CHAPTER LI
Many visitors, passengers in English vessels, called to see him. Generally, but not always, he received them. Generally, but not always, visitors so received went away converted into sympathetic friends, sometimes enthusiastic partisans. Only a few days ago (April, 1901) there died in London an aged man who, when a lad, saw the Emperor at St. Helena. The boy had been fascinated; never ceased to recall the placid countenance, gentle, sonorous voice, and wonderfully expressive eye; and spoke of Napoleon with enthusiasm to the last.
If the world possessed a faithful record of Napoleon’s conversation at St. Helena, no book would be more interesting, for he discoursed freely on almost every subject of human interest, and on most topics he touched he said something worth hearing. But we have only an imperfect, fragmentary, unreliable record. Long conversations extending through several hours, and jotted down by a secretary afterward, necessarily lose most of their flavor. It would be a miracle if such a method of reporting so rapid a talker as Napoleon were accurate.
On the subjects of death, religion, the soul, the hereafter, he is differently reported,—or, rather, he held two lines of expression. When thinking of political effect and the interests of his son, he would of course remember the Catholic Church, its power, its creed, and would say things which put him on the plane of the Concordat—the restorer of religion, the believer in Christ. But when he was not posing for effect, when he blurted out his real thoughts, all this disappeared. He did not believe in the modern doctrine about the soul, and scouted the idea of immortality. “When we are dead, my dear Gourgaud, we are altogether dead.”
Again he would ask: “What is a soul? Where is the soul of a sleeper, a madman, a babe?” In spite of that old-time pointing to the stars in the heavens and the oft-quoted question which we are told dumfounded the materialists, “Can you tell me who made all that?” Napoleon at St. Helena proclaimed himself a materialist. Long before Darwin’s great book appeared, Napoleon announced his belief in the principle of evolution. His great difficulty in reconciling the dogma of a benevolent and just God with the universe as it exists, was that the facts seemed all against the dogma. In the days of his power he had said scornfully, “God fights on the side of the heavy battalions;” at St. Helena he declared that he could not believe in a just God punishing and rewarding, for good people are always unfortunate and scoundrels are always lucky. “Look at Talleyrand; he is sure to die in his bed!” And so he did; and if the Pope’s blessing was a passport to heaven, this most villanous of all Frenchmen reached heaven by the best and shortest route. The manner in which the weak—no matter how good—go down before the strong,—no matter how bad,—in human affairs, as in the realms of animal life, staggered his belief in the benevolence of the plan of creation. “Were I obliged to have a religion, I would worship the Sun—the source of all life, the real god of earth.”
“Why should punishment be eternal?” Why damn a man who was brought into the world, not of his own will, and who was stamped with certain qualities which almost inevitably determined his character and conduct—why punish such a man with the eternal torments of hell because of a few years of sin? What good could it accomplish to torture poor human beings forever and forever? Would God never grow sorry? No? Then he was crueller than the savagest of the human race. Justice! Could it be just to create men with certain passions, turn them loose for a few years to see what they would do, and then when they had done what the law of their nature made it almost inevitable that they would do,—and what God knew they would do before he created them,—was it just to burn these helpless wretches forever in the slow fires of hell? Napoleon could not bring himself to think so.
He said that, when in Egypt, the sheiks had disturbed him considerably by alleging that he was a pagan because he worshipped three gods. These sheiks, with tantalizing persistence, maintained that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit made three gods. Of course Napoleon endeavored to explain to these benighted Arabs that our three gods were only one. The sheiks of Cairo, however, being men of primitive mind and stubborn habit, would not open their eyes to the truth, and they continued to say that Mahomet’s creed was better than Christ’s, because Mahometans believe in one God, only. All other celestial beings are angels, lower than God. Human beings, men born of women, may be prophets, martyrs, sublimely missioned reformers, but they are not gods.
“As for me,” exclaimed Napoleon, on one occasion, “I do not believe in the divinity of Christ. He was put to death like any other fanatic who professed to be a prophet or a messiah. There were constantly people of this kind.” As, indeed, there are. England crushed the last one in the Soudan a few years ago.
The great sorrow of Napoleon in his captivity was the absence of his wife and son. He believed, or pretended to believe, that Maria Louisa was still faithful to him. He had been told of her shame, he had even hotly denounced the infamous manner in which her father had put her into the power of Neipperg, but with singular persistency he would return to the idea that she yet loved him, and would join him if the Allies would permit. He could not know that the mother of his child had declared that she did not love him, and never had loved him.