Exile.
Napoleon a second time signed a treaty of abdication just one hundred days after his flagrant violation of the first treaty of abdication. One hundred days of doubtful triumph and then—Waterloo: was it worth while!
The Machiavellian principles—honorable fraud; splendid rascality; a ruler should combine the qualities of the fox and the lion; no matter what the means may be, the vulgar are ever caught by appearances and judge only by the event—which Napoleon had so deeply imbibed from perusal of his favorite book Il Principe, suffered sudden collapse of inflation and wraith-like glimmered as will-o-the-wisps in a bog. That stripping away of names and epithets and phrases and opinions and customs and sunlight success from the—Lie: and that Lie in naked hideousness black-branded on the soul for self and all the world to see;—how terrible a triumph of the unseen over the seen, the real over the apparent, the truth over the lie! What Austerlitz concealed Waterloo revealed. Outlaw of Europe, execrable wretch, vile miscreant whom no promises or vows could hold in honor, etc., were among the uncouth Teutonic free translations of Nap’s subtly soft Il Principe.
And Josephine was dead; she had died a year ago while Nap was at Elba. Josephine never knew the worst about Napoleon; she never could have known the “execrable wretch” as the Congress of Vienna knew him. Love and hate see differently the same objects. As she would gladly have followed Nap to Elba, so, too, would she have been a pitying angel at his side in the world-execration after Waterloo, and in the bitter loneliness of St. Helena. Was Nap, the real, what he was as known and loved by Josephine or what he was as seen and hated by the Congress of Vienna; or neither?
That portrait of Napoleon by Delaroche comes to mind. We are sorry for Nap in his hour of ignominy; we forgive him all the sorrows that he caused—to others; we look with him fascinated into the fatal future, we grieve with the stoic grief of the Man of Destiny.
Meissonier’s companion pictures “1807: Friedland” and “1814: Retreat from Moscow” come to mind. Full success-sun convergent from Austerlitz, Jena, Wagram shines in “1807”; penumbral shadows gray-flecked with snows from Borodino, Moscow, Berizina lower in “1814”.
Louis David’s statuesque picture “Napoleon Crossing the Alps” comes to mind. It seems the “French Revolution on horse-back” yet controlled, goaded up the ascent, led out from bleeding France, and destiny-plunging on towards Italy, Prussia, Austria, Russia.
David’s canvas “Coronation of Napoleon and Josephine” comes sadly to mind. From that rhapsody of color-splendor to bleak Helena surf-lashed by the sea; from that act of crowning exaltation to the signing of abdication at Fontainebleau; from that supreme success in life to a failure-grave under the willows: ah! surely there throbs within and between these antithetic scenes all that enigmatic life may hold for us mortals. Nothing exists beyond—in pleasure or in pain, in honor or dishonor, in success or failure, in highest or lowest.