Meanwhile the Bellepoule goes lumbering along, impeded by calms and gales, but anchored safely off Jamestown on October 8, 1840. Of course many formalities had to be carried out, so that the exhumation did not commence until the 15th at midnight. They came upon the coffin at ten in the forenoon, opened it, and found the body well preserved. Thereon everyone was overcome with emotion. After the coffin was deposited with profound solemnity and the national flag placed over it, the honours which would have been paid to the Emperor had he been living were paid to his remains on October 18, 1840.
The expedition set sail, and had only been a few days out when the captain of a passing vessel called the Hamburg informed Prince Joinville that war between France and Great Britain was imminent, and two or three days later this was confirmed by circumstantial information to him by a Dutch vessel called the Egmont. Officers of the two other vessels of the expedition were ordered aboard the Bellepoule, a council of war held, and a determined resistance resolved upon. The decks were cleared for action, guns were mounted, and every form of princely comfort dispensed with. The son of Louis Philippe added lustre to the name of Bourbon by the heroic decision that, whatever the fortune of battle might be, he would sink his ship rather than allow the remains of the Emperor to fall into the hands of the British again. The resolve was worthy of Napoleon himself.
Every precaution was taken to evade capture, but as the information proved to be unfounded, the expedition was not interrupted by hostile cruisers, nor even by contrary winds, and long before it was expected the historic frigate sailed quietly into the harbour of Cherbourg at 5.0 a.m. on November 30, 1840. She had made the passage from St. Helena in forty-two days. Then the great and unexampled triumph commenced.
Europe was a second time in mourning, bowing its head in reverence and shame. Never have there been such universal tokens of condemnation of the captivity and the creatures who engineered it, and never such unequalled joy and homage as were paid to the memory of the great dead. During the eight days the lying-in-state lasted, more than two hundred thousand people came to the Invalides daily. Thousands never got within the coveted grounds, yet they came in increasing numbers each successive day, notwithstanding the rigour of the biting weather.
It may be said that the whole world was moved with the desire to show sympathy with this unsurpassed national devotion and worldwide repentance. His remains are now in the church of the Invalides, where the daily pilgrimage still goes on. The interest in the victim of the stupidity of the British Administration never flags. Each day the dead Emperor is canonised, and his prophetic words that posterity would do him justice are being amply fulfilled.
The Christian Kings that made saintly war on Napoleon, and combined to commit an atrocious crime in the name of the founder of our faith, were dead. God in His mercy had dispensed with their sagacious guidance in human affairs, and it may be they were paying a lingering penalty for the diabolical act at the very time their prisoner's ashes reached the shores of his beloved country and convulsed it with irrepressible joy. They and many of their accomplices were gone. Four Popes had reigned and passed on to their last long sleep. The Spanish nation, which contributed to his downfall, had been smitten with the plague of chronic revolution. They had been deprived of the great guiding spirit who alone could administer that wholesome discipline which was so necessary to keep the turbulent spirits in restraint. Only Bernadotte, whom Napoleon had put in the way of becoming King of Norway and Sweden, remained to represent the galaxy of Kings. A few of the traitor Marshals were left, but Augereau had died soon after the banishment and Berthier had committed suicide a few day before the Battle of Waterloo by jumping out a window. Soult, Oudinot, and the guilty Marmont were in evidence in these days of great national rejoicing. Davoust, Jourdan, Macdonald, and Masséna had passed behind the veil. It was the defection of Berthier and Marmont, whom he regarded as his most trusted and loyal comrades-in-arms, that crushed the Emperor at the time of the first abdication. It was a cruel stab, which sunk deep into his soul, and never really healed, but the most heartless incident in connection with this betrayal was the appointment of Marmont, the betrayer, by the Emperor Francis to be the military instructor of Napoleon's son while he was held in captivity and ignorance at Vienna.
Fouché, whose treason and predatory misdeeds should have had him shot long before the dawn of disaster to the Empire came, joined the Ministry of Louis XVIII., whom he had arduously assisted to the throne, but in 1816 he was included in the decree against the murderers of Louis XVI., and had to make himself scarce. He went to Prague, then to Trieste, and died there in 1820.
Talleyrand died at Paris in 1838.
Both men were unscrupulous intriguers, without an atom of moral sense or loyalty, and both possessed ability, differing in kind, perhaps, which they used in the accomplishment of their own ends. France can never overestimate the great evil these two men did to the national cause. Napoleon's power and penetrating vision kept them in check only when he could grasp the nettle. Even when absent on his campaigns, they knew he was kept in close touch with what was going on. It was not until treason became entangled within treason that their evil designs had fuller scope and more disastrous results. Bourrienne, another rascal already referred to in this book, lost his fortune and his reason in 1830, and died in a lunatic asylum at Caen of apoplexy in February, 1834. It is a notable fact that nearly the whole of the prominent figures in the drama of the Empire and its fall had passed beyond the portal before the great captain's remains were brought back to France. These individuals are only remembered now as uninspired small men, benighted in mind, who had wrought ignobly to bring about the fall of a powerful leader, and to the end of their days were associated with and encouraged a fiendish persecution of the Emperor while he lived, and of his family before and after his death.
But the pious care of his tomb by a regiment of British soldiers, paid for by British taxpayers, from 1821 until the patriotic exhumation in 1840; by stately and solemn permission of the British Government, excels the comic genius of a gang of plethoric parochial innkeepers. If it were not so degrading to the national pride of race, we might regard it as taking rank amongst the drollest incidents of human life. What a gang of puffy, mildewed creatures were at the head British affairs in those days! Indeed, they expose the human soul at its worst, and a curious feature is their ingrained belief in the integrity of all their doings, which beggars the English vocabulary describe. How the people tolerated the drain on human life and the material resources of country is also phenomenal.