corsica, was a

professor of anatomy at Florence, when Cardinal Fesch selected him to

go to St. Helena to attend Napoleon, from whose side Dr. O'Meara had

been removed. He arrived in the same ship as the Abbés Buonavita and

Vignale and remained with the Emperor till his death.--B.

[412] At the Malmaison.--_Author's Note._

[413] _Ps._ LXXXVII. 16, 17.--T.

[414] _Machab._ I. 10.--T.

[415] On the death of Ferdinand VII., in 1833, the crown was usurped

on behalf of Isabella II., to the prejudice of Charles V., the _de

jure_ King, with the Dowager Queen Christina as Regent. The latter

was forced, in 1840, to abdicate the Regency in favour of General

Espartero, the revolutionary leader, who remained in power until

1843.--T.

[416] EZE. 37, 4-5.--T.

[417] _Conservateur_, 17 November 1818 (vol. I. p. 333).--B.

[418] MONTHOLON: _Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de France sous

Napoléon_, vol. IV. p. 243.--_Author's Note._

[419] François Ferdinand Philippe Louis Marie Prince de Joinville

(1818-1900), fourth son of Louis Philippe, commanded the frigate

_Belle-Poule_ sent to convey Napoleon's remains to France in 1840.--T.

[420] The Abbé Félix Coquereau (1808-1866) was chaplain of the frigate

_Belle-Poule_, and author of _Souvenirs de Sainte-Hélène_ from which

the above quotation is taken. In 1850, Louis Napoleon appointed him

Chaplain-in-Chief to the fleet.--B.

[421] Chateaubriand visited Cannes and the Golfe Juan in the month of

July 1838.--B.

[422] The 29th of July 1830 was the date of the abdication of Charles

X., the last reigning sovereign of the Elder Branch of the House of

Bourbon.--T.

[423] St. Honoratus, Bishop of Arles (_d._ 429) founded the monastery

of Lerins, _circa_ 400. He is honoured on the 16th of January.--T.

END OF VOL. III.