That the character of Napoleon was a singular compound of the highest intellectual powers with the lowest moral qualities, is evidently the true description of this extraordinary being. This combination alone accounts for the rapidity, the splendour of his career, and the sudden and terrible completeness of his fall. Nothing less than pre-eminent capacity could have shot him up through the clouds and tempests of the Revolution into the highest place of power. A mixture of this force of mind and desperate selfishness of heart could alone have suggested and sustained the system of the Imperial wars, policy, and ambition; and the discovery of his utter faithlessness could alone have rendered all thrones hopeless of binding him by the common bonds of sovereign to sovereign, and compelled them to find their only security for the peace of Europe in consigning him to a dungeon. He was the only instance in modern history of a monarch dethroned by a universal conviction; warred against by mankind, as the sole object of the war; delivered over into captivity by the unanimous judgment of nations; and held in the same unrelaxing and judicial fetters until he died.
It is another striking feature of this catastrophe, that the whole family of Napoleon sank along with him. They neither possessed his faculties, nor were guilty of his offences. But as they had risen solely by him, they perished entirely with him. Future history will continually hover over this period of our annals, as the one which most resembles some of those fabrications of the Oriental genius, in which human events are continually under the guidance of spirits of the air; in which fantastic palaces are erected by a spell, and the treasures of the earth developed by the wave of a wand—in which the mendicant of this hour is exalted into the prince of the next; and while the wonder still glitters before the eye, another sign of the necromancer dissolves the whole pageant into air again. Human recollection has no record of so much power, so widely distributed, and apparently so fixed above all the ordinary casualties of the world, so instantly and so irretrievably overthrown. The kings of earth are not undone at a blow; kingdoms do not change their rulers without a struggle. Great passions and great havoc have always preceded and followed the fall of monarchies. But the four diadems of the Napoleon race fell from their wearers' brows with scarcely a touch from the hand of man. The surrender of the crown by Napoleon extinguished the crowns actually ruling over millions, and virtually influencing the whole Continent. They were extinguished, too, at the moment when the Imperial crown disappeared. It had no sooner been crushed at Waterloo, than they all fell into fragments, of themselves;—the whole dynasty went down with Napoleon into the dungeon, and not one of them has since returned to the world.
The name of General Count Montholon is well known to this country, as that of a brave officer, who, after acquiring distinguished rank in the French army by his sword, followed Napoleon to St Helena; remained with him during his captivity; and upon his death was made the depositary of his papers, and his executor. But his own language, in a letter dated from the Castle of Ham in June 1844, gives the best account of his authority and his proceedings.
"A soldier of the Republic, a brigadier-general at twenty years of age, and minister-plenipotentiary in Germany in 1812 and 1813, I could, like others, have left memoirs concerning the things which I saw; but the whole is effaced from my mind in presence of a single thing, a single event, and a single man. The thing is Waterloo; the event, the fall of the Empire; and the man, Napoleon."
He then proceeds to tell us, that he shared the St Helena captivity for six years; that for forty-two nights he watched the dying bed of the ex-monarch; and that, by Napoleon's express desire, he closed his eyes. But to those duties of private friendship were affixed official services, which looked much more like tyranny than the tribute of personal regard, and which we should think must have worn out the patience, and tried the constitution, of the most devoted follower of this extraordinary captive.
Napoleon, though apparently contemptuous of the opinions of mankind, evidently felt the strongest anxiety to make out a favourable statement for himself. And all his hours, except the few devoted to exercise on horseback and to sleep, and to his meals, were employed in completing the narrative which was to clear up his character to mankind.
During the last years passed in St Helena, Napoleon sent for the Count every night at eleven o'clock, and continued dictating to him until six in the morning, when he went into the bath, dismissing the count with—"Come, my son, go and repose, and come to me again at nine o'clock. We shall have breakfast, and resume the labours of the night." At nine, he returned, and remained with him till one, when Napoleon went to bed. Between four and five, he sent for the count again, who dined with him every day, and at nine o'clock left him, to return at eleven.
The world little knew the drudgery to which these unfortunate followers of the Ex-Emperor were thus exposed, and they must all have rejoiced at any termination of a toil so remorseless and so uncheering.
Napoleon was fond of the Turkish doctrine of fatality. Whether so acute a mind was capable of believing a doctrine so palpably contradicted by the common circumstances of life, and so utterly repugnant to reason, can scarcely be a question; but with him, as with the Turks, it was a capital doctrine for the mighty machine which he called an army. But the count seems to have been a true believer. He, too, pronounces, that "destiny is written," and regards himself as being under the peculiar influence of a malignant star, or, in his own words: "In fact, without having sought it, my destiny brought me into contact with the Emperor in the Elysée Bourbon, conducted me, without my knowing it, to the shores of Boulogne, where honour imposed upon me the necessity of not abandoning the nephew of the Emperor in presence of the dangers by which he was surrounded. Irrevocably bound to the misfortunes of a family, I am now perishing in Ham; the captivity commenced in St Helena."
Of Count Montholon, it must be acknowledged, that he was unstained by either the vices or the violences which scandalized Europe so frequently in the leaders of the French armies. He appears to have been at all times a man of honourable habits, as he certainly is of striking intelligence. But we have no faith in his doctrine of the star, and think that he would have acted much more wisely if he had left the stars to take care of themselves, avoided the blunder of mistaking the nephew of Napoleon for a hero and a genius, and stayed quietly in London, instead of risking himself with an invasion of valets to take the diadem off the most sagacious head in Europe.