Chapter V: Part 5

The stone re-formed, but not in the bladder. Once you have a uric acid calculus you can never be quite sure you have done with it until you are dead, and in the case of Mr. Pepys recurrence took place in the kidney. When he died, an old man, in 1703, they performed a post-mortem examination on his body, suspecting that his kidneys were at fault, and in the left kidney found a nest of no less than seven stones, which must have been silently growing in the calyces for unnumbered years. Nor does it seem to me impossible that his extraordinary incontinence--he never seems to have been able to resist any feminine allurement, however coarse--may really have been due to the continued irritation of the old scar in his perineum. There is often a physical condition as the basis for this type of character, and some trifling irritation may make all the difference between virtue and concupiscence. This reasoning is probably more likely to be true than much of the psycho-analysis which is at present so fashionable among young ladies. Possibly also the sterility of Mrs. Pepys may have been partly due to the effects of the operation upon her husband.

One unpleasant result to Mr. Pepys was the fact that whenever he crossed his legs carelessly he became afflicted with a mild epididymitis--he describes it much less politely himself, doubtless in wrath. His little failing in this respect must have been a source of innocent merriment to the many friends who were in the secret. He was also troubled with attacks of severe pain whenever the weather turned suddenly cold. At first he used to be in terror lest his old enemy had returned, but he learned to regard the attacks philosophically as part of the common heritage of mankind, for man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward. Probably they were due to reflex irritation from the stones growing in the kidney. He does not seem to have passed any small stones per urethram, or he would assuredly have told us. He took great interest in his own emunctories--probably other people’s, too, from certain dark sayings.

Considering the by no means holy living of Mr. Pepys, it is rather remarkable that he never seems to have suffered from venereal disease, and this leads me to suspect that possibly these ailments were not so common in the England of the Restoration as they are to-day. It seems impossible that any man could live in Sydney so promiscuously as Mr. Pepys without paying the penalty; and the experience of our army in London seems to show that things there must be much the same as here (Sydney). I often wonder whether Charles II and his courtiers were really representative of the great mass of people in England at that time; probably the prevalence of venereal disease in modern times is due to the enormous increase in city life; probably men and women have always been very much the same from generation to generation--inflammable as straw, given the opportunities which occur mainly in cities and crowded houses.

Ignoble as was Pepys, he yet showed real moral courage during the Plague. When that great enemy of cities attacked London he, very wisely, sent his family into the country at Woolwich, while he remained faithful to his duty and continued to work at the navy in Greenwich, Deptford, and London. I cannot find in the Diary any mention of any particular attraction that kept him in London during those awful five months; he would, no doubt, have mentioned her name if there had been such; yet candour compels me to observe that there was seldom any one attraction for Mr. Pepys, unless poor Deb Willet may have somehow mastered--temporarily--his wayward heart. But, as might have been expected, he was little more virtuous during his wife’s absence than before; indeed, possibly the imminent danger of death may have led him to enjoy his life while yet he might, with his usual fits of agonized remorse, whose effects upon his conduct were brief. We owe far more to his organizing power and honesty--not a bigoted variety--than is generally remembered. His babble is not the best medium for vigorous description, and you will not get from Pepys any idea of the epidemic comparable with that which you will get from the journalist Defoe; yet through those months there lurks a feeling of horror which still impresses mankind. The momentary glimpse of a citizen who stumbles over the “corps” of a man dead of the plague, and running home tells his pregnant wife; she dies of fear forthwith; a man, his wife, and three children dying and being buried on one day; persons quick to-day and dead to-morrow--not in scores, but in hundreds; ten thousand dying in a week; the horrid atmosphere of fear and suspicion which overlay London; and Pepys himself setting his papers in order, so that men might think well of him should it please the Lord to take him suddenly: all give us a sense of doom all the more poignant because recently we went through a much milder version of the same experience ourselves. The papers talked glibly of the influenza as “The Plague.” How different it was from the real bubonic plague is shown by the statistics. In five months of 1665 there died of the plague in the little London of that day no less than about 70,000 people, according to the bills of mortality; in truth, probably far more; that is to say, probably a fifth of the people perished. There is no doubt that the bubonic plague kept back the development of cities, and therefore of civilization, for centuries, and that the partial conquest of the rat has been one of the greatest achievements of the human race. What is happening in Lord Howe Island, where it is exceedingly doubtful whether rats or men shall survive in that beautiful speck of land, shows how slender is the hold which mankind has upon the earth; and wherever the rat is able to breed unchecked, man is liable to sink back into savagery. The rat, the tubercle bacillus, and the bacillus of typhoid are the three great enemies of civilization; we hold our position against them at the price of eternal vigilance, and probably the rat is not the least deadly of these enemies.

I need not go through the Diary in search of incidents; most of them, while intensely amusing, are rather of interest to the psychologist in the study of self-revelation than to the medical man. When Pepys’s brother lay dying the doctor in charge hinted that possibly the trouble might have been of syphilitic origin; Pepys was virtuously wrathful, and the unhappy doctor had to apologize and was forthwith discharged. I cannot here narrate how they proved that the unhappy patient had never had syphilis in his life; you must read the Diary for that. Their method would not have satisfied either Wassermann or Bordet. Another time Pepys was doing something that he should not have been doing at an open window in a draught; the Lord punished him by striking him with Bell’s palsy. Still again, at another time he got something that seems to have resembled pseudo-ileus, possibly reflex from his latent calculi. Everybody in the street was much distressed at his anguish; all the ladies sent in prescriptions for enemata; the one which relieved him consisted of small beer! Indeed, one marvels always at the extraordinary interest shown by Pepys’s lady-friends in his most private ailments. London must have been a friendly little town in the seventeenth century, in the intervals of hanging people and chopping off heads.

But the great problem remains: Why did Pepys write down all these intimate details of his private life? Why did he confess to things which most men do not confess even to themselves? Why did he write it all down in cypher? Why, when he narrated something particularly disgraceful, did he write in a mongrel dialect of bad French, Italian, Spanish, and Latin? He could not have seriously believed that a person who was able to read the Diary would not be able to read the very simple foreign words with which it is interspersed. Most amazing of all: Why did he keep the manuscript for more than thirty years, a key with it? One thinks of the fabled ostrich who buries his head in the sand. The problem of Pepys still remains unsolved, in spite of the efforts of Stevenson in _Familiar Studies of Men and Books_. Stevenson was the last man in the world to understand Pepys, but more competent exegetists have tried and failed. One can only say that his failing sight--which Professor Osborne of Melbourne attributes to astigmatism--has deprived the world of a treasure that can never be sufficiently regretted. No man can be considered educated who has not read at least part of the Diary; in no other way is it possible to get so vivid a picture of the ordinary people of a past age; as we read they seem to live before us, and it comes as a shock to remember that poor Pall Pepys--his plain sister--and “my wife” and Mrs. Batelier--“my pretty valentine”--and Sir William Coventry and Mercer, and the hundreds more who pass so vividly before us, are all dead these centuries.

If this little paper shall send some to the reading of this most extraordinary book, I shall be more than satisfied. The only edition which is worth while is Wheatley’s, in ten volumes, with portraits and a volume of _Pepysiana_. The smaller editions are apt to transmute Pepys into an ordinary humdrum and industrious civil servant.

Edward Gibbon

For many years it has been taught--I have taught it myself to generations of students--that Gibbon’s hydrocele surpassed in greatness all other hydroceles, that it contained twelve pints of fluid, and that it was, in short, one of those monstrous things which exist mainly in romance; one of those chimeras which grow in the minds of the half-informed and of those who wish to be deceived. For a brief moment this chimera looms its huge bulk over serious history; it is pricked; it disappears for ever, carrying with it into the shades the greatest of historians, perhaps the greatest of English prose writers. What do we really know about it?

The first hint of trouble given by the hydrocele occurs in a letter by Gibbon to his friend Lord Sheffield. It is so delicious, so typical of the eighteenth century, of which Gibbon himself was probably the most typical representative, that I cannot resist re-telling it. Two days before, he has hinted to his friend that he was rather unwell; now he modestly draws the veil. “Have you never observed, through my inexpressibles, a large prominency _circa genitalia_, which, as it was not very painful and very little troublesome, I had strangely neglected for many years?” “A large prominency _circa genitalia_” is a variation on the “lump in me privits, doctor,” to which we are more accustomed. Gibbon’s is the more graceful, and reminds us of the mind which had described chivalry as the “worship of God and the ladies”; the courteous and urbane turn of speech which refuses to call a spade a spade lest some polite ear may be offended.

Gibbon had been staying at Sheffield House in the preceding June--the letter was written in November--and his friends all noted that “Mr. G.” had become strangely loath to take exercise and very inert in his movements. Indeed, he had detained the house-party in the house during lovely days together while he had orated to them on the folly of unnecessary exertion; and such was his charm that every one, both women as well as men, seems to have cheerfully given up the glorious English June weather to keep him company. Never was he more brilliant--never a more delightful companion; yet all the time he was like the Spartan boy and the wolf, for he knew of his secret trouble, yet he thought that no one else suspected. It is an instance of how little we see ourselves as others see us that this supremely able man, who could see as far into a millstone as anyone, lived for years with a hydrocele that reached below his knees while he wore the tight breeches of the eighteenth century and was in the fond delusion that nobody else knew anything about it. Of course, everybody knew; probably it had been the cause of secret merriment among all his acquaintance; when the tragedy came to its last act it turned out that every one had been talking about it all the time, and that they had thought it to be a rupture about which Mr. Gibbon had of course taken advice.

After leaving Sheffield House the hydrocele suddenly increased, as Gibbon himself says, “most stupendously”; and it began to dawn upon him that it “ought to be diminished.” So he called upon Dr. Walter Farquhar; and Dr. Farquhar was very serious and called in Dr. Cline, “a surgeon of the first eminence,” both of whom “viewed it and palped it” and pronounced it a hydrocele. Mr. Gibbon, with his usual good sense and calm mind, prepared to face the necessary “operation” and a future prospect of wearing a truss which Dr. Cline intended to order for him. In the meantime he was to crawl about with some labour and “much indecency,” and he prayed Lord Sheffield to “varnish the business to the ladies, yet I am much afraid it will become public,” as if anything could any longer conceal the existence of this monstrous chimera. It is hardly credible, but Gibbon had had the hydrocele since 1761--thirty-two years--yet had never even hinted of it to Lord Sheffield, with whom he had probably discussed every other fact connected with his life; and had even forbidden his valet to mention it in his presence or to anyone else. Gibbon, the historian who, more than any other, set Reason and Common Sense on their thrones, seems to have been ashamed of his hydrocele. Once more we wonder how little even able men may perceive the truth of things! In 1761 he had consulted Cæsar Hawkins, who apparently had not been able to make up his mind whether it was a hernia or a hydrocele. In 1787 Lord Sheffield had noticed a sudden great increase in the size of the thing; and in 1793, as we have seen, it came to tragedy.

He was tapped for the hydrocele on November 14; four quarts of fluid were removed, the swelling was diminished to nearly half its size, and the remaining part was a “soft irregular mass.” Evidently there was more there than a simple hydrocele, and straightway it began to refill so rapidly that they had to agree to re-tap it in a fortnight. Mr. Cline must have felt anxious; he would know “how many beans make five” well enough, and his patient was the most distinguished man in the world. Many students who have at examinations in clinical surgery wrestled with Cline’s splint will probably consider that Cline’s punishment for inventing that weapon really began on the day when he perceived Gibbon’s hydrocele to be rapidly re-filling. The fortnight passed, and the second tapping took place, “much longer, more searching, and more painful” than before, though only three quarts of fluid were removed; yet Mr. Gibbon said he was much more relieved than by the first attempt. Thence he went to stay with Lord Auckland at a place called Eden Farm; thence again to Sheffield House. There, in the dear house which to him was a home, he was more brilliant than ever before. It was his “swan song.” A few days later he was in great pain and moved with difficulty, the swelling again increased enormously, inflammation set in, and he became fevered, and his friends insisted on his return to London. He returned in January, 1794, reaching his chambers after a night of agony in the coach; and Cline again tapped him on January 13. By this time the tumour was enormous, ulcerated and inflamed, and Cline got away six quarts. On January 15 he felt fairly well except for an occasional pain in his stomach, and he told some of his friends that he thought he might probably live for twenty years. That night he had great pain, and got his valet to apply hot napkins to his abdomen; he felt that he wished to vomit. At four in the morning his pain became much easier, and at eight he was able to rise unaided; but by nine he was glad to get back into bed, although he felt, as he said, _plus adroit_ than he had felt for months. By eleven he was speechless and obviously dying, and by 1 p.m. he was dead.

I believe that the key to this extraordinary and confused narrative is to be found in the visit to Cæsar Hawkins thirty years before, when that competent surgeon was unable to satisfy himself as to whether he was dealing with a rupture or a hydrocele. It seems now clear that in reality it was both; and Gibbon, who was a corpulent man with a pendulous abdomen, lived for thirty years without taking care of it. But he lived very quietly; he took no exercise; he was a man of calm, placid, and unruffled mind; probably no man was less likely to be incommoded by a hernia, especially if the sac had a large wide mouth and the contents were mainly fat. But the time came when the intra-abdominal pressure of the growing omentum became too great, and the swelling enormously increased, first in 1787 and again in 1793. When Cline first tapped the swelling he was obviously aware that there was more present than a hydrocele, because he warned Gibbon that he would have to wear a truss afterwards, and moreover, though he removed four quarts of fluid, yet the swelling was only reduced by a half. Probably the soft irregular mass which he then left behind was simply omentum which had come down from the abdomen. But why did the swelling begin to grow again immediately? That is not the usual way with a hydrocele, whose growth and everything connected with it are usually indolently leisurely. Could there have been a malignant tumour in course of formation? But if so, would not that have caused more trouble? Nor would it have given the impression of being a soft irregular mass. However, the second tapping was longer and more painful than the first, though it removed less fluid; and Gibbon was more relieved. But this tapping was followed by inflammation. What had happened? Possibly Cline had found the epididymis; more probably his trochar was septic, like all other instruments of that pre-antiseptic period; at all events, the thing went from bad to worse, grew enormously, and severe constitutional symptoms set in. The ulceration and redness of the skin, which was no doubt filthy enough--surgically speaking--after thirty years of hydrocele, look uncommonly like suppurative epididymitis, or suppuration in the hydrocele. Thus Gibbon goes on for a few days, able to move about, though with difficulty, till he cheers up and seems to be recovering; then falls the axe, and he dies a few hours after saying that he thought he had a good chance of living for twenty years.

Could the great septic hydrocele, connected with the abdomen through the inguinal ring, have suddenly burst its bonds and flooded the peritoneum with streptococci? Streptococcic peritonitis is one of the most appalling diseases in surgery. Its symptoms to begin with are vague, and it spreads with the rapidity of a grass fire in summer. After an abdominal section the patient suddenly feels exceedingly weak, there is a little lazy vomiting, the abdomen becomes distended, the pulse goes to pieces in a few hours, and death occurs rapidly while the mind is yet clear. The surgeon usually calls it “shock,” or thinks in his own heart that his assistant is a careless fellow; but the real truth is that streptococci have somehow been introduced into the abdomen and have slain the patient without giving time for the formation of adhesions whereby they might have been shut off and ultimately destroyed. That is what I believe happened to Edward Gibbon.

The loss to literature through this untimely tragedy was, of course, irreparable. Gibbon had taken twenty years to mature his unrivalled literary art. His style was the result of unremitting labour and exquisite literary taste; if one accustoms oneself to the constant antitheses--which occasionally give the impression of being forced almost more for the sake of dramatic emphasis than truth--one must be struck with the unvarying majesty and haunting music of the diction, illumined by an irony so sly, so subtle--possibly a trifle malicious--that one simmers with joyous appreciation in the reading. That sort of irony is more appreciated by the onlookers than by its victims, and it is not to be marvelled at that religious people felt deeply aggrieved for many years at the application of it to the Early Christians. Yet, after all, what Gibbon did was nothing more than to show them as men like others; he merely showed that the evidence concerning the beginnings of Christendom was less reliable than the Church had supposed. The _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ shows the history of the world for more than a thousand years, so vividly, so dramatically, that the characters--who are great nations--move on the stage like actors, and the men who led them live in a remarkable flood of living light. The general effect upon the reader is as if he were comfortably seated in a moving balloon traversing over Time as over continents; as if he were seated in Mr. Wells’s “Time Machine,” viewing the disordered beginnings of modern civilization. I believe that no serious flaw in Gibbon’s history has been found, from the point of view of accuracy. Some people have found it too much a _chronique scandaleuse_, and some modern historians appear to consider that history should be written in a dull and pedantic style rather than be made to live; furthermore, the great advance in knowledge of the Slavonic peoples has tended to modify some of his conclusions. Nevertheless, Gibbon remains, and so far as we can see, will ever remain, the greatest of historians. Though we might not have had another _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, yet we might reasonably have looked for the completion of that autobiography which had such a brilliant beginning. What would we not give if that cool and appraising mind, which had raised Justinian and Belisarius from the dead and caused them to live again in the hearts of mankind, could have given its impressions of the momentous period in which it came to maturity? If, instead of England receiving its strongest impression of the French Revolution from Carlyle--whose powers of declamation were more potent than his sense of truth--it had been swayed from the beginning by Gibbon? In such a case the history of modern England--possibly of modern Russia--might have been widely different from what we have already seen.

Jean Paul Marat

It has always been the pride of the medical profession that its aim is to benefit mankind; but opinions may differ as to how far this aim was fulfilled by one of our most eminent confrères, Jean Paul Marat. He was born in Neufchatel of a marriage between a Sardinian man and a Swiss woman, and studied medicine at Bordeaux; thence, after a time at Paris, he went to London, and for some years practised there. In London he published _A Philosophical Essay on Man_, wherein he showed enormous knowledge of the English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish philosophers; and advanced the thesis that a knowledge of science was necessary for eminence as a philosopher. By this essay he fell foul of Voltaire, who answered him tartly that nobody objected to his opinions, but that at least he might learn to express them more politely, especially when dealing with men of greater brains than his own.

The French Revolution was threatening; the coming storm was already thundering, when, in 1788, Marat’s ill-balanced mind led him to abandon medicine and take to politics. He returned to Paris, beginning the newspaper _L’Ami du Peuple_, which he continued to edit till late in 1792. His policy was simple, and touched the great heart of the people. “Whatsoever things were pure, whatsoever things were of good repute, whatsoever things were honest”--so be it that they were not Jean Paul Marat’s, those things he vilified. He suspected everybody, and constantly cried, “Nous sommes trahis”--that battle-cry of Marat which remained the battle-cry of Paris from that day to 1914. By his violent attacks on every one he made Paris too hot to hold him, and once again retired to London. Later he returned to Paris, apparently at the request of men who desired to use his literary skill and violent doctrines; he had to hide in cellars and sewers, where it was said he contracted that loathsome skin disease which was henceforth to make his life intolerable, and to force him to spend much of his time in a hot-water bath, and would have shortly killed him only for the intervention of Charlotte Corday. In these haunts he was attended only by Simonne Everard, whose loyalty goes to show either that there was some good even in Marat, or that there is no man so frightful but that some woman may be found to love him. Finally, he was elected to the Convention, and took his seat. There he continued his violent attacks upon everybody, urging that the “gangrene” of the aristocracy and bourgeoisie should be amputated from the State. His ideas of political economy appear to have foreshadowed those of Karl Marx--that the proletariat should possess everything, and that nobody else should possess anything. Daily increasing numbers of heads should fall in the sacred names of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality. At first a mere 600 would have satisfied him, but the number rapidly increased, first to 10,000, then to 260,000. To this number he appeared faithful, for he seldom exceeded it; his most glorious vision was only of killing 300,000 daily.

He devoted his energies to attacking those who appeared abler and better than himself, and the most prominent object of his hatred was the party of the Girondins. These were so called because most of them came from the Gironde, and they are best described as people who wished that France should be governed by a sane and moderate democracy, such as they wrongly imagined the Roman Republic to have been. They were gentle and clever visionaries, who dreamed dreams; they advised, but did not dare to perform; the most famous names which have survived are those of Brissot, Roland, and Barbaroux. Madame Roland, who has become of legendary fame, was considered their “soul”; concerning her, shouts Carlyle: “Radiant with enthusiasm are those dark eyes, is that strong Minerva-face, looking dignity and earnest joy; joyfullest she where all are joyful. Reader, mark that queen-like burgher-woman; beautiful, Amazonian-graceful to the eye; more so to the mind. Unconscious of her worth (as all worth is), of her greatness, of her crystal-clearness, genuine, the creature of Sincerity and Nature, in an age of Artificiality, Pollution and Cant”--and so forth. But Carlyle was writing prose-poetry, sacrificing truth to effect, and it is unwise to take his poetical descriptions as accurate. Recent researches have shown that possibly Manon Roland was not so pure, honest, and well-intentioned as Carlyle thought--nor so “crystal-clear.” Summed up, the Girondins represented the middle classes, and the battle was now set between them and the “unwashed,” led by Robespierre, Danton, and Marat.

What manner of man, then, was this Marat, physically? Extraordinary! Semi-human from most accounts. Says Carlyle: “O Marat, thou remarkablest horse-leech, once in d’Artois’ stable, as thy bleared soul looks forth through thy bleared, dull-acrid, woe-stricken face, what seest thou in all this?” Again: “One most squalidest bleared mortal, redolent of soot and horse-drugs.” There appears to have been a certain amount of foundation for the lie that Marat had been nothing more than a horse-doctor, for once when he was brevet-surgeon to the bodyguard of the Compte d’Artois he had found that he could not make a living, and had been driven to dispense medicines for men and horses; his enemies afterwards said that he had never been anything more than a horse-leech. Let us not deprive our own profession of one of its ornaments. His admirer Panis said that while Marat was hiding in the cellars, “he remained for six weeks on one buttock in a dungeon”; immediately, therefore, he was likened to St. Simeon Stylites, who, outside Antioch, built himself a high column, repaired him to the top, and stood there bowing and glorifying God for thirty years, until he became covered with sores. Dr. Moore gives the best description of him. “Marat is a little man of a cadaverous complexion, and countenance exceedingly expressive of his disposition; to a painter of massacres Marat’s head would be invaluable. Such heads are rare in this country (England), yet they are sometimes to be met with in the Old Bailey.” Marat’s head was enormous; he was less than five feet high, with shrivelled limbs and yellow face; one eye was higher placed than the other, “so that he looked lop-sided.” As for his skin disease, modern writers seem to consider that we should nowadays call it “dermatitis herpetiformis,” though his political friends artlessly thought it was due to the humours generated by excessive patriotism in so small a body attacking his skin, and thus should be counted for a virtue. Carlyle hints that it was syphilis, thus following in the easy track of those who attribute to syphilis those things which they cannot understand. But syphilis, even if painful, would not have been relieved by sitting for hours daily in a hot bath.

Mentally he appears to have been a paranoiac, to quote a recent historical diagnosis by Dr. Charles W. Burr, of Philadelphia. Marat suffered for many years from delusions of persecution, which some people appear to take at their face value; the _New Age Encyclopedia_ specially remarks on the amount of persecution that he endured--probably all delusional, unless we are to consider the natural efforts of people in self-defence to be persecution. He suffered from tremendous and persistent “ego-mania,” and appears to have believed that he had a greater intellect than Voltaire. Marat, whom the mass of mankind regarded with horror, fancied himself a popular physician, whom crowds would have consulted but for the unreasonable and successful hatred of his enemies. Possibly failure at his profession, combined with the unspeakable irritation of his disease, may have embittered his mind, and for the last few months of his life there can be little doubt that Marat was insane.

It seems to be certain that he organized, if he did not originate, the frightful September massacres. There were many hundreds of Royalists in the prisons, who were becoming a nuisance. The Revolution was hanging fire, and well-meaning enthusiasts began to fear that the dull clod of a populace would not rise in its might to end the aristocracy; so it was decided to abolish these unfortunate prisoners. A tribunal was formed to sit in judgment; outside waited a great crowd of murderers hired for the occasion. The prisoners were led before the tribunal, and released into the street, where they were received by the murderers and were duly “released”--from this sorrowful world. The most famous victim was the good and gentle Princess de Lamballe, Superintendent of the Queen’s Household. The judge at her trial was the notorious Hébert, anarchist, atheist, and savage, afterwards executed by his friend Robespierre when he had served his turn. Madame collapsed with terror, and fainted repeatedly during the mockery of a trial, but when Hébert said the usual ironical, “Let Madame be released,” she walked to the door. When she saw the murderers with their bloody swords she shrank back and shrieked, “Fi--horreur.” They cut her in pieces; but decency forbids that I should say what they did with all the pieces. Carlyle, who here speaks truth, has a dark saying about “obscene horrors with moustachio _grands-levres_,” which is near enough for anatomists to understand. The murderers then stuck her head on a pike, and held her fair curls before the Queen’s window as an oriflamme in the name of Liberty. Madame was but one of 1,100 whose insane butchery must be laid to the door of Marat; though some friends of the Bolsheviks endeavour to acquit him we can only say that if it was not his work it looks uncommonly like it.

The battle between the Girondins, who were bad fellows, but less bad than their enemies of the “Mountain”--Robespierre, Danton, and Marat--continued; it was a case of _arcades ambo_, which Bryon translates “blackguards both,” though Virgil, who wrote the line--in the Georgics--probably meant something much coarser. The “Mountain” began to get the upper hand, and the Girondins fled for their lives, or went to the guillotine. The Revolution was already “devouring its children.”

At Caen in Normandy there lived a young woman, daughter of a decayed noble family which in happier days had been named d’Armont, now Corday. Her name was Marie Charlotte d’Armont, and she is known to history as Charlotte Corday. She had been well educated, had read Rousseau, Voltaire, and the encyclopædists, besides being fascinated by a dream of an imaginary State which she had been taught to call the Roman Republic, in which the “tyrannicide” Brutus loomed much larger and more glorious than in reality. Some Girondists fled to Caen to escape the vengeance of Marat; Charlotte, horrified, resolved that the monster should die; she herself was then nearly twenty-five years of age. I have a picture of her which seems to fit in very well with one’s preconceived ideas of her character. She was five feet one inch in height, with a well-proportioned figure, and she had a wonderful mass of chestnut hair; her eyes were large, grey, and set widely apart; the general expression of her face was thoughtful and earnest. Perhaps it would hardly be respectful to call her an “intense” young lady; but there was a young lady who sometimes used to consult me who might very well have sat for the portrait; she possessed a type of somewhat--dare I say?--priggish neurosis which I imagine was not unlike the type of character that dwelt within Charlotte Corday--extreme conscientiousness and self-righteousness. Such a face might have been the face of a Christian martyr going to the lions--if any Christian martyrs were ever thrown to the lions, which some doubt. She went silently to Paris, attended only by an aged man-servant, and bought a long knife in the Palais Royal; thence she went to Marat’s house, and tried to procure admission. Simonne--the loyal Simonne--denied her, and she returned to her inn. Again she called at the house; Marat heard her pretty voice, and ordered Simonne to admit her. It was the evening of July 13, four years all but one day since the storming of the Bastille, and Marat sat in his slipper-bath, pens, ink, and paper before him, frightful head peering out of the opening, hot compresses concealing his hair. Charlotte told him that there were several Girondists hiding at Caen and plotting against the Revolution. “Their heads shall fall within a fortnight,” croaked Marat. Then, he being thus convicted out of his own mouth, she drew forth from her bosom her long knife, and plunged it into his chest between the first and second ribs, so that it pierced the aorta. Marat gave one cry, and died; Charlotte turned to face the two women who rushed in, but not yet was she to surrender, for she barricaded herself behind some furniture and other movables till the soldiers arrived. To them she gave herself up without trouble.

At her trial she made no denial, but proudly confessed, saying, “Yes, I killed him.” Fouquier-Tinville sneered at her: “You must be well practised at this sort of crime!” She only answered: “The monster!--he seems to think I am an assassin!” She thought herself rather the agent of God, sent by Him to rid the world of a loathsome disorder, as Brutus had rid Rome of Julius Cæsar.

In due course she was guillotined, and an extraordinary thing happened. A young German named Adam Lux had been present at the trial, standing behind the artist who was painting the very picture of which I have a reproduction--it is said that Charlotte showed no objection to being portrayed--and the young man had been fascinated by the martyresque air of her. He attended the execution, romance and grief weighing him down; then he ran home, and wrote a furious onslaught on the leaders of the Mountain who had executed her, saying that her death had “sanctified the guillotine,” and that it had become “a sacred altar from which every taint had been removed by her innocent blood.” He published this broadcast, and was naturally at once arrested. The revolutionary tribunal sentenced him to death, and he scornfully refused to accept a pardon, saying that he wished to die on the same spot as Charlotte, so they let him have his wish. The incident reminds one of a picture-show, and it is not remarkable that an American, named Lyndsay Orr, has written a sentimental article about it.

The people of Paris went mad after Marat’s death; his body, which was said to be decaying with unusual rapidity, was surrounded by a great crowd which worshipped it blasphemously, saying, “O Sacred Heart of Marat!” This worship of Marat, which showed how deeply his teaching had bitten into the hearts of the people, culminated in the Reign of Terror, which began on September 5, 1795, whereby France lost, according to different estimates, between half a million and a million innocent people. Some superior persons seem to think that Marat had little or no influence on the Revolution, but to my mind there can be no doubt that the Terror was largely the result of his preaching of frantic violence, and it is a lesson that we ourselves should take to heart, seeing that there are persons in the world to-day who would emulate Marat if they possessed his enormous courage.

I need not narrate the history of the Reign of Terror, which was even worse than the terror which the Bolsheviks established in Russia. Not even Lenin and Trotsky devised anything so atrocious as the _noyades_--wholesale drownings--in the Loire, or the _mariages républicains_ on the banks of that river, and it is difficult to believe that the teaching of Marat had nothing to do with that frightful outbreak of bestiality, lust, and murder.

The evil that men do lives after them. There was little good to be buried in Marat’s grave, doctor though he was.

Napoleon I

There is not, and may possibly never be, an adequate biography of this prodigious man. It is a truism to say that he has cast a doubt on all past glory; let us hope that he has rendered future glory impossible, for to judge by the late war it seems impossible that any rival to the glory of Napoleon can ever arise. In the matter of slaying his fellow-creatures he appears to have reached the summit of human achievement; possibly also in all matters of organization and administration. Material things hardly seemed to affect him; bestriding the world like a colossus he has given us a sublime instance of Intellect that for many years ruthlessly overmastered Circumstance. That Intellect was finally itself mastered by disease, leaving behind it a record which is of supreme interest to mankind; a record which, alas, is so disfigured by prejudice and falsehood that it is difficult to distinguish between what is true and what is untrue. Napoleon himself possessed so extraordinary a personality that nearly every one whom he met became a fervent adorer. With regard to him we can find no half-tones, no detached reporters; therefore it is enormously difficult to find even the basis for a biography. Fortunately, that is not now our province. It is merely necessary that we shall attempt to make a consistent story of the reports of illness which perplex us in regard to his life and death; it adds interest to the quest when we are told that sometimes disease lent its aid to Fate in swaying the destinies of battles. And yet, even after Napoleon has lived, there are some historians who deny the influence of a “great man” upon history, and would attribute to “tendencies” and “ideas” events which ordinary people would attribute to individual genius. Some persons think that Napoleon was merely an episode--that he had no real influence upon history; it is the custom to point to his career as an exemplification of the thesis that war has played very little real part in the moulding of the course of the world. Into all this we need not now enter, beyond saying that he was the “child of the French Revolution” who killed his own spiritual father; the reaction from Napoleon was Metternich, Castlereagh, and the Holy Alliance; the reaction from these forces of repression was the late war. So it is difficult to agree that Napoleon was only an “episode.” We have merely to remark that he was the most interesting of all men, and, so far as we can tell, will probably remain so. As Fielding long ago pointed out in _Jonathan Wild_, a man’s “greatness” appears to depend on his homicidal capacity. To make yourself a hero all you have to do is to slaughter as many of your fellow-creatures as God will permit. How poor the figures of Woodrow Wilson or Judge Hughes seem beside the grey-coated “little corporal”! Though it is quite probable that either of these most estimable American peacemakers have done more good for the human race than was achieved by any warrior! So sinful is man that we throw our hats in the air and whoop for Napoleon the slaughterer, rather than for Woodrow Wilson, who was “too proud to fight.”

When Napoleon was sent to St. Helena he was followed by a very few faithful friends, who seem to have spent their time in hating one another rather than in comforting their fallen idol. It is difficult to get at the truth of these last few years because, though most of the eye-witnesses have published their memoirs, each man seems to have been more concerned to assure the world of the greatness of his own sacrifice than to record the exact facts. Therefore, though Napoleon urged them to keep diaries, and thereby make great sums of money through their imprisonment, yet these diaries generally seem to have aimed rather at attacking the other faithful ones than at telling us exactly what happened.

The post-mortem examination of Napoleon’s body was performed by Francesco Antommarchi, a young Corsican physician, anatomist, and pathologist, who was sent to St. Helena about eighteen months before Napoleon’s death in the hope that he, being a Corsican, would be able to win the Emperor’s confidence and cure the illness of which he was already complaining. Unfortunately, Antommarchi was a very young man, and Napoleon suspected both his medical skill and the reason of his presence. Napoleon used to suffer from severe pains in his stomach; he would clasp himself, and groan, “O, mon pylore!” By that time he was suffering from cancer of the stomach, and Antommarchi did not suspect it. When Napoleon groaned and writhed in agony it is said that Antommarchi merely laughed, and prescribed him tartar emetic in lemonade. Napoleon was violently sick, and thought himself poisoned; he swore he would never again taste any of Antommarchi’s medicine. Once again Antommarchi attempted to give him tartar emetic in lemonade; it was not in vain that Napoleon had won a reputation for being a great strategist, for, when Antommarchi’s back was turned he handed the draught to the unsuspecting Montholon. In ten minutes that hero reacted in the usual manner, and extremely violently. Napoleon was horrified and outraged in his feelings; quite naturally he accused Antommarchi of trying to poison him, called him “assassin,” and refused to see him again. Another fault that Napoleon found with the unhappy young man was that whenever he wanted medical attendance Antommarchi was not to be found, but had to be ferreted out from Jamestown, three and a half miles away; so altogether Antommarchi’s attendance could not be called a success. Napoleon in his wrath was “terrible as an army with banners.” Even at St. Helena, where the resources of the whole world had been expended in the effort to cage him helpless, it must have been no joke to stand up before those awful eyes, that scorching tongue; and it is no wonder that Antommarchi preferred to spend the last few weeks idling about Jamestown rather than forcing unwelcome attention upon his terrible patient.

Worst of all, Antommarchi at first persuaded himself that Napoleon’s last illness was not serious. When Napoleon cried in his agony, “O, mon pylore!” and complained of a pain that shot through him like a knife, Antommarchi merely laughed and turned to his antimony with catastrophic results. It shakes our faith in Antommarchi’s professional skill to read that until the very last moment he would not believe that there was much the matter. The veriest blockhead--one would imagine--must have seen that the Emperor was seriously ill. Many a case of cancer of the stomach has been mistaken for simple dyspepsia in its early stages, but there comes a time when the true nature of the disease forces itself upon even the most casual observer. The rapid wasting, the cachexia, the vomiting, the pain, all impress themselves upon both patient and friends, and it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Antommarchi must have been both careless and negligent. When the inevitable happened, and Napoleon died, it was Antommarchi who performed the autopsy, and found a condition which it is charitable to suppose may have masked the last symptoms and may have explained, if it did not excuse, the young anatomist’s mistaken confidence.

We conclude our brief sketch of the unhappy Antommarchi by saying that when he returned to Europe he published the least accurate and most disingenuous of all accounts of Napoleon’s last days. His object seems to have been rather to conceal his own shortcomings than to tell the truth. This book sets the seal on his character, and casts doubt on all else that comes from his pen. He may have been, as the _Lancet_ says, a “trained and competent pathologist”; he was certainly a most unfortunate young man.

The post-mortem was performed in the presence of several British military surgeons, who appear to have been true sons of John Bull, with all the prejudice, ignorance, and cocksureness that in the eyes of other nations distinguish us so splendidly. Though truthfulness was not a strong point with Antommarchi, he seems to have known his pathology, and has left us an exceedingly good and well-written report of what he found. Strange to relate, the body was found to be still covered thickly with a superficial layer of fat, and the heart and omenta were also adipose. This would seem impossible in the body of a man who had just died from cancer of the stomach, but is corroborated by a report from a Dr. Henry, who was also present, and is not unknown. I remember the case of an old woman who, though hardly at all wasted, was found at the autopsy to have an extensive cancerous growth of the pylorus; the explanation was that the disease had been so acute that it slew her before there had been time to produce much wasting. At one point Napoleon’s cancerous ulcer had perforated the stomach, and the orifice had been sealed by adhesions. Dr. Henry proudly states that he himself was able to thrust his finger through it. The liver was large but not diseased; the spleen was large and “full of blood”--probably Antommarchi meant engorged. The intestine was covered by small bright-red patches, evidently showing inflammation of lymphatic tissue such as frequently occurs in general infections of the body. The bladder contained gravel and several definite calculi. There was hardly any secondary cancerous development, except for a few enlarged glands. Antommarchi and the French generally had diagnosed before death that he was suffering from some sort of hepatitis endemic to St. Helena, and the cancer was a great surprise to them--not that it would have mattered much from the point of view of treatment.

Napoleon’s hands and feet were extremely small; his skin was white and delicate; his body had feminine characteristics, such as wide hips and narrow shoulders; his reproductive organs were small and apparently atrophied. He is said to have been impotent for some time before he died. There was little hair on the body, and the hair of the head was fine, silky, and sparse. Twenty years later his body was exhumed and taken to France, and Dr. Guillard, who was permitted to make a brief examination, stated that the beard and nails appeared to have grown since death; there was very little sign of decomposition; men who had known him in life recognized his face immediately it was uncovered.

Leonard Guthrie points out that some of these signs seem to indicate a condition of hypo-pituitarism--the opposite to the condition of hyper-pituitarism which causes “giantism.” Far-fetched as this theory may appear, yet it is possible that there may be something in it.

The autopsy showed beyond cavil that the cause of death was cancer of the stomach, and it is difficult to see what more Antommarchi could have done in the way of treatment than he did, although certainly an irritant poison like tartar emetic would not have been good for a man with cancer of the stomach, even if it did not actually shorten his life. But Napoleon was not a good patient. He had seen too much of army surgery to have a great respect for our profession; indeed, it is probable that he had no respect for anybody but the Emperor Napoleon. He, at least, knew his business. He could manœuvre a great army in the field and win battles--and lose them too. But even a lost Napoleonic battle--there were not many--was better managed than a victory of any other man; whereas when you were dealing with these doctor fellows you could never tell whether their results were caused by their treatment or by the intervention of whatever gods there be. Decidedly Antommarchi was the last man in the world to be sent to treat the fallen, but still imperious, warrior.

The symptoms of impending death seem to have been masked by a continued fever, and probably Antommarchi was not really much to blame. This idea is to some extent borne out by a couple of specimens in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, which are said to have belonged to the body of Napoleon. The story is that they were surreptitiously removed by Antommarchi, and handed by him to Barry O’Meara, who in his turn gave them to Sir Astley Cooper. That baronet handed them to the museum, where they are now preserved as of doubtful origin. But their genuineness depends upon whether we can believe that Antommarchi would or could have removed them, and whether O’Meara was telling the truth to Sir Astley Cooper. It is doubtful which of the two first-mentioned men is the less credible, and Cooper could not have known how untruthful O’Meara was to show himself, or he would probably not have thought for one moment that the specimens were genuine. O’Meara was a contentious Irishman who, like most other people, had fallen under the sway of Napoleon’s personal charm. He published a book in which he libelled Sir Hudson Lowe, whose hard fate it was to be Napoleon’s jailer at St. Helena--that isle of unrest. For some reason Lowe never took action against his traducer until it was too late, so that his own character, like most things connected with Napoleon, still remains a bone of contention. But O’Meara had definitely put himself on the side of the French against the English, and it was the object of the French to show that their demigod had died of some illness endemic to that devil’s island, aggravated by the barbarous ill-treatment of the brutal British. We on our side contended that St. Helena was a sort of earthly paradise, where one should live for ever. The fragments are from _somebody’s_ ileum, and show little raised patches of inflamed lymphoid tissue; Sir William Leishman considers the post-mortem findings, apart from the cancer, those of some long-continued fever, such as Mediterranean fever.