The first room you enter on going into the house, is the one in which, amid storm and rain, and when
“Far along,
From peak to peak, the rattling crags among,
Leapt the live thunder,”
its booming reaching the now drowsy ear which was once attuned to the roar of cannon on a hundred fields, with the ejaculation of “tête d’armée” on his nearly motionless lips, died Napoleon. The head of his bed rested against the sill of a window, from underneath which the French have removed the stone, and placed it in the Hospital des Invalides as a precious relic. Through the sashless opening, the sun now streams in on the floor of a room occupied by a thrashing-machine, and with a manger overhead; while the room in which he mostly slept, and ate, and read, is now paved with cobble-stones, and filled with horse-stalls. The fish-pond is dry, and the grave of his favorite horse you can not find.
Just across the road I visited the new house of Longwood, its walls sound, its porticoes and floors in a perfect state of preservation, and its spacious rooms unoccupied. Napoleon visited it once, but feeling that one jail was no less one for being better built than another, spurned this offer of the English to conciliate him in his cage, as the lion spurns the leavings of the jackal though he die in his den.
On my way back to James’ town, I passed in sight of the grounds and former mansion of
“The paltry jailer and the prying spy”—
“Plantation house”—but had no desire to visit it.
At James’ town there is a very fine bust of Napoleon, said to have been made from a plaster cast of the face, taken after death; the nose is much more exquisitely chiselled and beautiful than any other representation to be seen of his face.