Without any trace of bitterness, he referred to the harm his brothers and sisters had done him; of Marmont, Berthier, Murat, Ney, he spoke with as much absence of malice as was possible under the circumstances. He took to himself all the blame for his great errors,—his Russian campaign and the attempt on Spain.
More inclined to be severe on those who had failed him during the Hundred Days, he put the burden where history must say it belongs,—on Bourmont, on Ney, on the false movement of D’Erlon’s column, on Grouchy, and on Fouché and Lafayette.
The anniversary of Waterloo was a yearly affliction. It was a day that oppressed him, a day which wrung from him anguished regrets.
“Ah, if it were to be done over again!”
How did it happen? why was it that his left failed him at Ligny, and his right at Waterloo? Was there treachery, or merely misfortune?
Over this problem he would ponder, with a face which revealed deep emotion; a feeling akin to that which had caused him to raise his hand and strike his forehead on the day when he heard the guns of Blücher’s army where he had expected to hear Grouchy’s.
Wellington he frankly hated: partly because Wellington had commanded at Waterloo, and partly because Wellington had sent him to St. Helena. In his Will, the dying Emperor left an unworthy trace of this bitter feeling by devising a sum of money to a man who was charged with having attempted to assassinate the English duke. True, the Emperor states that the man had been acquitted, but the Will asserts that Cantillon had as much right to kill Wellington as the latter had “to send me to die on this rock.” Here is vindictiveness and a departure from good morals; but if ever circumstances justified such an offence, it was in the case of Napoleon.
But the time, hard as he tried to kill it, hung heavy on his hands. He would lie in bed till late in the day, spend hours in the bath, lounge in undress on the sofa. If he could by any means keep himself pleasantly occupied till midnight, he was overjoyed: “We have got through one more day!” “When I wake at night, do you think my thoughts are pleasant, remembering what I have been, and what I am?” “How long the nights are!” was an exclamation which reveals an ocean of misery.
With more to grieve over than all of his companions put together, he made it a point to set an example of cheerfulness, of amiable comradeship, of intelligent consideration for others. “We are a little group, a little family, condemned to pass dreary years of exile here on this bleak rock; let us try make the time pass as agreeably as possible.” When there were jealousies and bickerings between members of his little court, it was the Emperor who soothed them away. When a fretful Gourgaud would take offence at something Napoleon had said or done, he was coaxed out of his ill-humor, or paternally sent to bed to sleep it off.
Note.—Lord Rosebery in his “Napoleon,” says, “As to his habitation, Longwood was a collection of huts which had been constructed as a cattle-shed. It was swept by an eternal wind; it was shadeless, and it was damp. Lowe himself can say no good of it, and may have felt the strange play of fortune by which he was allotted the one delightful residence on the island with twelve thousand a year [about $60,000], while Napoleon was living in an old cow-house on eight.”