Up to the 20th March the Moniteur had continued publishing loyal addresses to Louis XVIII., but on the 21st it announced, ‘The King and the Princes left last night. His Majesty the Emperor arrived this evening at eight o’clock in his palace of the Tuileries.’ One of Napoleon’s first inquiries to a lady of his court was whether there were many English in Paris. On being told that nearly all had left he exclaimed, ‘Ah, they recollect what I did before, but those times are past. You do not repeat yourself.’ John Cam Hobhouse, Byron’s friend, afterwards Lord Broughton, tells us this, and he adds that the detentions of 1802 were against French feeling and could not have been repeated in 1815 in defiance of such a feeling. Napoleon, moreover, may have thought there was a chance of his recognition by the allies,[304] and the detention of foreigners would have been a virtual declaration of war. Yet the stampede was obviously prudent, and the principal Englishman who remained did not escape molestation. Francis Henry Egerton, as we have seen, had come over to Paris in 1802, and he had apparently continued to reside uninterruptedly, for he published several works there, both in English and French, between 1812 and 1826. He had hired a house till 1814, but on the restoration of the Bourbons he purchased the mansion of the Noailles family in the rue St. Honoré, and to show his sympathy with the new Government he paid up at once, on the 2nd March 1815, in lieu of by instalments, the stamp duty of 30,000 francs. This seems to have marked him out for Napoleon’s resentment. The house with its contents was requisitioned to serve for a Government office. Egerton resisted, stood a kind of siege, and appealed to the tribunals. He could not, it is obvious, have permanently withstood Napoleon, but he seems to have held his ground until Waterloo arrived and put an end to the affair. He lost no time in securing legal domicile and civic rights, for in default of the latter one alien could not bequeath property to another, such property being forfeit to the French Crown. His support of the Bourbons should have shielded him from further annoyance, but in 1818 he had an unpleasant episode. Workmen who were placing flower-pots on the pillars of the Tuileries gardens found it convenient to fasten ropes to the wall of his back garden in the rue de Rivoli. Egerton drove out in his carriage and required them to desist. An altercation ensued, there were cries of ‘Down with the Englishman!’ and he was dragged out of his carriage to the guardhouse. Though promptly released, he was very punctilious in exacting an apology for this indignity, threatening otherwise to quit France. He was very eccentric in his latter years, if we are to believe that cats and dogs dressed up as human beings sat at his dinner-table, and that he kept rabbits and partridges in his garden in order to have shooting on his own premises. He died as Duke of Bridgewater in 1829, aged seventy-nine, and left £8000 for eight prize treatises which were named after him. The Hôtel St. James, into which his house has been converted, contains the original staircase and other relics of the mansion in which Marie Antoinette welcomed Lafayette and Noailles on their return from America.
Englishmen who, like Egerton, remained or arrived during the Hundred Days witnessed curious scenes. Hobhouse in his passport of 1814 had seen the word empire erased and royaume substituted. He now found a contrary change made. He saw Napoleon review the National Guard on the 16th April, and attend the Comédie Française on the 21st, on both which occasions his reception was enthusiastic. He also witnessed the ceremony on the Champ de Mars, when Napoleon closely scrutinised the crowd with his eyeglass during the mass on which he had resolved in order to show that the Empire was not anti-catholic. Hobhouse, though strenuously opposed to the renewal of the war by the allies, acknowledges that Napoleon was not popular in Paris except with the military, and that the cheers were very faint. Yet he courted popularity by visiting public institutions and by walking about almost unattended and conversing with people of all classes. He removed on the 17th April from the Tuileries, where, however, he still held his councils, to the Elysée, close to the Borghese palace which Wellington had purchased for the British Embassy. The latter was of course vacant, for all the ambassadors had followed Louis XVIII. to Ghent, Fitzroy Somerset assuring him previously to his flight that England would stand by him. In the absence of ambassadors foreigners could not of course be formally presented, but Mrs. Damer obtained an interview to give Napoleon the bust of Fox, which she had promised him in 1802. The jewelled snuff-box bearing his own portrait which he gave her in return is now in the British Museum. Up to the 4th May, if not later, the Calais and Dover mail-packets continued to run, and took many French passengers. When Corpus Christi festival arrived the processions, as from the Revolution till 1813 and as ever since, were confined in Paris to the churches or their enclosures.
Napoleon affected liberal views, not only by summoning Benjamin Constant to his councils, but by inviting to return to Paris his friend Madame de Staël, who had not joined in the exultation at his fall, and indeed had sent him warning to Elba, through his brother Joseph, of a plot against his life. She did not accept the invitation, but wrote to Quintin Craufurd a letter intended for transmission to the English Government, in which she affirmed the sincerity of his liberal professions. Yet she might justly have distrusted these.
Among the Frenchmen who fled to England was one whose Irish extraction entitles him to mention. Jean Baptiste Lynch, whose Jacobite ancestors had settled at Bordeaux, was imprisoned during the Revolution. In 1808 Napoleon made him Mayor of Bordeaux, and in 1810 created him a Count. Lynch was lavish in his professions of fidelity to the Empire, but in 1813 he had secret dealings with a royalist emissary, and in 1814, on the approach of Wellington’s army, he proclaimed Louis XVIII. at Bordeaux. He was the first man in France to do this, and he also sent a deputation to Louis in England. On hearing of Napoleon’s return from Elba and unopposed march on Paris, he despatched the Duchess of Angoulême to England to be out of his reach, and he himself followed her. He was at Newcastle on a visit to a relative when news of Waterloo arrived, and he was cheered by the populace.[305] Louis, who in 1814 had awarded him the grand cross of the Legion of Honour, thus giving him a Napoleonic decoration for deserting Napoleon, made him a peer. In a letter written to a Bordeaux editor in 1816 Lynch urged the justice of Catholic emancipation, but deprecated Irish independence, and expressed a wish to go and deliver loyalist speeches in Ireland, that he might render service to his ancestral as he had done to his native country.
No foreigners applied during the Hundred Days for domicile or naturalisation, whereas previously Philip Dormer Stanhope had obtained domicile,[306] as also James George Hartley, a law student, and naturalisation had been accorded to two Irish officers in the French service—Julius Terence O’Reilly and William Corbett.
On the 12th June Napoleon left for the frontier, and a period of suspense followed. Hobhouse started on the following day for Geneva, but found he could not pass through the armies, and accordingly returned to Paris on the 28th. ‘I cannot help wishing,’ he says in his letters to Byron, which the Quarterly characterised as ‘infamous libels on the English name and character,’ ‘that the French may meet with as much success as will not compromise the military character of my own countrymen; but as an Englishman I cannot be witness of their triumph; as a lover of liberty I would not be a spectator of their reverses.’ This was an utterance published after the event. Perhaps Hobhouse at the time, like Byron, was nevertheless sorry to hear of Waterloo. He seems to have quitted Paris before the re-entry of Louis XVIII., but British residents like Helen Williams, Croft, Craufurd, and Egerton, witnessing the first fall of Napoleon, the accession of Louis, his flight, the arrival of Napoleon, his return from Waterloo, and the re-accession of Louis, beheld in the short space of fourteen months a series of vicissitudes unexampled in human annals.
No Englishman who saw Napoleon in Paris after Waterloo, if any such there were, has left any record of it. It is obvious, indeed, that the few Englishmen then in Paris would shun observation during those days of suspense. An Englishwoman, daughter of one of the officers detained in 1803 and herself born in captivity, may, however, have then seen him. In any case her husband, Legouvé, the Academician who died in March 1903, at the age of ninety-four, was in all probability the last survivor of those who had seen Napoleon in Paris, for he was six years of age in 1815. The last survivor who had mixed in his society at St. Helena was Madame Hortense Eugénie Thayer, daughter of General Bertrand by Henrietta, daughter of General Arthur Dillon. This was one of Napoleon’s compulsory marriages, but Bertrand succeeded in gaining his unwilling bride’s affection. Hortense, born at Paris in 1810, was presented by Napoleon at St. Helena with a pair of earrings, and he witnessed the boring of her ears for this purpose, complimenting her on her composure during the operation. She married Amédée Thayer, a French Senator under the Second Empire, of American extraction. Dying in 1890, she bequeathed to Prince Victor Bonaparte a red damask coat presented to her by Napoleon for a spencer to be made out of it, but preserved intact, together with other relics. We do not hear what became of the earrings. Her mother gave Napoleon lessons in English at St. Helena, and I subjoin a short article on this subject published by me in the Atlantic Monthly, November 1895:—
A recent exhibition of Napoleonic relics in Paris comprised, among numerous specimens of handwriting—one of them the draft abdication of Fontainebleau, another the draft ‘Themistocles’ letter to the Prince Regent—a lesson in translating French into English. Pitying Napoleon as we must, though conscious that captivity alone secured France and Europe against another Hundred Days, his attempt to learn English is irresistibly pathetic. We are reminded of Ovid learning to speak, and even to versify, in Dacian, but Napoleon does not seem to have mastered English sufficiently to be able to write in prose without numerous mistakes. He had been acquainted from his youth, by translations, with several English authors. He was fond of Ossian, and a collection of thirty-four books, given him by his sister Pauline to take with him to Egypt, included Bacon’s Essays, in which he marked in pencil two passages: one in the chapter Of Great Place, from the third sentence, ‘It is a strange desire to seek power and to lose liberty,’ to the sentence preceding the lines from Seneca; the other in the chapter Of Kingdoms and Estates, from ‘triumph amongst the Romans’ to the end. Patronised by the younger Robespierre and by Barras, he had already exemplified the saying, ‘By indignities men come to dignities’; and he was destined also, like Bacon himself, to find that ‘the standing is slipping, and the regression is either a downfall or at least an eclipse.’ He never, apparently, saw acted even an adaptation of Shakespeare, yet on the eve of the rupture of the Treaty of Amiens he surprised his Council of State by diverging from a coinage question into a tirade against both Shakespeare and Milton. Too busy, even if inclined, to study English, he would, had he invaded England in 1803 and commissioned Sir Francis Burdett to organise a republic, have taken with him one hundred and seventeen interpreter guides, in red coats and white trousers—a corps which he expected to recruit from Irish and other refugees. One of these refugees, the notorious Lewis Goldsmith, read the London newspapers for him. But Napoleon was not fated to get nearer to English soil than William III.’s landing-place, Torbay.
Captivity afforded him the requisite leisure and also a strong inducement, for he was anxious, not to acquaint himself with English literature, but to see what was said of himself in the English press. Accordingly, on the six weeks’ voyage to St. Helena, he took two lessons from Las Cases, who, when himself an exile, had taught French and learned English in London. It seems likely that he had acquired just a smattering before Waterloo, if not before Elba; for while waiting at Balcombe House till Longwood was ready for him, he occasionally spoke English (desiring her to correct his mistakes) to the lively Betsy Balcombe, that enfant terrible who coolly questioned him not only as to his supposed atheism, but as to the ‘happy dispatch’ of the wounded French at Jaffa and as to the execution of the Duc d’Enghien. He sent, moreover, for some English books, one of them an edition of Æsop, and, pointing to the picture of the ass kicking the sick lion, he remarked in English, ‘It is me (sic) and your governor’ (Sir Hudson Lowe). His accent then, and probably to the last, was very peculiar, and he usually talked and joked with Betsy in French, though her French was not of the best. He got her to translate to him Dr. Warden’s account of the voyage of the Northumberland. Though addicted to teasing, he had so won her affection that she shed many tears on quitting the island, where, according to a recent French visitor, the recollections of Napoleon have been effaced by a wild-beast show, a visitor quite as rare as an imperial captive. When settled at Longwood, Napoleon resolved on seriously renewing the study. Las Cases gave him a daily lesson; sometimes finding him a diligent scholar, at other times so inattentive that Napoleon would himself laughingly ask his teacher whether he did not deserve the rod, regarded by him as an essential adjunct to education. He even wrote several letters in English to Las Cases, but the irregular verbs overtaxed his patience. He managed, however, to read after a fashion, and, according to Las Cases, might at a push have made himself understood in writing; but it does not appear that the lessons went on more than a few weeks. They had probably ceased long before December 1816, when Las Cases had to quit the island. A scrap of paper, presented by him to a friend, and also included in the exhibition, is the only trace of these lessons. We read on it, in his pupil’s handwriting: ‘Gone out, aller dehors, sortir. Opened, ouvert. To see, voire (sic), regarder.’
Napoleon’s next professor, after how long an interval we cannot tell, was Countess Bertrand, daughter of General Arthur Dillon by Anne Laure Girardin, cousin to the Empress Josephine. She had never even visited England, but her father, guillotined when she was eight years of age, had probably taught her his native tongue. Napoleon, disposing of rich heiresses with Oriental despotism, had required her to marry Bertrand, one of his generals; and though the poor girl was at first in despair and refused to see her suitor, she speedily became attached to him, and they lived happily ever after. One of their children, named Arthur, not, as one of the St. Helena narratives states, after the Duke of Wellington, but after the grandfather—was born on the island in January 1817, and archly introduced by the mother to Napoleon as ‘the first Frenchman who had entered Longwood without a pass from Sir Hudson Lowe.’ She was extremely fond of society, and though, with her husband, she had accompanied the Emperor to Elba, she was so averse to St. Helena that she stormed at Napoleon for involving Bertrand and his family in his banishment, and even tried to throw herself overboard. This, unlike some of her other antipathies, she never overcame, and at the time of Napoleon’s death she was arranging for a return to France, on the plea of getting her children educated. One of those children, whose ears were bored in Napoleon’s presence that he might present her with earrings, survived, as Madame Thayer, widow of one of Napoleon III.’s senators, till 1890. Madame Bertrand, apparently, gave a specimen of Napoleon’s lessons to Madame Junot, whose granddaughter, Madame de la Ferrière, lent it to the recent exhibition. A sheet of letter paper, yellow with age, contains alternate lines of French and English; but it will be more convenient to give first the theme, and then the translation, which has never yet been published. The italics in brackets indicate the erasures.