Many visitors, passengers in English vessels, called to see him. Generally, but not always, he received them. Generally, but not always, visitors so received went away converted into sympathetic friends, sometimes enthusiastic partisans. Only a few days ago (April, 1901) there died in London an aged man who, when a lad, saw the Emperor at St. Helena. The boy had been fascinated; never ceased to recall the placid countenance, gentle, sonorous voice, and wonderfully expressive eye; and spoke of Napoleon with enthusiasm to the last.

If the world possessed a faithful record of Napoleon’s conversation at St. Helena, no book would be more interesting, for he discoursed freely on almost every subject of human interest, and on most topics he touched he said something worth hearing. But we have only an imperfect, fragmentary, unreliable record. Long conversations extending through several hours, and jotted down by a secretary afterward, necessarily lose most of their flavor. It would be a miracle if such a method of reporting so rapid a talker as Napoleon were accurate.

On the subjects of death, religion, the soul, the hereafter, he is differently reported,—or, rather, he held two lines of expression. When thinking of political effect and the interests of his son, he would of course remember the Catholic Church, its power, its creed, and would say things which put him on the plane of the Concordat—the restorer of religion, the believer in Christ. But when he was not posing for effect, when he blurted out his real thoughts, all this disappeared. He did not believe in the modern doctrine about the soul, and scouted the idea of immortality. “When we are dead, my dear Gourgaud, we are altogether dead.”

Again he would ask: “What is a soul? Where is the soul of a sleeper, a madman, a babe?” In spite of that old-time pointing to the stars in the heavens and the oft-quoted question which we are told dumfounded the materialists, “Can you tell me who made all that?” Napoleon at St. Helena proclaimed himself a materialist. Long before Darwin’s great book appeared, Napoleon announced his belief in the principle of evolution. His great difficulty in reconciling the dogma of a benevolent and just God with the universe as it exists, was that the facts seemed all against the dogma. In the days of his power he had said scornfully, “God fights on the side of the heavy battalions;” at St. Helena he declared that he could not believe in a just God punishing and rewarding, for good people are always unfortunate and scoundrels are always lucky. “Look at Talleyrand; he is sure to die in his bed!” And so he did; and if the Pope’s blessing was a passport to heaven, this most villanous of all Frenchmen reached heaven by the best and shortest route. The manner in which the weak—no matter how good—go down before the strong,—no matter how bad,—in human affairs, as in the realms of animal life, staggered his belief in the benevolence of the plan of creation. “Were I obliged to have a religion, I would worship the Sun—the source of all life, the real god of earth.” “Why should punishment be eternal?” Why damn a man who was brought into the world, not of his own will, and who was stamped with certain qualities which almost inevitably determined his character and conduct—why punish such a man with the eternal torments of hell because of a few years of sin? What good could it accomplish to torture poor human beings forever and forever? Would God never grow sorry? No? Then he was crueller than the savagest of the human race. Justice! Could it be just to create men with certain passions, turn them loose for a few years to see what they would do, and then when they had done what the law of their nature made it almost inevitable that they would do,—and what God knew they would do before he created them,—was it just to burn these helpless wretches forever in the slow fires of hell? Napoleon could not bring himself to think so.

He said that, when in Egypt, the sheiks had disturbed him considerably by alleging that he was a pagan because he worshipped three gods. These sheiks, with tantalizing persistence, maintained that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit made three gods. Of course Napoleon endeavored to explain to these benighted Arabs that our three gods were only one. The sheiks of Cairo, however, being men of primitive mind and stubborn habit, would not open their eyes to the truth, and they continued to say that Mahomet’s creed was better than Christ’s, because Mahometans believe in one God, only. All other celestial beings are angels, lower than God. Human beings, men born of women, may be prophets, martyrs, sublimely missioned reformers, but they are not gods.

“As for me,” exclaimed Napoleon, on one occasion, “I do not believe in the divinity of Christ. He was put to death like any other fanatic who professed to be a prophet or a messiah. There were constantly people of this kind.” As, indeed, there are. England crushed the last one in the Soudan a few years ago.

The great sorrow of Napoleon in his captivity was the absence of his wife and son. He believed, or pretended to believe, that Maria Louisa was still faithful to him. He had been told of her shame, he had even hotly denounced the infamous manner in which her father had put her into the power of Neipperg, but with singular persistency he would return to the idea that she yet loved him, and would join him if the Allies would permit. He could not know that the mother of his child had declared that she did not love him, and never had loved him.

A striking refrain, running through all the discussions of those acts of his reign which had been under hottest fire, is this, “History will do me justice.” Time and again, after stating his explanations, reasons, motives, or justification, he comes back to the words, “History will do me justice.”

Considering all the circumstances, the confidence was sublime. His was a blasted name throughout the world. In France it was bad taste to mention him. By formal enactment of combined Europe he was an outlaw, beyond the pale of humanity, a pariah whom all were privileged to stone. Only one newspaper of the free press of England had dared to say a word for him when the government was making a prisoner out of a man it had not captured; only two members of Parliament dared protest against the wrong.

In France his followers, Ney and LabÉdoyÈre, had been shot, and Lavalette condemned. Reaction was rushing like an avalanche, and sweeping all before it. Royalist Catholics were outdoing in the White Terror the atrocities of the Red. Italy was her old self again, and Murat had looked into the muzzles of the Bourbon muskets, and had said, with the last flash of the old courage and pride, “Save my face, aim at my heart—fire!” Every pander who could distort or create was adding to the piles of books in which the Corsican monster was devoted to damnation here and hereafter. Yet, in spite of all, the captive was serenely at ease about his future.

“History will do me justice. My work will speak for itself. I shall soon be gone; but what I did, and what I attempted, will live for ages. My public improvements, my canals, harbors, roads, monuments, churches, hospitals, my school system, my code, my organization of the civil service, my system of finance, the manufactures that sprang up at my touch, the arts and sciences encouraged, the libraries founded, the triumphs of democracy which I organized and made permanent—these are my witnesses, and to posterity they will testify. Your Wellingtons and your Metternichs may dam the stream of liberal ideas, checking the current for the time; but the torrent will be only the stronger when it breaks.

“From the passions of to-day, I appeal to the sober judgment of to-morrow. Future generations will remember my intentions, consider my difficulties, and judge me leniently.”

This superb confidence sustained him so buoyantly that he was never more imperial in his pose than at St. Helena. When Lowe threatened to have his room forcibly entered each day in order that the jailer might know his prisoner was still there, the indomitable Corsican said, “I’ll kill the first man that tries it!” and before that courage of despair even Hudson Lowe drew back. When England demanded his sword, he had placed his hand upon it and looked the British officer in the eye with an expression that could not be misunderstood. The brave and generous Lord Keith, more chivalrous than his government, bowed to his captive, and retired without the sword.

“Let him” (Lowe) “send all my friends away, if he will; let him plant sentinels at the doors and windows, and give me nothing but bread and water: I care not. My soul is free. I am as independent as when I was at the head of six hundred thousand men; as free as when I gave laws to Europe!”

Mr. Taine with painstaking malevolence traces Napoleon back to CÆsar Borgia; but this granite formation of character was not Italian, it was Corsican. The spirit which here nerved the solitary captive to brave a world in arms was not that of his Italian father who bent the courtier’s knee to the conquerors of his country; it was that of his Corsican mother, whose firmness of character resisted all fears and all temptations. In Napoleon, Italy may have reached her highest type; but in him, also, Corsica saw the last and the greatest of the heroic race of Sampiero.

“The atmosphere of modern ideas stifles the old feudalists, for henceforth nothing can destroy or deface the grand principles of our revolution. These great truths can never cease to exist. Created in the French Tribune, cemented by the blood of battles, adorned by the laurels of victory, hailed by the acclamations of the people, they can never be turned backward. They live in Great Britain, illuminate America, they are nationalized in France. Behold the tripod from whence issues the light of the world! They will yet triumph. They will be the faith, the religion, the morality of all peoples, and this era will be connected with my name. For, after all, I kindled the torch and consecrated the principle, and now persecution makes me the Messiah of those principles. Friends and foes must acknowledge that of these principles I am the chief soldier, the grand representative. Thus, when I am in my grave, I shall still be, for the people, the polar star of their rights. My name will be the war-cry of their efforts.”

Scores of other quotations might be made to the same effect, and they go far to explain why modern liberalism regarded Napoleon as The Man. He grew to hate democracy? Yes. He crushed opposition to his will rigorously, pitilessly? Yes. He stifled free speech and smothered representative government? Yes. He was more despotic than any Bourbon? Yes. Then how dared he predict that his name would become the war-cry of the people in their struggle for civil rights?

Because he knew that posterity would see at work, within the body of his despotism, the spirit of democracy. He knew that with his system of civil and social equality, and the absolute privilege of every citizen, however humbly born, to rise to the loftiest positions, no real despotism could be possible; and that history would say so. When he, the Emperor, chosen by the people, stood up in his carriage on the streets of Paris and pointed out to his Austrian bride the window of the room in which he had lodged when he came up from Brienne,—a poor boy with his career to make,—his pride in pointing to that mile-post on the toilsome route of his promotion was that of all self-made men, was that of the man who scorns to win where he has not fought, was that of the robust conqueror who wants nothing for which he has not paid the price of manly effort.

It was the same spirit which flashed out of him when Metternich presented from the Emperor of Austria, in 1809, the proofs that he was descended from the nobility of Florence.

“I will have none of such tomfoolery. My patent of nobility dates from the battle of Montenotte!”

It was the same spirit which moved him to chide Duroc, his beloved Duroc, when that highest officer of the palace had been rude to Constant, the valet, Constant being in tears about it.

The same spirit was on him when he stopped to talk with poor Toby, the Malay slave of St. Helena, and to give him money; the same when he rebuked Madame Balcombe, who with angry voice ordered some heavily burdened slaves to give way to her, in a steep, narrow path,—“Respect the burden, Madame!”

Thought, feelings, deeds like these are not born in hearts barren of human sympathy, dead to the sense of fraternity, or alien to the sentiment which inspires the mystic to strive for the good of all.

Bertrand states that after 1820 Napoleon was a confirmed invalid. Sitting in his chair, clad in dressing-gown, he spent the days reading, being no longer able to work or dictate.

“What a delightful thing rest is. The bed has become for me a place of luxury. How fallen am I. Once my activity was boundless; my mind never slumbered; I sometimes dictated to four or five secretaries, who wrote as fast as words could be uttered. But then I was Napoleon. Now I am nothing. I am sunk into a stupor, I can hardly raise my eyelids, my faculties forsake me. I do not live; I merely exist.”

Through March and April, 1821, he was slowly dying, and suffering torments from his ailment—cancer of the stomach. His patience and his kindness to those around him were perfect.

On one of the last days of April he said to Montholon, early in the morning on awakening from sleep: “I have just seen the good Josephine. I reached out my arms to embrace her, and she disappeared. She was seated there. It seemed to me that I had seen her yesterday evening. She is not changed; she loves me yet. Did you see her?”

Burning fever and delirium marked these final days; but in the lucid intervals he was calm, fearless, and thoughtful for the friends about him. On May 4 Bertrand asked him if he would have a priest. “No, I want no man to teach me how to die.” Nevertheless, he accepted the usual clerical services. And the picture of a densely ignorant and dull-minded priest, taking possession of Napoleon Bonaparte, hearing his confessions and granting him heavenly passports, is one of those things which makes the vocabulary of amazement seem to need enlargement and intensification.

It would not, perhaps, be difficult to explain why Napoleon, in his last illness, accepted the services of a priest, and died in the arms of the Church; but it puzzles one to understand why he embalmed in his Will his delusion as to Maria Louisa. He had long known of her infidelity, he received no line or message from her during the whole time of his captivity; yet he speaks of her in his will as though she had ever been the true and loving wife. Was this done from personal pride? Or did he do it for the sake of his son? Both motives may have influenced him, especially the latter.

A storm was raging over the island on May 4. “The rain fell in torrents, and a fierce gale howled over the drenched crags of St. Helena. Napoleon’s favorite willow was torn up by the roots, and every tree he had planted at Longwood was blown down.

“The night was very bad,” says Montholon. “Toward two o’clock delirium set in, accompanied by nervous contractions. Twice I thought I heard the words, France—armÉe—tÊte d’armÉe—Josephine, at the same time the Emperor sprang from the bed, in spite of my efforts to restrain him. His strength was so great that he threw me down, heavily falling to the floor.”

Others, hearing the noise, ran in, and the Emperor was put back upon the bed, where he became calm again. At six in the morning the death-rattle was heard. As Montholon approached the bed, the dying man made a sign that he wanted water. He was past swallowing; his thirst could only be allayed by a sponge pressed to his lips. He then lay all day with his eyes fixed, seemingly in deep meditation. As the sun was setting, he died—the evening gun of the English fort booming across the sea as his life went out.

“Ah,” said Marchand, “he died in the arms of victory! He called for Desaix, Lannes, Duroc. I heard him order up the artillery, and then he cried: ‘Deploy the eagles! Onward!’”

“I shall never forget,” says Stewart, “Marshal Bertrand coming out of the room and announcing, in a hollow voice, ‘The Emperor is dead,’ the last word being accompanied by a deafening peal of thunder.”

Napoleon had made his preparations for death with the composure of an ancient pagan. He had given minute instructions to all about him as to their duties when he should be gone, and had directed an autopsy of his body in order that the true character of his disease might be known, for the benefit of his son. He inquired of the young priest whether he knew how to arrange the death chapel; and he dictated the form of notice which should be sent Sir Hudson Lowe when he, Napoleon, should be dead. In his Will, written by his own hand, he set out an elaborate list of legacies, including those who had befriended his boyhood, and those who had been loyal to him in the days of his power, as well as those whose fidelity had been the comfort of his captivity and dying hours. From his mother and nurse to his teachers and schoolfellows, his companions-in-arms and the children of those who had died in battle at his side, to the Old Guard and the faithful few at St. Helena, he swelled the debt of gratitude, and honored himself in remembering others. In regard to this Will, it may be of interest to state that only a small portion of the vast assets Napoleon claimed to have left in Europe could be found by his executors, and that during the second Empire the State voted $1,600,000 toward the unpaid legacies.

Given the funeral of a general officer, his unmarked coffin was borne by soldiers down into the little valley, where was the willow, under which he often rested, and the spring whose waters had so refreshed him in the fever of his long decline. Here he was buried, May 8, 1821.

One day, at St. Helena, there was a stormy interview between prisoner and jailer, between Napoleon and Sir Hudson Lowe. The book from Hobhouse had been kept by the governor, and this and many other things the captive resented.

“I detained the book because it was addressed to the Emperor,” said Lowe.

“And who gave you the right to dispute that title?” cried Napoleon, indignantly.

“In a few years your Lord Castlereagh and all the others, and you yourself, will be buried in the dust of oblivion; or, if your names be remembered at all, it will be only on account of the indignity with which you have treated me; but the Emperor Napoleon will continue forever the subject, the ornament of history, and the star of civilized nations. Your libels are of no avail against me. You have expended millions on them; what have they produced? Truth pierces through the clouds; it shines like the sun, and like the sun it cannot perish!”

To which proud boast, Sir Hudson Lowe replied, as he records, “You make me smile, sir.”

Sir Hudson may have smiled then, and may have kept on smirking as long as Napoleon lived. Nothing seemed less likely than that the prophetic words of the prisoner would come true. But there came a time when Sir Hudson did not smile. When death had released the prisoner, and the faithful companions of his years of misery went home and told their story,—O’Meara in England, Las Casas and Montholon in France,—Sir Hudson did not smile; for all Europe rang with his name, and all generous hearts condemned him. He turned to British courts for vindication, and did not get it. He applied to the English ministers for high, permanent employment and liberal pension, and he got neither the one nor the other. Young Las Casas invited him to fight, and he did not fight. He dropped into a contempt which was so deep and so universal that even Wellington, in effect, turned his back upon the creature he had used, having no further need for just such a man.

“You make me smile, sir,” said amused Sir Hudson, when the shabbily clad, prematurely decrepit man, standing on the hearth of his dismal room, prophesied his political resurrection and his final triumph over his enemies. Had Castlereagh heard, he also would have smiled, not foreseeing that ghastly climax to political prostitution, when, after a lifetime of truckling to royalism, and of doing its foulest work, he should find the whole world turn black, should cut his own throat, and be followed to his tomb by the hoots of an English mob!

Wellington, too, would have been amused at hearing the prisoner’s prophecy; would have thought Napoleon insane, not foreseeing the perilous times in England when the progress of liberalism would break the line of his Tory opposition; would win triumphs for reform in spite of his threat that he would have his dragoons “sharp grind their sabres as at Waterloo.” With the windows of his London home smashed by a British mob, with millions of liberals shouting demands for better laws, so fiercely that even Wellington gave up trust in those sharp-ground swords, there came a day when the Iron Duke may have remembered the prophet of St. Helena, and read the words again—without the smile.

“In a few years you and all the others will be buried in the dust of oblivion; but the Emperor will live forever, the ornament of history, the star of civilized nations!”

It was a proud boast, and proudly has time made it good. In a few years the Bourbons had played out their shabby parts on the throne of France, and had gone into final and hopeless exile, “unwept, unhonored, and unsung.”

Liberalism had risen from defeats, and made its will supreme. Both in England and in France the Old Order had passed away, principles more enlightened prevailed. A new day had dawned, not cloudless nor free from storm, but better and brighter than 1815 or 1821. In the year of our Lord 1840, the thought of the two great nations turned to the grave at St. Helena. France asked, and England gave—whom? The Emperor! Not “Bonaparte” nor “General Bonaparte,” save in the minds of the very small and the exceedingly venomous; but Napoleon, “the Emperor and king.”

The grave at St. Helena was opened; the perfectly preserved face, beautiful in death, uncovered amid sighs and tears; and then the body, taken away to be entombed “upon the banks of the Seine in the midst of the people I have so much loved,” was received on board a royal ship, by a prince of the Bourbon house of Orleans, with masts squared, flags flying, cannon booming, drums beating, and every note of triumph swelling the pomp of that imperial reception. With a vast outpouring of the people, France welcomed the greatest Frenchman home. “Truth cuts through the clouds; shines like the sun; and like the sun it is immortal!” Sublime confidence, sublimely justified!

“You make me smile, sir,” said Lowe; but that was many years since. It is 1840 now, and Napoleon’s turn has come.

From king to peasant, all France starts up to meet her returning hero. He comes back to a throne which none dispute. He comes back to a dominion no Marmont can betray. Allied kings will league themselves in vain to break that imperial supremacy. No Talleyrand or FouchÉ or Bourmont can find for treachery a leverage to overthrow that majestic power. No. It is secure in a realm which envy and malice and ignoble passion may invade, but cannot conquer. It has linked itself with things immortal; and for this imperial career and fame there can be no death.

Let Cherbourg’s thousand guns salute! Let triumphal arches span the Seine as he passes on his way! Let hill and slope and river bank hold their gazing hosts! Let flowers and garlands shower down on the bier from every bridge. Let aged peasants drop on reverent knees, fire the old musket in humble salute, and then cover the weeping faces with trembling hands! Cold is this December day; but winter cannot chill this vast enthusiasm. From the quay, where the funeral barge moors, to the Church of the Invalides, where the tomb waits, a million people throng the route. Streets, avenues, squares, balconies, windows, roofs, trees—all are full of people. Cannons, drums, military bands, the tramp of men and war-horses, the glitter of endless lines of soldiers, the songs which rouse the passions and the memories, the shouts of dense crowds stirred by electrical emotions—all these mark this December day as the gorgeous funeral car bears Napoleon to his final rest. There is the white war-horse, not Marengo, but one like him; and upon the horse is the saddle and the bridle Napoleon had used. There are his old Marshals Moncey, and Soult, and Oudinot; there is Bertrand and Gourgaud and Las Casas, the faithful companions of his long exile. But above all there are the relics of his ancient wars to come weeping around the bier; and there is a remnant of his Old Guard to march with him to his tomb. Oh, the magic of the mighty dead! No freezing December air can keep down the fervor which makes the great city ring with cries of “Live the Emperor!”

Sixteen black horses, plumed and draped, draw the lofty funeral car over which lies the purple velvet robe, and in which is the coffin—marked, at last, in letters of gold, “Napoleon.” Princes of the Church come forth to meet the body; a king and his court and the proudest notables of France wait within to receive it.

“The Emperor!” cries the herald at the door; and the brilliant assembly rises, as one man, and makes the reverent bow to the dead man who enters.

Over all is the spell of a master spirit; over all the spell of a deathless past.

The sword of Austerlitz is handed to King Louis Philippe by Soult; and the King gives it to the faithful Bertrand; and Bertrand lays it, reverently, upon his master’s coffin. The awful stillness of the great temple is broken by the sobs of gray-haired soldiers.

With a grand Requiem chant, the funeral ends; but the silent procession of mourners coming in endless lines to view the coffin lasts more than a week, bringing people from all parts of France, from Belgium, and from other lands.

Nor has that procession ended yet. Around the great man, lying there in his splendid tomb, with his marshals near him and the battle-flags he made famous drooping about him, still flows the homage of the world. The steps of those who travel, like the thoughts of those who are students of human affairs, turn from the four quarters of the earth to the tomb of this mightiest of men.

His impress lies upon France forever, in her laws, her institutions, her individual and national life; but his empire does not stop with France,—is cramped by no “natural limits” of Rhine and Alps and Pyrenees.

By force of genius and of character, by superior fitness to do great things, he was the chief usurper of his time. He is the usurper yet, and for the same reasons. He did the work kings ought to have done,—doing it in spite of the kings. He does it yet, in spite of the kings.

His hand, as organizer of the Revolution, which was greater even than he, is at the loom where the life-garments of nations are woven. Listen to this voice, coming out of Italy: “Within the space of ten years we had made [under Napoleon] more progress than our ancestors had done in three centuries. We had acquired the French civil, criminal, and commercial codes; we had abolished the feudal system, and justice was administered with improved methods.” So wrote General PÉpÉ; and what he said of Italy was equally true of every other portion of Continental Europe which had come under the imperial sway. It was this work Napoleon was doing from the very first day he grasped the reins of power; it was this work the allied kings dreaded; it was this work they meant to stop.

In that he strove for himself and his dynasty, Napoleon failed miserably, for to that extent he betrayed his trust, was false to his mission, wandered from the road. But so far as his toil was for others, for correct principles, for better laws, better conditions, productive of happier homes and better men and women, he did not fail. No Leipsic or Waterloo could destroy what was best in his career: no William Pitt could pile up sufficient gold to bribe into the field kings strong enough to chain peoples as they had once been chained. In vain was Metternich’s Holy Alliance, his armed resistance to liberal ideas; his savage laws, his inhuman dragoonings:—the immortal could not be made to die.