That seems to tell the whole story. He was, in his way, the greatest man who ever lived. He stepped from a humble cradle in an Italian provincial town on to the throne of France; he made his commonplace brothers and sisters and his ignorant henchmen kings and queens of all the European countries within his reach; he locked a pope in a closet, as if he had been a naughty boy; he re-drew the map of half the world; he re-wrote history; his name will live as long as books are read; no man out of so little ever accomplished so much—but yet he was no gentleman!
The Bonaparte mask, in bronze, as here shown is very rare. Only four are known to exist. The copy in the Paris Mint—Hotel des Monnaies—is without the gilded wreath which this copy possesses. It is said to have “been taken from the Emperor’s face at St. Helena, twenty hours after his death.”
The mask of Napoleon III. was taken, of course, at Chiselhurst. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was distinguished, particularly, as being the only Bonaparte, for four generations at least, who bore no resemblance whatever to the Bonaparte family, not one of the strongly marked facial traits so universal in the tribe appearing in him.
No matter what may have been his shortcomings in other respects, he was devoted to his mother and to her memory. She used to call him “the mildly obstinate;” and the maternal judgment, perhaps, was mildly correct. Kinglake expressed it more epigrammatically when he said that “his characteristic was a faltering boldness.” The historian of the Crimea, in his account of the attempt at Strasburg in 1836, pictured Prince Louis as “a young man with the bearing and the countenance of a weaver—a weaver oppressed by long hours of monotonous in-door work, which makes the body stoop and keeps the eyes downcast.” Those half-shut eyes impressed every one who saw the Third Napoleon in life. He was called by Madden, in his Memoirs of the Countess of Blessington, “the man with the heavy eyelids, with the leaden hand of care and calculation pressing them down—the man-mystery, the depths of whose duplicity no Œdipus has yet sounded—the man with the pale, corpse-like, imperturbable features.” Neither Mr. Kinglake nor the chosen biographer of the Blessingtons, however, was an impartial witness. Henry Wikoff, on the other hand, declared that his face recorded resolution, and that his eyes, which he kept half closed, revealed subtlety as well as daring. “His manner,” according to the Chevalier, “was graceful, composed, and very distingué. He had the air of a man superior by nature as by birth.” And Mrs. Browning believed in him and trusted him, and called him “the good and the just.” He was perhaps the mildest-mannered man who ever scuttled ship of State, or cut a political throat.
NAPOLEON III.
The cast of the dead face of Oliver Cromwell, which was for some years in the cabinet of the Mint at Washington, bears the following inscription—copied verbatim: