True, after the earthquake the old slow, stubborn forces reassert themselves; but the configuration of the land has been irrevocably changed. The Maya, the illusion of Royalty, comes slowly back, for it is a world of unreason, and even Bismarck believed in the divine right of the princes he despised. But the feudal order throughout Europe will never wholly recover from the shock of Napoleon. Unfortunately, from a Messiah he glided into a Magnificent One, and the marriage with Marie Louise, at first perhaps a mere cold-blooded chess-move to establish his dynasty, subtly reduced him into accepting Royalty at its own and the popular valuation. He had married beneath him, and Nemesis followed. The dyer’s hand was subdued to that it worked in, and Napoleon sank into a snob. His true Waterloo was spiritual. The actual Waterloo was a moral victory.
Had he remained representative of the Republican or any other principle, exile would have had no power over him; on the contrary, it would have aggrandised his influence. But his exile represented nothing but the moping of a banished Magnificent, so that a generous spirit like Byron could find in his “Ode to Napoleon,” no words too excoriating for this fallen meanness.
And while Napoleon pined in St. Helena, Marie Louise found promotion as Duchess of Parma, becoming her own mistress instead of the world’s, and finding husbands nearer down to her own level than the Corsican ex-corporal. Quite happy she must have been, sitting on her throne under a great red baldachino, giving audience, surrounded by her suite and her soldiers—as Antonio Pock painted her—or smothered in diamonds at neck, waist, earrings and hair, smirking in a low-necked dress at her crimson and jewelled crown, as in the picture of Gian Battisti Borghesi. Parma preserves both these portraits, but they are not so quaint a deposit of the great Napoleonic wave as Canova’s bust of Marie Louise as Concord!
There is in Milan a queer museum called “The Gallery of Knowledge and Study,” the collection of which was begun by a “Noble Milanese,” and the first catalogue of which was published in Latin in 1666. Here, amid sea-shells, miniatures, old maps, pottery, bronzes, silkworm analyses, and old round mirrors in great square frames, may now be seen a pair of yellow gloves which once covered the iron hands, together with the cobbler’s measure of that foot which once stamped on the world. There is an air of coquetry about the pointed toe. A captain’s brevet, signed by the “First Consul” and headed “French Republic,” serves as a reminder of the earlier phase. The humour of museums has placed these relics in a case with those of other “illustrious men”—to wit, two Popes and St. Carlo, the dominant saint of the district (who is just celebrating his tercentenary).
But the Triumphal Arch remains Napoleon’s chief monument at Milan, though it is become a sort of Vicar of Bray in stone. For when Napoleon fell, the Austrian Emperor replaced the chronicle of French victories by bas-reliefs of defeats, and re-christened it an Arch of Peace. And when in turn Lombardy was liberated by Victor Emmanuel, new inscriptions converted it into an Arch of Freedom. One can imagine the stone singing, like the Temple of Memnon at sunrise:
“But whatsoever king shall reign,
Still I’ll be the Arch of Triumph.”
And in Ferrara there is a Triumphal Column no less inconstant. Designed to support the statue of Duke Ercole I, it was annexed by Pope Alexander VII, who was deposed by Napoleon, whose statue has now been replaced by Ariosto’s. Whether the ducal-papal-military-poetic pillar supports its ultimate statue, we may doubt, though a poet seems less obnoxious to political passion than the other sorts of hero.
Such mutations in the significance of monuments, however they deface and blur history, are not unnatural amid the vicissitudes of Italy: and, after all, an arch or a pillar is but an arch or a pillar.
But even a statue that keeps its place is not safe from supersession. In Rimini in 1614 the Commune, grateful to the Pope (Paolo V), commemorated him in bronze in the beautiful Piazza of the Fountain, the Fountain whose harmonious fall pleased the ear of Leonardo da Vinci. The monument is elaborate and handsome, with bas-reliefs in the seat and in the Papal mantle, showing in one place the city in perspective. But during the Cisalpine Republic, thanks again to Napoleon, no Pope could keep his place in Rimini, and as the simplest way of preserving him on this favoured site, the municipality erased his epitaph and re-christened him Saint Gaudenzo. Gaudenzo was the martyr Bishop of Rimini, the Protector of the City. This unearned increment was not the Saint’s first, for the Church of S. Gaudenzo had been erected on the basis of a Temple of Jove. To annex the glories of both Jove and Pope is indeed a singular fortune, even in the ironic changes and chances we call history. But Napoleon, in the days when he ordered the Temple of Malatesta to be the Cathedral of Rimini, was annexing even the functions of both Pope and Jove. For he was also rearranging Europe after Austerlitz and giving the quietus to the Holy Roman Empire.