Napoleon's Young Neighbor

by Helen Leah Reed

"Mees Betsee, how can you possibly dare to have an opinion on the subject?"

This glimpse of Napoleon, sadly watching the Conqueror, was not the only occasion when Betsy had an opportunity to see the more serious side of the man whom she admired. Although she was only a young girl, she was able sometimes by her intelligent questions to draw from him an explanation of much discussed things in his past. There was, for example, the oft-repeated story that Napoleon had sanctioned the butchery of Turkish troops at Jaffa and the poisoning of the sick in the hospitals.

If the Emperor was vexed with Betsy for touching on forbidden ground, he did not show his feeling, but entered into an explanation that his young neighbor was able long afterwards to repeat in his own words. "Before leaving Jaffa," said Napoleon, "and when many of the sick had been embarked, I was informed that there were some in the hospital severely wounded, dangerously ill, and unfit to be moved at any risk. I desired my medical men to hold a consultation as to what steps had best be taken with regard to the unfortunate sufferers and to send in their opinions to me. The result of this consultation was that seven-eighths of the soldiers were considered past recovery, and that in all probability few would be alive at the expiration of twenty hours."

Betsy listened attentively, as Napoleon showed how difficult it was to decide whether it was not more cruel to leave these helpless men to the mercy of the Turks than to end their misery by a dose of opium: "I should have desired such a relief for myself under the same circumstances and I considered it would be an act of mercy to anticipate their fate by only a few hours. My physician did not enter into my views of the case, and disapproved of the proposal, saying it was his business to cure, not to kill. Accordingly I left a rear-guard to protect these unhappy men from the enemy. They remained until Nature had paid her last debt and released the expiring soldiers from their agony."

As his auditors did not look convinced of the correctness of his views, Napoleon turned to Dr. O'Meara, who was of the party.

"I ask you, O'Meara, to place yourself in the situation of one of these men. Were it demanded of you which fate you would select, either to be left to suffer the tortures of those miscreants or to have opium administered to you, which fate would you rather choose? If my own son—and I believe I love my son as well as any father loves his child—were in a similar situation, I should advise it to be done. If so situated myself I should insist upon it, if I had sense enough and strength to demand it."

Without waiting for comment from the others, Napoleon added that if he had been capable of secretly poisoning his soldiers or of the barbarity ascribed to him of driving his carriage over the mutilated bodies of the wounded, his troops would never have fought under him with the enthusiasm and reverence they uniformly displayed. "No, no, I should have been shot long ago. Even my wounded would have tried to pull a trigger to despatch me."

The Emperor spoke so earnestly that no one could doubt he meant what he said. Even though they believed that the Turkish prisoners had been treated with great cruelty, his hearers saw that ambition or a feeling of necessity had been the impelling motive of the officers who sanctioned or ordered the cruelty.

Napoleon's conversations with Betsy were of course carried on largely in French, and but for the little girl's fluency in this language she would probably have seen much less of the great man. Napoleon himself made a real effort to learn English. Not only did he study with Las Cases, but he tried to practise the language with Betsy and her sister. In conversation, however, he never became very proficient, his pronunciation was droll, and he was inclined to translate things very literally. Betsy was less patient than her sister with Napoleon's English. By his expressed desire she and Jane were always to correct his mistakes, yet often, in the midst of his efforts, she would run off without deigning to help him.

"Ah, Mdlle. Betsee," he would then cry in French, "you are a stupid little creature; when will you become wise?"