Chapter XV: Book VI (2)

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.