If, after a hard day's work, when assembled together in the little room that served them for parlor, kitchen, and hall, the power of regret vanquished fatigue, and sadness drove away sleep, then Jack, who compared himself to Peter the Great, when a voluntary exile in the shipyards of Saardam, would endeavor to infuse a little mirth into the lugubrious party. If all his efforts to make them merry failed, all three would join together in a humble prayer to their Heavenly Father, who bestowed resignation upon them instead.
If Willis and his two friends were not accumulating wealth, at all events they were earning the bread they ate honestly and worthily. They had all three laid their shoulders vigorously to the wheel and kept it jogging along marvellously for a month. By that time, a detailed report of the seizure of their property had been placed before the director of the Domaine Extraordinaire, who was the sovereign authority in all matters pertaining to the exchequer of the empire. He saw at once that this capture was extremely harsh, and probably thought that, if it became known, it would raise a storm of indignation about the ears of his department. Here were two young men—Moseses, as it were, saved from the bulrushes. Lost in the desert from the period of their birth, and ignorant of the dissensions then raging in Europe, they were unquestionably beyond the ordinary operation of the law. This will never do, he probably said to himself; the civilization which these two young men have come through so many perils to seek ought not to appear to them, the moment they arrived in Europe, in the form of spoliation and barbarism.
The name of this extraordinary director of Domaine Extraordinaire was M. de la Boullerie, and, when we fall in with the name of a really good-hearted man, we delight to record it. He felt that the two young men had been hardly dealt with, but he had not the power to order a restitution of the property, now that the seizure had been made, and sundry perquisities, of course, deducted by the excise officials. Accordingly, he referred the matter to the Emperor, who commanded the goods to be immediately restored intact. Napoleon, at the same time, praised the functionary we have named for calling his attention to the merits of the case, and thanked him for such an opportunity of repairing an injustice.[[I]]
There are many such instances of generosity as the foregoing in the career of the great Emperor—mild rays of the sun in the midst of thunderstorms; sweet flowers blowing here and there, in the bosom of the gigantic projects of his life—which many will esteem more highly than his miracles of strategy and the renown of his battles. As nothing that tends to elevate the soul is out of place in this volume, we may be permitted to insert one or two of these anecdotes.
In 1806, Napoleon was at Potsdam. The Prussians were humbled to the dust, and the outrage of Rossbach had been fearfully avenged. A letter was intercepted, in which Prince Laatsfeld, civil governor of Berlin, secretly informed the enemy of all the dispositions of the French army. The crime was palpable, capital, and unpardonable. There was nothing between the life and death of the prince, except the time to load half a dozen muskets, point them to his breast, and cry—Fire. The princess flew to the palace, threw herself at the feet of the Emperor, beseeched, implored, and seemed almost heart-broken. "Madam," said Napoleon, "this letter is the only proof that exists of your husband's guilt. Throw it into the fire." The fatal paper blazed, crisped, passed from blue to yellow, and the treachery of Prince Laatsfeld was reduced to ashes.
Another time, a young man, named Von der Sulhn, journeyed from Dresden to Paris; unless you are told, you could scarcely imagine for what purpose. There are people who travel for amusement, for business, for a change of air, or merely to be able to say they have been at such and such a place. Some go abroad for instruction, others, perhaps, with no other object in view than to eat frogs in Paris, bouillabaisse at Marseilles, a polenta at Milan, macaroni at Naples, an olla podrida in Spain, or conscoussou in Africa. Von der Sulhn travelled to assassinate the Emperor. Like Scævola and Brutus, he, no doubt, imagined the crime would hand down his name to posterity. In youth, all of us have erred in judgment more or less. Sulhn thought the Emperor ought to be slain. Unfortunately for him, the Duke of Rovigo, the then minister of police, entertained a different opinion. He thought, in point of fact, that the Emperor ought not to be killed: hence it was that the young Saxon found himself in chains, and that the Duke went to ask the Emperor what he should do with him. We ought, however, to mention that the young man, in his character of an enlightened German, testified his regret that he had not succeeded in carrying out his project, and protested that, in the event of regaining his liberty, he would renew the attempt. "Never mind," said the Emperor to the duke, "the young man's age is his excuse. Do not make the affair public, for, if it is bruited about, I must punish the headstrong youth, which I have no wish to do. I should be sorry to plunge a worthy family into grief by immolating such a scapegrace. Send him to Vincennes, give him some books to read, and write to his mother." In 1814, the young man obtained his liberty, his family, and his Germany, and it is to be hoped that he afterwards became a respectable pater-familias, a sort of Aulic councillor, and that, during the troublesome times in the land of Sauerkraut, he was before, and not behind, the barricades of his darling patria. If he be dead, it is to be supposed that, instead of lying a headless trunk ignominiously in a ditch, or in the unconsecrated cemetery of Clamort, he is reposing entire in the paternal tomb.
On the 15th of March, 1815, the Emperor landed at Cannes—he had returned from the island of Elba. On the beach he was joined by one man, at Antibes by a company, at Digne by a battalion, at Gap by a regiment (that of Labedoyer), at Grenoble by an army. The hearts of the soldiers of France went to him like steel to the loadstone—first a drop, and then a torrent; the Empire, like a snowball, increased as it progressed. At Lyons, the Count of Artois, the setting sun, is obliged to go out of one gate the moment that Napoleon, the rising sun, comes in at another. Smiles, orations, triumphal arches, and even the discourses that had been prepared to welcome the Bourbons, were used to congratulate their successor on his return. Cockades and flags were altered to suit the occasion, by inserting a stripe of red here and another of blue there. One national guard, but only one, remained faithful to the Bourbons; he would neither alter his cockade nor his colors, and remained true to his patrons in the hour of disaster. Everybody asked, what would the Emperor do with him? Would he be imprisoned or banished? Neither; the Emperor sent him a cross of the order of merit! It is, no doubt, grand to have overthrown the brilliant army of Murad Bey in Egypt; to have vanquished Melas, Wurmser, and Davidowich in Italy; Bragation, Kutusoff, and Barclay de Tolly in Russia; Mack in Germany; and thus to have reduced the entire continent of Europe to subjection. But it appears to us that a still greater feat was the victory he gained over himself, when, in the midst of the fever excited by his return, and the animosity of parties, he gave this cross to the solitary adherent of misfortune. Having made these slight digressions into the future, it is proper that we should return to our story.
The mysterious roads of Providence do not always lead to the places they seem to go; it often happens that, when we expect to be swallowed up by the breakers that surround us, we are wafted into a harbor, and that we encounter success where we only anticipated disappointment. The rigorous enactments of the continental system, that the other day had ruined the two brothers, became all at once the source of unlooked-for wealth; for, on account of the scarcity of colonial produce, a scarcity dating from the prohibitory laws promulgated in 1807, the merchandise of the young men had more than quadrupled in value.
From the grade of hard-working mechanics they were suddenly promoted to the rank of wealthy merchants. They consequently abandoned the laborious employments that for a month had enabled them to live, and to keep despair and misery at bay. Willis, greatly to his inconvenience, found himself transformed into a gentleman at large, which caused him to make some material alterations in the manipulation and quality of his pipes.
Fritz busied himself in collecting in, the by no means inconsiderable sums, which their property realised. He did not value the gold for its glitter or its sound, he valued it only as a means of enabling himself and his brother to return promptly to their ocean home. Jack undertook the task of finding a scalpel to save his mother—doubtless a difficult task; for how was he to induce a surgeon of standing to abandon his connexion, his family, and his fame, and to undertake a perilous voyage to the antipodes, for the purpose of performing an operation in a desert, where there were neither newspapers to proclaim it, academicians to discuss it, nor ribbons to reward it? As for the gentlemen of the dentist and barber school, like Drs. Sangrado and Fontanarose of Figaro, the remedy was even worse by a great deal than the disease. But, as we have said, Jack promised to find a surgeon, and the research was so arduous, that he was scarcely ever seen during the day by either Willis or his brother.